Instructify

BY BILL FERRIS

Empressr‘s greatest strength is that it lets you put together a decent-looking slide show presentation in a matter of minutes. The controls feel very intuitive if you’ve ever used PowerPoint, and even if you haven’t, just playing around with it for a few minutes should be enough to figure things out.

Add charts, pictures, tables and text to any slide, just like you can in Microsoft’s venerable presentation software. Changing sizes and colors is a snap, too. I really like the Arrange controls, which change the front-to-back order of objects on screen. That is, if you added a square shape that’s sitting smack-dab in the middle of your budget chart, just click the square and hit the “Back” button to send that square to the bottom of the pile. You now have a nifty background instead of an obstruction.

Empressr packs a bundle of slide transitions, which I advise you to use with caution. They’re really easy to use, especially with the “Random” function that configures transitions automatically. Just remember that when it comes to wipes, fades, and that thing where the slide turns into a cube and floats away or something, less is more. Unless you want to use a star wipe, in which case you have my blessing to use them for every slide.

If you’re in a real hurry, Empressr Express lets you upload several pictures at once, then creates a slide show based on those. Just add some captions and you’ve got a working presentation in less than five minutes.

Empressr lets you upload your existing PowerPoint presentations if you choose. For best results you can have each slide appear as an image. If you want to edit your slides, you can do that, too, but plan to do some reformatting and tweaking as your carefully arranged slides will appear out of whack as a result of the conversion process. If you really need to edit your presentation, I suggest doing so in whatever program you used to create it in the first place.

Even if you’re a veteran PowerPoint user, Empressr is an ideal program if you just need a quick and dirty slide show. In a way, this approach is probably for the best — the less time you spend on slides, the more time you spend preparing the actual content of the presentation, which is far more important. The slides are there to support the speaker, not the other way around. Forget that, and you’ll suffer the consequences.

Empressr

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