Digital Workshop Opus Presenter

Digital Workshop's Opus product family has made a name for itself in the world of interactive media design.

Now the company is keen to push one of the biggest, but least known, benefits of its software, which is the ability to create Powerpoint-like business presentations with a much greater degree of interactivity, animation and multimedia content.

To this end, it has released Opus Presenter, a redesigned version of Opus Pro aimed squarely at frustrated Powerpoint users. We reviewed a late beta; Presenter should be shipping by the time this review appears.

Presenter's first big attraction is its price - at under £100 it will be an appealing alternative to anyone who doesn't already have Microsoft Office. The basic steps to building a presentation are similar to Powerpoint.

The left-hand side of the screen displays thumbnails of each slide, or pages as they are called in the manual, while the main area is where you edit the content of the presentation.

Presenter also refers to documents as 'publications' rather than presentations, reflecting the fact that it can be used not just for standard business presentations but for a wide variety of other media.

Other differences in the main interface include a tabbed organiser down the far left of the screen, providing quick access to page templates and resources such as picture files and buttons.

There's also a colour palette down the right edge of the screen. All interface elements can easily be repositioned, and either docked to an edge of the screen or left as floating palettes.

Clicking the items in the content toolbar allows you to quickly place items on a page, such as text, pictures, video, animation, navigation buttons and so on.

The Resource gallery provides a range of ready-made content which can be dragged straight onto a page. For basic presentations, Presenter's templates behave in the expected Powerpoint-style manner, whereby a mouse click progresses to the next slide.

But the user has full control over what actions a mouse click or key press triggers. For example, you can trigger an animation, or a slideshow to appear within a page, or control a video clip.

Transitions are also fully customisable. They don't just apply to moving between slides, but can be applied to any individual object on a page, such as a text box or picture.

You can also apply visual effects to objects, such as drop shadows and transparency, with a level of control normally only seen in graphics applications.

The entire approach is object-oriented, so you can apply any number of properties to any number of objects.

Double-clicking on an object brings up its Properties window, where you can edit every conceivable property, such as its colour, its size, what actions are triggered when it's clicked, and so on. In other words, the possibilities are limitless.

Once you've mastered the creation of basic presentations, then creating standalone multimedia applications, training materials, quizzes, and point-of-sale demonstrations is only a few stages away.

There are two modes in Presenter: Interactive Presentation mode is meant for designing standard presentations, but if you instead choose Extended mode, you are presented with a wide variety of additional options for the creation of more sophisticated interactive publications.

The huge scope of this application meant that we found it a little daunting. The interface is relatively complex and not as welcoming as Powerpoint's, so it's not always easy to find what you're looking for.

You need to have a large amount of patience if you want to discover everything Opus Presenter allows you to do, and you'll very likely create some pretty awful looking material along the way. It gives you the tools to create great designs, but if you're not a designer that may not be of much use.

One further limitation of Opus Presenter is its lack of support for the Powerpoint file format, meaning you can't import existing presentations. This isn't as limiting as you might think, as Opus Presenter documents can be 'published'.

This means that all the content is packed into a standalone executable application which loads a 'lite' version of the software to play back the publication on any Windows computer. These exe files can't be edited, which may prove inconvenient.

Contact: Digital Workshop 0870 120 2186
www.digitalworkshop.com

System requirements:

• 450MHz Pentium II
• 64MB of Ram
• 50MB of hard disk space
• 1,024 x 768 resolution display with 24-bit colour
• DirectX 8
• Quicktime 4
• Windows Media Player 6
• Windows 95 or above