In the Wings

Persuasion 3.0

Although it was not ready in time for full NSTL testing, the long-awaited version 3.0 of Aldus's Persuasion will soon be available, bringing another strong challenger into the field of desktop presentation packages. The new version of Persuasion continues the program's strategy of focusing more on serious users who will be creating presentations on an on-going and fairly frequent basis. It makes great strides in adding usability to the program through a revamped and more logical menu structure and floating icon palettes, but high-end features are the priority. In fact, Persuasion lacks novice-level teaching tools. The program does not include any wizards, coaches, or advisors.

Persuasi on is a powerful program that provides many fine-tuning controls that appeal to serious presentation designers. You can adjust the position of graphics objects, for example, by increments as small as the width of one pixel on the screen using "nudge," a feature also found in Microsoft PowerPoint 4.0. You can adjust independently the foreground, background, line, and shadow colors of each graphics object or piece of text to any of 200 colors or any of 200 gray scales. And you can define an unlimited number of left-, right-, center-, and decimal-aligned tabs for each text group you add to a page.

The biggest advance is the addition of Aldus Chart 1.0, the companion charting program. It adds histograms, bubble charts, radar charts, polar charts, high-low-open-close charts, and spectral area maps to its standard stock of chart types. Two other notable feature additions to Persuasion are animation and hyperlinks within its slide shows. Either can be used by the main program as well as by the run-time slide- show player.

WordPerfect Presentations for Windows 3.0

We could not include WordPerfect Presentations 3.0 in our full report, but we did preview a beta version of the program. Presentations will compete on its own but will also be part of the upcoming PerfectOffice suite of applications. All the modules in the PerfectOffice suite feature a common menu structure between the modules and shared resources, such as the spelling checker, thesaurus, grammar checker, and drawing tools. The suite also supports cross-application macros.

Presentations has an extensive list of features. Particularly impressive are its tools for painting and bit-map editing directly on slides. TWAIN support lets you scan images directly into the program.

Another area where Presentations is strong is in 3-D effects. The program comes with an impressive set of tools that can add all kinds of 3-D effects to either charts or text. You can, for example, give text a straight 3-D, perspective 3-D, or revers e perspective 3-D aspect, all from many viewpoint angles. You can also give 3-D aspects to charts at any time from any viewpoint angle.

Presentations offers numerous tools designed to shorten the learning curve for first-time users. It includes a series of coaches, which are short tutorials related to specific presentation-building tasks. One particular feature that should make Presentations faster and easier to work with is its in-place editing of data charts. The program also includes another learning tool (similar in concept to PowerPoint's wizards and Harvard Graphics' advisor system) called the Show Expert, which teaches you how to design a presentation.