Hi again Al,
I'm adding this as a comment, as I don't have a specific "solution"
for you, just some paths I'd probably take if I were in your shoes...
>I just don't get why MS didn't update this yet
I could go on a rant, but I won't. :-) However, you can probably
figure out how much priority upgrading a freeware application has to
the MS engineering team.
One note about what you mentioned about the animation/timing problem
you're experiencing. It's been my experience that extremely large
presentations often suffer from timing problems when you use the
Viewer, so it may not be caused by the 2002-specific
animations/objects. As you note that you have an extremly large
presentation, you may want to consider breaking them into smaller,
sequential presentations of around 25MB each, and use the PPViewer LST
feature to run (see the ABOUT dialogue box in the Viewer for more
info) tyem in sequence.
I personally don't think OpenOffice is a solution for what you want,
as you'd have to convince your clients to install it to view your
presentation. A more viable strategy might be to convert the
PowerPoint into another format, such as AVI video, QuickTime, or
Flash. That's really dependent on how much interactivity you
currently have in your presentation, how much you'd be willing to give
up if necessary, and again, how much you'd be willing to spend.
Depending on your organization's level of technical knowledge and the
level of sophistication you, you might look into any one of a number
of tools that will do screen recording and save out to a video format.
Alternatively, you might want to talk to a video production company
who can use a scanbox to capture the presentation and then save it out
in digital video format.
Ditto on the Flash. There are a few tools out there that claim to
convert PowerPoint into Flash. I don't have an opinion on any, as
I've never used them. However, my experience with similar
"conversion" tools from PowerPoint to Director is that you often lose
significant parts of the original presentation through the conversion.
However, a quick search using the terms "convert powerpoint to Flash"
will give you demos and trial versions that you might want to look
into. Again, alternatively, you might want to get a quote from two or
three Flash developers on the costs to recreate your presentation in
Flash.
Hope that helps. Best of luck.
rico |
