Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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According to its publisher, SlideRocket “is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web.”

While other online applications like Zoho and OpenOffice have presentation capabilities, I wanted to take a look at SlideRocket because it supports Flash and seems to have a truly robust feature set.

The first thing that strikes you about SlideRocket is that it rivals desktop apps in its interface and intention. It looks a lot more like an Adobe product than a web app.

The other aspect to keep in mind (for better or worse) is that with SlideRocket your presentation assets can live on the web or on the desktop, or both.

Probably it is on the presentation side (assuming a reliable web connection) that SlideRocket shines; with the presentation online instead of downloaded or moved with flash drive, fonts can be uploaded once, for example, and they’re always available.

Another cool aspect of SlideRocket is that you can instantly access objects stored in a host of compatible web formats, like a table written in Google Writely.

Let’s take a look. The first thing you notice is that SlideRocket doesn’t look like most web apps — the most similarity I note would be with the web database — Blitz.

(I think the key here is that programs that are part of an online Office suite are a bit more generic — standalones can be more developed).

Even in the beta, you have a lot of features accessible immediately, and you have the familiar PowerPoint-like capability to choose a background for a new presentation.

Figure 1

While there is an Import PowerPoint option in the early version, there are some features that don’t quite work, like charts and as you might expect animation. Your best bet is to take a simple text presentation from PowerPoint and rebuild it online in SlideRocket.

Figure 2

Right from the Title page, the tools are very intuitive and obvious, particularly to a PowerPoint user.

Here it’s really easy to revise the boilerplate title slide with the design — a palette of colors for the selected placeholder makes it a breeze.

Figure 3

What I love right off the bat is the ease with which one can save a slide to a Slide Library; you don’t need a SharePoint server or any complex network infrastructure — you do it right from the program itself.

Figure 4

Clicking video is kind of exciting, because it opens up a host of potential asset locations (some of them not yet available). You can link to community video or photo sites, stock sites or upload your own content to keep reusing it.

Figure 5

The next thing I decided to do was to create and publish a simple spreadsheet using GoogleApps, and copy the URL to the clipboard.

Figure 6

Now I can use the Table tab or SlideRocket (having created a table) to link to the GoogleApps table and put it in my slide. (I can keep the two files linked, so that my SlideRocket table always reflects the most current table in GoogleApps).

Figure 7

Figure 8

I need to emphasize that this is still early in this app’s life cycle and I had mixed results loading slides to revise them and getting some tables to refresh or assume the formatting of the underlying linked spreadsheet. I’m sure these issues will be resolved by the time the app is widely publicly available.

This is a pretty cool situation — except that it brings up another philosophical issue. SlideRocket is a “Cloud” application; meaning that with it a lot of your data is kept online.

(There is the impending release of a version that works with Adobe Air — the technology that allows you to use web based applications completely on the desktop with local files).

This sort of linking is already a feature of Microsoft Office; you can keep an Excel spreadsheet linked to a PowerPoint slide and the data will refresh and update.

Of course, users being what they are, invariably the links get broken (or corrupted) and need to be relinked.

As long as the web is reliable, this sort of interactivity between API enabled applications is wonderful — you should be able to walk away secure in the knowledge that next time you log in, all of your stuff will work.

Referring to “my stuff” is sort of a tribute to George Carlin, whose routine about moving “your stuff” is truly relevant to the difference between trusting the “Cloud” and trusting your PC or Microsoft Office.

Besides GoogleApps a host of plug ins are already available or contemplated — here there is an animated snow background and in the plug in panel you can see other options, including instant links to Yahoo maps.

Figure 9

The other area where this product shines is delivery. Obviously it is easy to share this slide show anywhere — it is right in the browser.

You can preview a file, play it full screen, and here the video is playing from its original location without any worry about linking or codecs.

Figure 10

You can collaborate easily as well, and even in terms of printing, there is already a relationship with Mimeo, which handles lots of PowerPoint projects, binding them and delivering them (their offices are right by Fedex in Memphis).

All of the usual basic presentation features like animation (builds and transitions) are there, plus the more powerful non desktop features like holding an instant meeting or conference from the program itself; or you could use the SlideRocket presentation in a tool like Go to Meeting just by sharing your browser or desktop.

SlideRocket is young and ambitious in terms of web apps. It is still early as well, some features are still being added and kinks worked out.

But if you are a burgeoning presenter who wants the cutting edge capabilities of the web, and you are not wed to PowerPoint because of corporation restrictions, you may want to try SlideRocket to create your presentations from scratch.

From a corporate standpoint, the ability to enforce themes, share templates and also garner statistics on who is viewing a presentation is also very helpful.

If the tool catches on, you will be in the vanguard of presenters.

InformIT Articles and Sample Chapters

Using SlideShare for Online PowerPoint with Narration

Flex|360 Seattle: Day One

Books and eBooks

Cloud Computing: Web-Based Applications That Change the Way You Work and Collaborate Online, Rough Cuts

Flex In Action — Online Applications (Safari Books Online)

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