FOR POWERPOINT AND KEYNOTE

As a presenter’s or a salesperson's tool, the iPad 2 is nearly without peer. Except for one area: displaying trouble-free, powerful, dynamic PowerPoint presentations.

I'm not talking about that slide deck you hastily prepped for the next quarterly meeting, full of static blocks of Arial or Times New Roman mixed in with stolen Google images or clip art.

No, today's better PowerPoints now incorporate features like animation, fancy layouts and beautiful graphics. These are the kind that can help a sales or marketing person successfully capture buyers and company execs. And they are precisely the kinds of PowerPoints that can get destroyed when you bring them to your iPad.

Microsoft Office doesn't run on the iPad (and no word from those people in Redmond when it might). There are various other solutions, most of them from parties external to Microsoft and Apple. These approaches all work, but only to a degree.

One ‘fix’ is to convert the PowerPoint to JPEG files or PDFs. These are viewable on the iPad's slide show viewer. The downside? You 'flatten' the files into single, static images. As a result, you lose all animations, videos, music and spoken voice-overs.

Another solution is to convert the PowerPoint to a video file. This has the advantage of retaining all animations and multimedia. There are two problems, though. Large file sizes, for one. The other, more subtle issue, is that while videos work great for single, uninterrupted viewing (think of a solitary user viewing it at his desk via the Web on-demand), they are inflexible for interactive scenarios, such as presentations by salespeople.

You can also open in Apple's Keynote on your iPad. This lets you retain the original PPT/PPTX file, but tend to convert files over to its own format. If the original file format is retained, though, editing capabilities tend to be primitive. If the software converts the file format to something other than PPT, the risk remains that graphic formatting and animations will not run 100% perfectly.

At Xtec we completely vet your presentation to make sure it displays on an IPad as well as a desktop. No more fumbling around and making excuses.