Free Powerpoint Program for CALL

A few weeks back I wrote about a free powerpoint program alternative available online from zoho.com.  It is a very good and simple to use solution that you can easily direct your students towards. It is simple to use, and additionally, because it is online, you can access your powerpoint presentations from any computer with an internet connection.  This means that you don’t need to worry about having powerpoint installed on a machine in a different location if you want to access your presentations.

As good as zoho’s free powerpoint program is, it isn’t perfect.  It does lack some of the features of the full Microsoft Powerpoint software.  For most people this isn’t an issue, however if it is, there is another very good alternative in the free powerpoint program market.  It is called “Impress” and is a part of the Open Office suite of software which you can find here (Open Office)

As a free powerpoint program, Impress is a very good alternative of Microsoft’s full price software.  The program is very simple to use, has many templates and master slides that you can use to develop your presentations, and is completely compatible with its retail cousin.  The main issue with Impress is that it is a desktop software – which means you need to have the software installed on a machine in order to work on or with your presentations.  However because it is completely cross-platform (and cross software) compatible, your presentations can be opened with any other Powerpoint software.

Another very interesting feature of Impress is that you can actually save your presentations as flash movies which means that they can be shown on any machine that has flash installed (which pretty much installed on any machine with a web-browser).  This really helps with transportability of your presentations.

So, if you’re looking for a decent free powerpoint program and the one from zoho isn’t quite enough, checking out Impress from OpenOffice is a really good idea.

Cheers for now.

Eric