What they're saying about PPTools
Reviews and Articles
A nice shout-out from Mike Parkinson inthe Association for Talent Development's blog. Thanks!
Indezine, the premier PowerPoint online magazine, has reviewed several of the PPTools add-ins:
Thank you, Planet PDF, for your insightful review of Prep4PDF (and the mention of Friday, the software we use to generate this and our other FAQ-based sites)
Presentations Magazine recently published Get the most out of your PowerPoint files by PowerPoint MVP Geetesh Bajaj that explains the many ways you can "repurpose" your PowerPoint presentations for other uses, and featured our PPT2HTML (PowerPoint to HTML conversion) and Prep4PDF (PowerPoint to PDF conversion) addins.
TechTrax featured PPTools PPT2HTML PowerPoint to HTML converter in their June, 2002 issue. They even let us write the article, so you know it's not biased.
And from satisfied PPTools users
From Joe S., a new PPTools Merge user:
Thanks for your prompt and detailed response. Thanks again for all your help -- you're the best technical support professional I have ever experienced.
From Ian R. a PPTools Merge user:
Our company frequently makes pitches to potential clients. The powerpoint handouts we bring to those meetings comprise a lot of data and imagery. All of our data was stored in excel spreadsheets which we would then manually transfer over to a powerpoint template to present at the pitch meetings. This process ate up a lot of our time. Our firm found PPTTools online through google search and we were impressed enough by the trial version to invest in the software. Initially we created a powerpoint template that matched the style of what we were doing before and that proved to be a great time saver in-and-of-itself. However, we quickly realized that the software was capable of much more and we decided to start from scratch to create an ace presentation that could be created with the press of a button. We ended up biting off more than we could chew and we had to consult with the PPTTools support staff frequently for advice and guidance. A few times, we were pushing the capabilities of the software in a way that the team beyond PPTTools added functionality at our request. Extraordinary customer care to say the least! Needless to say our firm is now able to create sharp, professional presentations in a matter of minutes and productivity has gone up greatly because we use PPTTools.
From Tom McM:
"PPTools products are easy to use and provide solutions to many of the known limitations that PowerPoint users encounter on a daily basis. In addition, their prompt after sales support has assisted us greatly in resolving issues outside of the core PPTools range. I have strongly recommended these products to my colleagues and will continue to recommend them to future employers"
Lee Featherby of powerfulpoints.com.au wrote to say:
Just a note to follow up & acknowledge your work with ppmerge.
I needed to do the presentation for the client's annual sales rally. This is a big gig costing upwards of $250,000 with 3 screens, including 1 16:9 that is about 20 metres long, in front of 2,500 people. In all there were about 350 slides in some 13 categories...some awards with 280+ names. Some categories were just names, some were photos & a brief bio including names, ages, goals, strengths, etc.
We planned well for this by having the people nominated for the awards on a specially prepared excel spreadsheet.
Last year the same rally resulted in charges of $1,800 to the client, just for the clerical work in doing this (I only eventually charged them $1,000 as a goodwill gesture). This year the charge for the same work was down to $350 as we didn't have to worry about transcription errors or data entry...which is work I hate anyway. Even the client commented on how easy everything was this year.
I am more than delighted, the clients was rapt that the job was both easier AND cheaper AND more accurate.
In summary, this is the definition of good software when everybody wins. I would also be remiss if I didn't comment on the great and immediate follow up on every query I had. You had dealt with every question within 24 hours...outstanding!
Thanks again & keep up the good work. If only all software developers were this way.
A.M. from down under had a few problems using our PPTMerge demo, but we managed to get things sorted out for her quickly:
Steve, thank you thank you thank you - you are an absolute legend - it has worked a treat and I am over the moon, as are my colleagues! Thank you so much for all the time you have spent on this and for your perseverence. I am so impressed with your service. It is going to make such a difference - I am running an awards program (just like the example on your website) - well, except its actually seven awards programs ... over 530 nominees and their photos/logos. I need to get into powerpoint and so as you can imagine this is the tool i need!!
Caroline C of the Canadian Forest Service had this to say about FixLinks:
By the way this little tool saved my life last fall!! I had 8 sets of linked presentations (60 in total) with hyperlinks and accompanying audio files I had to prepare for the World Forestry Congress in Quebec City last September. These were prepared here in Ottawa and were to be loaded on the kiosks in the Pavillion once I arrived..... I really don't think I would have made my deadline without this handy little tool!
