Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations

by Software Publishing Corp.

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00004YRS2
• Item model number: 16-4001-99
• Date first available at Amazon.com: May 10, 2002
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #32,748 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From Winmag®

Remember Harvard Graphics? The former presentation graphics industry leader has wakened from its hibernation to show it hasn't lost any of its famous ease-of-use features -- while adding some worthwhile new ones. This version, called Advanced Presentations, offers new 3D transition effects, talking animated characters, additional design options, and improved import and export filters for PowerPoint.

You'll find the new 3D effects in dozens of screen-to-screen transition effects. One group of transitions is titled Virtual Worlds. Think of putting each slide on a billboard, and when you press "play" the program simulates a drive down a roadway, and as you approach a billboard around each bend, you'll see the next slide. Other Virtual World settings put your slides as framed art along a corridor or as sheets of paper emerging from a folder sitting on a table.

Other 3D transitions are built-in, though I had to choose a lower screen resolution and fewer colors in order to get acceptable speed. In the tiny preview window everything looked good; in full screen, things were considerably slower. In PowerPoint, such effects are available as add-ons from third-party vendors, most notably Crystal Graphics. In Advanced Presentations they're built in.

The other new bright spot is animation in the form of four figures. You can choose one of four figures (a robot, wizard, parrot, or genie) on a slide (one per presentation), specify where the figure is to move (always starting in the upper left corner), and choose a pose (puzzled, welcoming, and so on). The program even has the smarts to perch the parrot so its feet caressed a bubble in my presentation's template. You can also specify the text the figure will read to your audience; and each word of your text appears in a bubble (see illustration) as it is spoken. It was easy to understand what was being said, though the "closed captioning" also helped.

At the right of the design workspace is the new Studio Bar that offers 80 color palettes, 250 slide styles, object effects (bullets fly in from the side or appear along with the sound of typewriter keys clicking), graphic fills, and fonts (selected for their readability when projected). You can easily lose yourself amid the thousands of permutations and combinations. The thumbnails of the pre-designed styles don't do them justice - they actually more professional than the thumbnails indicate.

There are dozens of special QuickShapes with built-in smarts. Drag a rectangle onto the slide and the program adds a slider bar to one side. Drag the slider and you change the number of points on the polygon, so it's easy to create a triangle or octagon. You can likewise change the number of points on a star, the roundness of a rectangle's corners, the shape of an arrow, and so forth.

You can publish your presentation as a "WebShow." When viewed over the Web, users only need the Macromedia Flash plug-in (which is widely available).

(click to see larger image)
Rather than build a presentation from scratch, use Quick Presentations.

Advanced Presentations maintains some of the classic features of previous versions. For example, Quick Presentations fills out a multi-slide presentation with sample text; PowerPoint offers a similar feature. A "company presentation" Quick Presentation fills in a bullet list of goals, an agenda with times already filled in, and so on, on the theory that it's easier to edit text on such a slide than to create it from scratch (and it is). The Advisor offers step-by-step guidance or design advice; advice changes by the type of slide you're creating (bullet list, chart, and so forth).

I'd still like to see more lively charts - where pie slices fly in or the chart itself is animated. Oddly, none of the new animation features do much to enhance what can be a deadly dull chart slide.

Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations is loaded with useful tools for building an engaging presentation. While the animated characters may seem "cute," there are plenty of other attention-grabbing features that, combined with ease of use, make for a worthy competitor to PowerPoint. That's why it joins the WinList.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What Powerpoint dreams of being !!!, April 9, 2001

By 

Thomas L. Pilon (Carrollton, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations (CD-ROM)

If you are frustrated by the lack of data charting capabilities in PowerPoint and Excel, this package is for you. In terms of data charting capabilities, this is the only package that surpasses the old Harvard Graphics for DOS that was King of the DOS World. It is far superior to the data charting capabilities in Freelance and 1-2-3 as well. I haven't used a recent verison of Corel Presentations so I can't comment on that.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superior in every way to Power Point, September 15, 2001

By 

Shiffman, ML (Richmond, VA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations (CD-ROM)

Harvard graphics allows complete versatility to design the graph or chart you want, not the type of chart has pre-designed for you. You have complete control over every aspect of every graph. The X-axis can be numerical or titled which cannot be done in PowerPoint. This is important when making line graphs. When compared to PowerPoint, this is a far easier program to master.

5.0 out of 5 stars Superior in every way to Power Point, September 15, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Harvard Graphics Advanced Presentations (CD-ROM)

Harvard graphics allows complete versatility to design the graph or chart you want, not the type of chart has pre-designed for you. You have complete control over every aspect of every graph. The X-axis can be numerical or titled which cannot be done in PowerPoint. This is important when making line graphs. When compared to PowerPoint, this is a far easier program to master.