Moving on from MS Powerpoint

Question

I am working for a large government organization, where we have been using Powerpoint as the backbone of our training material development. However we are thinking about migrating to a new platform for a number of reasons

• Powerpoint technologically is "stale" and uncompelling compared to alternatives.
• We'd like to migrate to a tool that runs through the web browser and that uses more open standards/source
• Would like to be able to open a presentation at different points. Previous to pptx / Office 2010, you could open a powerpoint to a given slide. But this feature doesn't work anymore

Feature Requirements (top 3 features)

• Access to any / all parts of presentation via URL controls (ie using '?' or ':' in the url) in IE 8
• "Instant" Access: The staff that would be using this is under tremendous time pressure. We have low bandwidth, so a tool with less frills and smaller file sizes / time to start up is preferred.
• Web development or "Single file" deployment: If possible, tools like Presi (inaccessible currently do to technology constraints) or single file formats like .ppsx are preferable to having an archive of files.
• NOT NEEDED: Interactivity is rather low on the list. The system is intended to be simple, focusing on procedural instructions with a screen shot of two

Concerns

• There is a lot(!) of technical information that our trainees need to learn and be able to recall. Ideally, training material would also serve as a user manual for forgotten concepts.
• We already have a sizeable trove of powerpoint training material, which ideally we'd like to be able to migrate
• Our technology platform is well behind the current state-of-the-art (OS: MS-XP, IE 8, Adobe AIR from 2005 - 8), and because of the size of our organization, platform upgrades are difficult and expensive. Also, I have been pushing our MIS team for upgrades of these platforms for a year, without any success.

The platform issue is a serious issue, and will take some real effeort to resolve. However I see the biggest issue is with migrating old training material. So any advice on these two issues would be very welcome.

Tx

Answer 1

Given your ideals of single file deployment and the ability to use the training material as reference I would strongly suggest converting the existing material to and generating new material as ebooks.

A first look for converting your existing files:

ppt -> OpenOffice Impress -> HTML -> Calibre -> ebook format.

The ebooks will normally be:

• Single file
• Readable on a wide variety of devices including older machines
• Able to be downloaded and retained for reference.
• All of the above software is free
• All of the above software is cross platform
• All of it is scriptable so you should be able to automate the process, (for at least a first pass conversion).
• The middle step - the HTML collection - can be viewed on web browsers including the ability jump to specific locations.
• If you set up a suitable template you could include links to download the ebook version(s)
• Calibre can be set as a server allowing the training material to be browsed by category and downloaded, with device specific conversion.

Answer 2

(MS PowerPoint is good for me atleast)
Frankly you don't have much alternatives out in the market. So I'm listing all available (most appraised only) Office applications.

• FreeOffice - Download - Freeware - Windows, Linux
• LibreOffice - Download - Freeware Open-source - Windows, Linux, Mac
• Apache OpenOffice - Download - Freeware Open-sorce - Windows, Linux, Mac

I'm familiar with both LibreOffice and OpenOffice. They are good at what they are designed to.

Answer 3

It would be a big change but you could consider a static web generator. The problem is that there are probably too many good choices in terms of the underlying technology. I know Pelican pretty well and was flexible enough for our needs.

Advantages:

• you can use text files to write the material with Markdown or Restructured Text syntax
• the same text files can be processed to different types of output (including those mentioned in the answer from Steve Barnes)
• accessing any page can be done by URL and you can customize the URLs to your liking
• can be distributed as a folder of linked html files with no need for a server, if required.

Disadvantages:

• the change is a major one and migrating from PowerPoint presentations might be hard to automate
• the system needs tweaking to correspond to your own needs in terms of look and feel
• the obtained static html files need to be served from a server (your own or hosted)
• page layout will be more variable, depending on which browser is used, but could be even read on a mobile device with automatic layout adaptation provided by many "responsive" themes.