Building presentations for any standard browser

We built some multimedia presentations with Microsoft Producer after reading your column about it in August and are now looking for a similar presentation builder that will publish files that can be viewed with browsers other than Internet Explorer. Have you found any programs that work similarly but publish to formats that Firefox and Macintosh users can view?

I've found two products that deliver presentations viewable by any standard browser. The first is NetXpression, available for $49 from its Web site. The second is Presio, which is currently in beta. Both programs offer free trial downloads. Both work similarly to MS Producer by allowing you to import PowerPoint presentations and audio or video files and then synchronizing the slides to the audio/video track by clicking through the presentation. The NetXpressions trial version does not allow the user to actually publish the presentation but does have a Preview mode that demonstrates what the final product will look like. The Presio beta version allows the user to publish as many as five presentations and can publish in Windows Media, Flash, Quicktime and MP4 formats. Presio does a nicer job than NetXpression does converting PowerPoint slides; the text is much sharper in Presio. Both programs are slower than MS Producer when importing video, and neither provides tools for editing the video track inside the program like you can with MS Producer. Either could be a good choice for publishing multimedia presentation material based on PowerPoint that can be viewed by almost any modern browser.

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We built some multimedia presentations with Microsoft Producer after reading your column about it in August and are now looking for a similar presentation builder that will publish files that can be viewed with browsers other than Internet Explorer. Have you found any programs that work similarly but publish to formats that Firefox and Macintosh users can view?

I've found two products that deliver presentations viewable by any standard browser. The first is NetXpression, available for $49 from its Web site. The second is Presio, which is currently in beta. Both programs offer free trial downloads. Both work similarly to MS Producer by allowing you to import PowerPoint presentations and audio or video files and then synchronizing the slides to the audio/video track by clicking through the presentation. The NetXpressions trial version does not allow the user to actually publish the presentation but does have a Preview mode that demonstrates what the final product will look like. The Presio beta version allows the user to publish as many as five presentations and can publish in Windows Media, Flash, Quicktime and MP4 formats. Presio does a nicer job than NetXpression does converting PowerPoint slides; the text is much sharper in Presio. Both programs are slower than MS Producer when importing video, and neither provides tools for editing the video track inside the program like you can with MS Producer. Either could be a good choice for publishing multimedia presentation material based on PowerPoint that can be viewed by almost any modern browser.

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