Microsoft PowerPoint 2002

The biggest drawbacks are: the instructions are relatively weak (I strongly recommend "Step by Step MS PowerPoint" if you are a new user to get you up and running); and the extraordinarily steep price tag. I bought it as a standalone product, and I think it is outrageously priced, considering you can get it plus Word, Excel and Outlook in the new 'MS Office XP Standard for Students and Teachers' (which, unfortunately, had not come out when I bought this) for less money than PowerPoint alone.

Overall, I still believe that my title sums it up: Good performance, high price.


Not worth the money   April 23, 2003
 13 out of 15 found this review helpful

While I've found this product to be quite useful, it is unnecessarily expensive. I used to only use the powerpoint program on the school computers, but I found an alternative. OpenOffice.org has an entirely free version of office. Impress is the name of the equivalent program to powerpoint, and it works for everything I have needed to do with it. Don't pay the monopoly for powerpoint, it's not worth that much money.


Good, but StarOffice Impress is as good or better   January 26, 2003
 20 out of 22 found this review helpful

I've been using Ppt for a while but not anymore. Before I upgraded, that is when I was considering upgrading, I downloaded OpenOffice.org, the free version of StarOffice, and I was blown away. It opened all my PowerPoint files, and it has most of the same features. I use Impress all the time now, whether my clients need Impress or PowerPoint file formats. Does'em both.

Try Impress first, from the OpenOffice.org or StarOffice office suite.


Good product, ridiculous price, and there's no point.   December 1, 2002
 52 out of 52 found this review helpful

My last contract was with a subsidiary of Microsoft so they gave me MS Office XP, including PowerPoint. I didn't have to shell out the bucks for it. And it's a nice product. There's a little too much autoformatting but it's reasonably easy to say no, stop that, keep it normal. And Clippy doesn't come up.

But before that contract, and since then because I'm used to them, I've used StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. I've used them both and am really impressed, there's actually an alternative to Microsoft Office that's FREE. Well, OpenOffice is free and StarOffice which has a few other files so they charge you a bit for them. But they both open PowerPoint and Word and Excel files, and save back to those formats too, and 9 times out of 10 they do it perfectly.

I've done lots of presentations, including animation and linking to URLs, etc., in OpenOffice and it's really good. FREE really good software. So I don't see why anyone needs to get this product.

A few key things in OpenOffice.org -- different layouts, so you can look at it as a regular slide, handouts, outline, and in background and layer views too. I've done some great backgrounds since the drawing tools let you put really small gifs or vector graphics in the background once and it doesn't inflate your file size. Plus the file sizes with OpenOffice.org are spectacularly small. I opened up my PowerPoint presentation for a contract, opened it in OpenOffice.org, and the file size was suddenly half as big and it looked just the same as it did in PowerPoint.

So basically, here's the deal. I'm really happy doing all my work now in OpenOffice.org instead of PowerPoint, and while I'm not a power power power user I definitely put it through its paces.

Download OpenOffice.org before you get PowerPoint, or get StarOffice if you feel like you should pay for your software. PowerPoint ain't your only option.