Presentation Software-Your advice please!

[horqua]

Here's the situation: my company produces very specific reports for the mutual fund industry. As one of the graphics techs, I use Pagemaker 7 and MS Excel along with the Adobe suite of graphics programs to create these reports. Charts and graphs are created in Excel, imported into PM templates, custom text and graphics are added, and multiple copies of the documents are printed or PDF'd for distribution to the client.

Here's the need: our Sales team wants the graphics team to find some sort of software that will allow Sales to show, project, and print customizable sample documents specifically for our clients. The Sales team are not graphics savvy and they don't want to use PM to do it. Each document style (we offer 10+) neets to be a template. Each chart (over 30) needs to be an object that can be placed on the template to show the client what their custom reports could look like. Text can be objects or customizable.

Here are the problems we've encountered so far: Our Sales team "don't do graphics" and don't want to have to have PM on their laptops to make these presentations. We are unable to import out PM templates into PowerPoint and PowerPoint is not sufficiently customizable to allow our chart-objects to be placed upon our templates to produce reasonable facsimiles of our products. We've also tried to create our example charts as objects and place them into libraries in PM so they can be dragged and dropped onto PM templates. This resulted in huge files and libraries that were un-manageable. In my research, I've learned that Adobe USED to offer a presentation software, but it has been discontinued. I've looked at numerous PowerPoint-like programs, but none have met the need.

Here's the question: Does anyone know of a software product that sounds like it might meet the needs described? I'm open to suggestions and no idea is too outlandish to consider at this time.

I thank you in advance for your posts!

Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find!

I love Mondays cause they're the Second day of the week!

 

[BionicJohn]

Hi, Horqua,

> Adobe USED to offer a presentation software, but it has been discontinued

Yes, it was called Aldus Persuasion, but when PP was bundled with MSOffice, Persuasion became ignored.

Have a look at

http://www.rdpslides.com

Steve Rindsberg who runs it all is also very familiar with Adobe products.

Iechyd da! John
22:14 18/09/2003 BST

 

[horqua]

John,
Thanks for that site!

I've made some progress since yesterdays post. We've decided the Sales team is going to have to use PM since it's the basis of what we do. Teaching how to make these sample layups should be fairly straight forward.

I've figured out how to turn the Excel charts into graphical objects using PUP 5. This is a great Excel tool and I highly recommend it. You can find it here:

http://j-walk.com/ss/pup/pup5/

I'm taking the objects created in PUP and placing them into a folder I've created in the ClipArt gallery that comes with PM. Here's the issue I'm having with that approach: I'm using PUP to turn each chart into a TIF file. Then I put the TIF into the gallery. When I drag the picture onto the PM layout page, it pixellates all over the place and looks lousy on the screen. BUT, when I send the page to the printer, the page looks Great! Now, what gives with that? I'd appreciate any input.

Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find!

I love Mondays cause they're the Second day of the week!

 

[BionicJohn]

Hi, horqua,

> > looks lousy on the screen. BUT, when I send the page to the printer, the page looks Great!

That's the norm for PM. Hit Ctrl+Shift+F12 to change the screen view into hi-rez mode. The TIFFs will look fine, but the screen refresh will probably slow down.

Pleased to hear it's going well.

Iechyd da! John
14:02 20/09/2003 BST