If you need to be able to create and edit PowerPoint
presentations you need more than just a viewer. Microsoft
PowerPoint or Sun Microsystems OpenOffice (a free product) is required.
Microsoft
Office Enterprise 2007 Trial Version
For Microsoft Windows operating systems. 60 day trial
This
Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 software evaluation program is
appropriate for Developers and IT Professionals. IMPORTANT: A product
key is required to use this trial. See the Overview section for details.
Microsoft Office 2008 Trial Version
For Apple Macintosh users.
Coming soon (Summer 2008 maybe. No firm date has been announced).
Once the trial period is over you will have to purchase
PowerPoint or use Open Office.
How to Buy Microsoft PowerPoint
For
Microsoft Windows
For
Apple Macintosh
Also, check retailers for specials. Sometimes Microsoft has promotions,
such as this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2007/sep07/09-12ultimatesteal.mspx
Beware! There's a lot of questionable offers
concerning Microsoft Office.
If you shop eBay and find tghe word "compatible" in the product
description it is not
Microsoft office that's being advertsed. Most likely it's a copy of
OpenOffice, which is completely free. You'd be crazy to pay for it (see
below).
OpenOffice, OxygenOffice and NeoOffice do not have
some key components that are included in
Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office installs new fonts to your
computer. These fonts include some very nice unicode fonts. The
Microsoft fonts are important in helping documents created in Microsoft
Office have a consistent look from one computer to another. Macintosh
and Windows versions of Microsoft Office install the same fonts so that
documents look the same on both Mac and Windows computers.
Because OpenOffice does not install Microsoft
fonts, when you use OpenOffice to open a document created in Microsoft
Office, your computer may have to substitute a font from your
computer's font collection to replace any Microsoft fonts that were
used when documents were created. Sometimes this makes for odd looking
display and printing when using OpenOffice.
OpenOffice support for the Visual Basic For
Applications programming language is very limited. OpenOffice has no
userform support. The object model is a little different, so most
macros will have to be tweaked. VBA is supported only in Calc, the
spreadsheet application.
When using OpenOffice, use File > Save As (instead of File >
Save) and select Microsoft PowerPoint file type if you want to share
your presentation with other PowerPoint users. You can change the
default file type to Microsoft PowerPoint using OpenOffice's
preferences so that OpenOffice always saves in Microsoft file formats.
I leave it to you to decide whether OpenOffice is as good, better, or
worse than Microsoft's Product.
Google Docs and
other web based tools
If you don't mind being force-fed advertising,
having everything you do analyzed then shared with advertisers,
government agencies, or anyone else with cash to pay for information
about you and everyone who looks at your presentations, then consider
web 2.0 based tools. I don't consider these
free because you pay the price by trading information about yourself
and everyone who goes to the provider's web site to look at your stuff.
Using the word "free" with such tools is
deceptive in my opinion.
Google Docs:
http://www.google.com/google-d-s/intl/en/tour1.html
Microsoft Office Live
Requires FireFox
Requires that you send your Windows Hotmail user ID and password over
the internet as clear text. Don't do it!
Barely works on Mac
http://home.officelive.com/
ThinkFree
http://www.thinkfree.com
ZoHo
http://www.zoho.com/
Stealing
AKA Pirating.
Bit Torrent, Limewire, and other file sharing services offer the
ability to obtain without charge copies of office that are not
legitimate.
Countless email messages offer Microsoft Office products at prices too
good to be true.
Here's how to protect yourself from piracy:
http://www.microsoft.com/piracy/
I hope you find this information useful.
Jim Gordon
Microsoft
Macintosh MVP
May, 2008