PPT has one big advantage: it is written by the same people who wrote Windows. So it can seize the Windows display and keyboard, and take control over the entire UI. I happen to think that's A Bad Thing™ but I may be in the minority on that.
Of course, it isn't portable to Mac OS or Linux. It depends on the OS. Who wants to figure out the nuances of the Mac OS or Linux display libraries to provide portable functionality equivalent to Powerpoint?
It has a proprietary file format making it difficult to work with. That's -- perhaps -- a more important problem.
So, what are the alternatives?
OpenOffice/StarOffice Impress . "a truly outstanding tool for creating effective multimedia presentations. Your presentations will stand out with 2D and 3D clip art, special effects, animation, and high-impact drawing tools." Likely to be completely true. However, I'm not ready to make the leap to Open Office. Yet. Office 12 may be the tipping point.
KOffice KPresenter . "With KPresenter, you can prepare a set of slides for use in an on-screen slideshow or for printing. Your slides can include text and graphics in a variety of formats, and of course, you can embed all sorts of objects." However, the Windows/Cygwin thing leaves me a little cold.
MagicPoint . "X11 based presentation tool. It is designed to make simple presentations easy while to make complicated presentations possible. Its presentation file (whose suffix is typically .mgp) is just text so that you can create presentation files quickly with your favorite editor (e.g. Emacs, vi)." Cool. What about Windows? That's what my company-supplied laptop runs, and I'd like to stick close to that platform.
Latex-based tools (a classic write-up is Making Presentations with LaTeX and Prosper ). Not interesting to me because I'm more comfortable with the SGML/HTML/XML syntax family. Typically, LaTeX leads to a PDF that can be shown in full-screen mode. This is rather cool, since everyone has Adobe Reader nowadays.
HTML-based tools (see Using Linux for Presentations Mini-HOWTO ). In this case, we rely on a browser to show the slides. I've looked at some of the following, and been unhappy for a variety of very small reasons.
Also, there's Bruce , which is new, and I haven't tried it. It uses PyGame , which sits on SDL , and looks like it can seize the display and keyboard in a portable, non-proprietary way, which would be A Good Thing™. It uses Python as a markup language, an interesting alternative to XML or LaTeX. More precisely, a Bruce presentation IS a Python application which builds individual Page objects and displays them using some interactive events for navigation.
A Leo document to could produce the Python app which is a Bruce presentation. Leo does this in a very elegant way. A simple @button could launch Bruce on the resulting Python file.
Or, even nicer, a plug-in to Leo could present an outline directly in Bruce by combining Bruce's PyGame presentation with a Leo outline reader to build Page objects from Leo outlines. At the end of the presentation, you'd be back editing Leo.
Pylize . While simple, the HTML markup leaves a little bit to be desired. The slides aren't contained, but rather delimited by <h1> tags. I prefer proper XML/DocBook containers (like <slide> or <frame> or even <div>).
PythonPoint . I like the idea of going from a version of a DocBook-like XML to slides. This is rather elegant, and since I know (and like) DocBook markup, this has a lot of potential. However, it isn't full DocBook XML; in particular, some HTML in-line markup seems to work, but is otherwise undocumented. Finally, I'm not adverse to processing markup to see the results, but in this case, the consequences of a word or two alters the look of the slide so profoundly that something closer to WYSIWYG really is appropriate.
Currently, I'm playing with Slidy . It uses XHTML, and <div> tags. It has a clunky distribution issue, since it is style sheets and a Javascript file to make the whole thing go. It does, however, look really good in FireFox, and isn't too difficult to configure and make work. Feedback to see the consequences of a change is almost instant.
Sadly, really cool layouts require that I actually learn how to control CSS. Until then, I'm stuck with more-or-less the default CSS's supplied with Slidy.
For either PythonPoint or Slidy, I can prepare my XHTML using Leo . It isn't a XML editor, so it doesn't help with the markup. It is, however, a scriptable outliner. As outliner, it rules. Being scriptable in Python means that I could write a Python script to emit the <div> container and <h1> tags automatically.