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Make Your Speeches Shine with Acrobat Presentations

David Pierce — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 17:00:28 +0000

I’ll be the first to admit I’m biased on the subject of presentation software. I think PowerPoint is terrible. I hate it, I hate how people use it, and I avoid it at all costs. There are, however, times when I’m required to give a presentation. For a while, I was using Google Docs to create my presentations – it was all well and good, but there had to be a better option out there, right?

There is. Well, sort of. There’s going to be. It’s called Presentations, and is the latest offering from the folks at Adobe’s Acrobat.com, the makers of (among other things) Buzzword, a fantastic online word processor.

To get to Presentations, go to the Acrobat.com site, and look at the bottom. There’s a link for Presentations near the bottom – this is Adobe’s way of making sure you know it’s not a full-featured release yet. But it’s still darn good.

I was able to have a brief discussion with the folks at Acrobat.com before Presentations was launched, and they mentioned something that’s critical to Web-based apps being successful. There are three basic principles and points on which Presentations was founded: ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience. In all three realms, Presentations scores high.

The basic product is the same as any other presentation software – it lets you create slides, and then show them to other people. Adobe’s offering, though, offers a bunch of stuff that’s different and better. The best thing, in my opinion, is how much better the collaboration features are – better than PowerPoint, and better than any other online presentations tool.

A huge number of people can be working on the same presentation, or the same slide, or even the same word or image. You’ll see avatars for each person working on the presentation, listed next to the slide they’re currently editing. Conflicting changes are presented to the users, just in case your work overlaps with another collaborator.

There are a bunch of other great features to Presentations – the little things are what really shine. There are a number of themes available, which are easily customized to your liking (great for corporate use, where they tend to mandate a template). Diagrams can be created separately, and then moved around and edited together.

The navigation system is also a major upgrade from other applications. Even when you’re in presentation mode, you can bring up a small dock-like list of all your slides, letting you easily choose the one you want – avoiding that terrible “scrolling-through-everything-to-find-the-right-slide” moment. You drag the window to change the view of the slides, depending on how you want to edit them.

But it’s not all candy and rainbows, unfortunately. Acrobat.com notes frequently that Presentations is very much an early, unstable release, and it has some major notable features missing. There’s no spell-check, no support for importing movies other than .FLV files, and no import and export with PowerPoint – you can only save a Presentation to PDF.

There’s also no sharing of themes, no way to invite someone to view the presentation as anything other than a co-editor, and no way to make comments or notes on slides and presentations.

For now, Presentations is a slick, usable application. But as bugs get fixed and features get quickly rolled out, Presentations is going to bring ubiquity, collaboration, and user experience to a new level within the world of presentations. They’re easier to create, easier to navigate, and Presentations is a gorgeous app.

Worried about your next presentation? Tina shows you have to blow your audiences minds away with 10 Powerpoint tips.

What tool do you use for giving presentations? Present them to us in the comments.

Photo: garethjmsaunders

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Use PDFVue To Fill Froms & Edit PDF Files For Free Online

Karl L. Gechlik — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 15:01:59 +0000

In my day-to-day 9 to 5 job I have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro. Yes it is expensive but it gets the job done quickly and properly when it has anything to do with PDF creation, modification and filling out forms. But not everyone has such an expensive software suite installed on their machine.

So what do you do when you want to fill out forms online or edit a PDF? Need to mark up a PDF? Well you can’t do that with the free version of Acrobat Reader. So we have to find another solution!

Nifty website pdfVue does exactly what we need it to do. As long as we aren’t working on top secret documents (or even tax forms for that matter) we should have no problem in uploading our documents to PDFVue’s server and then manipulate them using their online Adobe Acrobat Pro-esque editor.

Let’s see what PDFVue has to offer and how we can Make Use Of It. (Pun intended – suck it up!)

It looks like they want you to click on the folder icon on the top left under the PDFVue logo. This will let you browse to your PDF file on your local machine. I chose a invoice I had in PDF format and uploaded it. It was under 100KB and took about 45 seconds to upload to their server.

When it was complete I had my full invoice in a web editor. I was able to mark it up, draw funny shapes and even stick sticky notes over crucial data so I wouldn’t get sued!

The tab at the upper right hand side of the screen that says Forms will give you the ability to edit forms and save the finished product. Using this feature, you can add text boxes and all sorts of corporate goodies.

