Give your ideas the eye-popping treatment they deserve with one of these professional packages

WANT TO GET YOUR MESSAGE across to a large audience? Need to impress a client with your portfolio or sales pitch? Armed with presentation software and a little imagination, you can produce a professional-looking slide show, complete with attractive transitions, sound effects, videoclips, and even voice-over commentary.

We took a look at five leading Windows presentation software packages, and discovered that all of them work in similar ways: You first select a template design containing the background colors, fonts, and graphics that will set the tone of your presentation. Many let you start with a canned presentation, containing boilerplate text for everything from a business plan to a corporate overview.

Next, you can organize your thoughts or bullet points by using a program's outline view. You're then free to fine-tune each slide--adding graphics, charts, animation, and multimedia effects--in the program's one-slide-at-a-time view.

Once your slides are complete, you use a sorter view to preview them as thumbnails and rearrange them as you see fit. All of the applications here offer the chance to preview your slide show and rehearse your timing at any step of the process.

Aside from their different templates and clip art, the programs vary mainly in their distribution and Internet conveniences. Although each program can package a presentation with a runtime player so it will run as a stand-alone application, Astound and Microsoft PowerPoint also support interactive Internet shows--helpful when you can't present in person. (See this month's Can Do section for a step-by-step guide to creating online presentations.) Corel Presentations, for its part, can export your slides as Adobe Acrobat (PDF) files--great for distribution on a CD.

Lotus Freelance leans toward sophisticated network collaboration, so you can present a show simultaneously to everyone at the corporate office (provided, of course, they're using Lotus SmartSuite). And with the exception of Harvard Graphics, all of these programs can mutate your slides into Web pages, so you can post the show on a Web site.

Another point of variability is the quality of templates and drawing tools. The artistically disadvantaged should look closely at PowerPoint, which has the classiest clip art and the widest selection of attractive templates. Perhaps drawing on some CorelDraw DNA, Corel Presentations has the strongest drawing tools in the roundup. Astound and Harvard Graphics include utilities for creating interesting text effects, and Freelance offers excellent diagramming capability.

As potent as these presentation tools are, they can't turn a weak message into a memorable one. Keep each slide short--no more than three or four points--and always favor content over spinning globes and bouncing text. Even when it comes to PC presentations, you don't want your medium to overcome your message.

Astound 6

The winning entry when it comes to creating presentations with animation and multimedia effects, Astound 6 ($395) comes with more than 100 gorgeous template styles, an excellent bundled program for creating animated 3D text, and a spectacular library of sound and videoclips and photos. Oddly, the package offers only 10 canned presentations--a minus for busy home-based workers who need professional slides in a hurry.

Although Astound isn't difficult to learn, the absence of online tutorials or helpful onscreen walk-throughs makes the program harder to master than it should be. The documentation is silent about some features, including the 3D text utility; the display isn't customizable, and lacks pop-up tool tips. A status bar on the bottom of the screen provides minimal feedback about the current task.

But what Astound lacks in ease-of-use niceties, it makes up for in multimedia. You can drop sophisticated effects onto slides using simple toolbar buttons. In addition, you'll find support for the latest Web multimedia formats, such as PNG, MP3, and RealMedia G2 files.

Astound's sophisticated Web features make it a good choice if you're planning an Internet presentation. As with PowerPoint, you can preview slides in your browser, but Astound also lets you add Java applets and other Internet components, such as ActiveX controls and Visual Basic scripts. When you want to distribute your presentation, the included Web Conference Publisher automatically converts presentations into either static or dynamic HTML and immediately posts them to the Web. Web conferences can be played back in any Java-enabled browser.

Despite its meager documentation and ho-hum interface, we were wowed by Astound's capabilities. If you relish assembling complex animations and adding cool special effects to presentations--and don't mind the price and the learning curve--this is the program for you.

Corel Presentations 2000

Corel has incorporated first-rate drawing and image editing tools into Presentations 2000 ($300 as part of WordPerfect Office 2000 Standard Edition). The suite ships with an extensive library of fonts and clip art, making it one of the most complete presentation packages on the market.

As for Presentations itself, the program offers several attractive ease-of-use features, including online context-sensitive help, vertical tabs to switch between different views, and the ability to build macros to automate your work. If you're a programmer, you can even use Visual Basic to write complex routines.

Corel has added considerable Web power to Presentations 2000 in the form of the Internet Publisher Wizard. This module allows you to specify a variety of page layouts for your slides, including graphic formats, display sizes, colors, and button styles. Unfortunately, you can't preview Web pages from within Presentations itself, and some of our test files did not display correctly in our browser.

The program can also save a slide show in PDF format, though a few of our slide backgrounds previewed inaccurately. Presentations lacks the interactive Internet slide shows found in some of the other programs, but it does include the ability to save shows in PowerPoint format--useful if you want to broadcast your slide presentation to a Microsoft Office environment.

On the downside, multimedia and animation features are scarce--you can add simple animations to objects and bulleted lists, but the program doesn't sing and dance the way Astound does.

We found Presentations easy to learn, but not exceptionally feature-rich, and its output is occasionally at odds with what you see in the slide view. For these reasons, we don't see Presentations expanding its audience beyond existing WordPerfect Office users.

Harvard Graphics 98

Way back in the DOS days, the name Harvard Graphics was synonymous with professional presentations. Today's Harvard Graphics 98 is a competent presentation package, but it looks and feels passe--and at $295, it seems overpriced. This is especially true if you buy Lotus Freelance, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Corel Presentations as part of an entire office suite, complete with clip art and multimedia libraries.

Harvard's interface resembles PowerPoint's, but is less customizable. You can learn the basics by running the provided onscreen tutorial or reading the included manual; but if you've used presentation software before, you'll be up and running in a few minutes. Newbies will appreciate the Advisor window, which provides tips and checks slides for design errors.

You can drop both animations and videos onto your slides, but we found the implementation confusing, and there's no preview feature to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be. Voice-over sound recordings can accompany each slide, and you can scribble on slides during a presentation. Special text effects are easy, thanks to the external drawing module, though you'll spend considerable time waiting for special effects to be drawn onscreen.

Distribution of your presentation can be tricky; if you want to send your presentation out on CD, you'll have to send the supplied viewer along with it. Presentations can be shown simultaneously to a maximum of 64 machines on a network, however. And while there's a plug-in provided on the program CD for watching the presentation from Microsoft Internet Explorer 3, neither later versions of IE nor Netscape Navigator is supported.

Finally, Harvard's Internet support is poor--there's no export filter for saving slides in HTML format (although you can send the presentation files to a Web site using Microsoft Web Publisher).

Overall, Harvard Graphics 98 is a decent upgrade for users of earlier versions, but too costly and limited to compete with the other programs in this roundup.

Lotus Freelance Graphics Millennium Edition