If your slideshow is truly relevant to your audience and actually useful outside the context of your presentation, making your slides available via the web after you speak can be a good “Leave Behind”. It's also a much more environmentally friendlier approach than making photocopies of all your slides for everyone in the room, only to have most of them tossed away afterwards.
Posting PowerPoint to the web in .swf (Flash) format is the best way to ensure that your entire audience can view your slides on their computer. Flash has a number of distinct advantages over PowerPoint on the web. You don't need to own PowerPoint to view a Flash file. All you need is the free Flash Player, which is already installed on 98% of the computers in the world. Flash is also truly cross-platform so whether your audience uses the PC, Mac or Linux they won't have a problem viewing your content.
The only problem with this approach is that while it’s technically been possible to convert PowerPoint presentations to Flash for quite awhile, it usually isn't pefect and it usually isn't pretty (click here for a good tutorial on how to manually convert PPT to SWF). This is where utilities like SWiSHPresenter come in handy.
SWiSHPresenter is a neat little utility that converts PowerPoint presentations in to Flash files. It works as either an export plugin within PowerPoint itself or as a separate stand-alone application for batch conversion. Like many of SWiSH's other tools, it’s a basic, affordable, easy-to-use application that requires no knowledge of Flash to use. All it takes to output your PowerPoint presentation in Flash is just a few clicks.
Depending on your needs and budget it may or may not be worth the $100 purchase price, but it's handy little capability to have if you want it and existing SWiSH users will appreciate the added bonus of being able to open and edit PowerPoint output in the much more robust SWiSHmax.
If you want to test drive SWiSHPresenter download the free fully functional 15-day trial. The full version can be downloaded for $99.95 US on the SWiSH web site.