Now I definitely won’t say this is a Acrobat Pro replacement for me but it will get the job done in a pinch. Of course if you are editing confidential information I would not go uploading it anywhere. Pester the hell out of your boss until you get the tools you need to do your job!

There are also collaboration tools and some other nifty features discussed in the getting started guide available here.

If you have a Mac, Jackson has covered FormulatePro and in our directory, we have also looked at PDF Escape.

Do you use any of these or a similar tool to edit PDF’s? If you do let us know about your favorite – in the comments!

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Acrobat.com : Work. Together. Anywhere

Varun Kashyap — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:37:45 +0000

Acrobat.com is a collection of web applications from Adobe which includes lots of cool features.

Acrobat.com claims to offer the first real online word processor, web based file sharing and storage, ability to create PDF’s, online screen sharing and web conferencing.

Lets take a look at all of these one by one, shall we?

1. Adobe Buzzword

Adobe claims Buzzword to be the only real online word processor. They are justified in their claims as it turns out. For starters Buzzword supports the docx format, but that’s not all as it has a host of cool features that takes it closer to the desktop experience.

It offers options for header – footer, font colors, images, tables, special characters, comments etc. It keeps track of the version history of a file and your work can be shared or exported to various formats. How about performance? It worked well when I gave it a try (although i didn’t do any serious work).

Mark also took a previous look at Buzzword here.

2. Adobe ConnectNow

Adobe ConnectNow is for those of you who want to collaborate with someone over the Internet. It allows you to invite participants to view your webcam or share your computer screen. Not only can you share but you can also remotely control the screen and annotate it. You can also send a file from within ConnectNow if you desire.

In addition it has a white board functionality that lets you draw shapes, lines etc on the screen for on-the-go instant discussions and designs. It however requires you to install a ConnectNow plugin to share your screen with the participants.

Oh, I almost forgot, you can also chat with all the participants in your room. A very useful and productive app for those who want to share their ideas and work online.

3. Create PDF

You might be wondering why it’s called acrobat.com but still no mention of PDF? Well here it is. The Create PDF app. It presents you with an intuitive interface where you can see the files you created or uploaded to acrobat.com. In addition to that it has an option to upload files from your computer as well. You can convert them to PDF here and then download them. You can also view the documents that others are sharing with you.

You can sort the available files by a variety of criteria such as upload time, name etc. One special mention here would be that Adobe imposes a 5 document conversion limit. Not sure what the idea is behind this strategy. Why would they want to limit PDF conversion?

4. Share Files

Share files allows you to upload files from your computer and share them with your colleagues or friends. You can also send them messages notifying them of the fact that you have shared a new file with them. You can control the access level of the documents and keep them open or restricted. In addition, it offers all the file management features I mentioned in number 3 above. All the files you have stored in this organizer can also be embedded in a web page in the form of a flash preview of the document.

5. My Files

This is the central file organizer of acrobat.com. Actually I have already mentioned it twice in 3 and 4 above when I discussed the file management features within Create PDF and Share Files. In addition to that My Files has a lot more to offer. You can filter files according to their name, size, extension, author, share status, and upload date. You can view them as lists or thumbnail.

Finally you can upload files from your computer as well. Worth mentioning here is that as cool as all this seems did you notice I didn’t mention search? After uploading a handful of files, and as forgetful as I am, I went to My Files and noticed that there is no search option. So if you were to use the entire storage limit (which is 5 GB by the way) can you imagine a scenario when you won’t have to search for a file? What makes this even worse is that you can’t tag your files or organize them in folders (at least I didn’t find the option). I really hope they add this in the future.

As you can see, the last three i.e. Create PDF, Share Files and My Files have somewhat similar features. Actually all of them are tightly integrated into each other so that you don’t have to go back to the welcome screen each time you want to convert a Buzzword file to PDF or share a file you uploaded.

All in all the suite ( if I may call it so) promises to be great. It has some minor glitches like 5 document conversion limit, no search and no tags or folders but with the fantastic UI, it’s sure to spice up your web apps experience! Check it out at acrobat.com. It requires a free registration. Let us know what you think and how you like it.

(By) Varun Kashyap – A tech enthusiast, programmer and a blogger who will be sleeping when this gets published. Wish him sweet dreams at TechCrazy Blog

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