Visit the Canada Pavilion On-Line - Forest, Source of Life
Visitez le Pavillon du Canada en ligne - La forêt, source de vie
After we helped her get started with Prep4PDF, Ronda from Virginia wrote to say:
THANK YOU SO MUCH!! That worked just fine when creating hyperlinks in the Master View in Powerpoint and then using (Prep4PDF) to convert it to .pdf in Acrobat. This product is great! I first used the Demo on a few files - then decided it was beneficial to the project I was working on and we decided to purchase the full converter. So not only am I very happy with my purchase - I did not expect the quick response and outstanding technical response I received thus far. I would recommend this tool in a heartbeat and will certainly look to this site if I need other similar type programs in the future.
... the palette is precisely what PowerPoint was missing - at least from the colorfully creative standpoint. I'm a freelance paralegal who ONLY creates mediation presentations and trust me when I say that I was running out of colors because I'd used them all, twice.
John Sadowski of Pivotal Communications in Kalamazoo, Michigan wrote:
... the greatest the greatest aspect was the use of FixLinksPro. That puppy saved my hide. I was able to make all links relational and in separate folders...a god send! My disk included PPT with auto advance and audio files, speaker support, and scripts. I was able to map out a very understandable file layout on the disk .. hiding all resources in folders and providing only the .pps files to be clicked by user. Your program was definitely the hero. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Chuck Jones, OBM Program Manager, Oracle Consulting writes:
FixLinks Pro helped us when we really needed it: We had an 8 MB PowerPoint slide deck with over 1000 links. When the links began to break because we ran up against PPTs storage limits, FixLinks Pro enabled us to regain control of our links. Thanks PPTools!
A friend in Australia writes about PPTMerge:
Some will remember the presentation we put together for the school junior graduation, with heaps of children scanning. It was held last night and I think it fair to say the results were spectacular! The teacher in charge of the process, Dave Notley, remarked to the parents that he kept saying: "It's not going to happen on time"! And that I kept saying: "It'll be ready". We used PPTMerge, it was the most amazing compilation in 10 seconds I ever saw. We had the students pictures saved by name, which meant we could use Excel formulae to be super smart. With the concatenate function, we could add the path prefix of c:\school\ at the beginning of the name and at the end .png. This meant not having to retype names into the database. James Bond (not his real name) became c:\school\James Bond.png in the appropriate cell. This was more unreal because we had many dual photos of the children, both currently, as well as when they first started school. These younger photos were saved with the same name, but a letter "b" at the end of each name (b for baby). So a quick edit and replace on those cells removed .png and replaced it with b.png. This would make James Bond.png into James Bondb.png. There ended up being eight pictures with associated text per slide. On behalf of 70 children, a number of staff, many parents and a very pleased "myself", thankyou.
A Senior Training Analyst at a research hospital is using PPT2HTML to convert PowerPoint presentations to online courses and wrote to say:
"Thought you would want to know that our online launch went fantastic yesterday! The courses worked beautifully...no problems at all. Smoothest rollout we have had. Thank you for all your help and commitment to the customer (us!) for this rollout. It was wonderful!"
Jon Rowlan of SADS wrote:
"Many thanks for your help with this Steve, your software has dug us out of a hole and your help has made it worth every penny."
Mind if we quote you on that, Jon?
"Quote me in whichever way you prefer ... I am genuinely thrilled - it really has saved our bacon ..."
A customer (who'll remain nameless) had this to say when we located and fixed a problem for him within 30 minutes of receiving his email reporting it:
"You kick A**!!!
What's the HTML code for blush?
Chris Lim at MANN+HUMMEL AUTOMOTIVE, Inc. had this to say about PPTools Optimizer:
We love it. Everyone now sends their presentations to me and I "compress" it. There was once a 60+Mb presentation made up of only 13 slides and it compressed it to 7Mb. It blew their minds.
David Krueger of AgRenaissance Software writes:
"I bought the Optimizer tool... what a life-saver. Last week someone gave me a ppt file that was 48MB, and wanted it on their website for others to download. I optimized for 800x600, and it reduced down to 2MB. Not bad!"
Diane Cunningham is President of D &D Enterprises, Virtual Dean of Students for Presenters University, the voice of "Ask the Professor" at www.presentersuniversity.com, and Web Publishing Instructor for the Information Technologies Department at the UCSD Extension. After purchasing PPT2HTML, she wrote to ask why hyperlinks within her PowerPoint text blocks weren't converting to links in the converted HTML. We were able to provide a quick manual workaround, but figured that'd be too tedious for repeated use.
So we set to work on a fix. Later that week, Diane had a new version of PPT2HTML to try and she wrote back:
Dude!! You NAILED this puppy. You are one awesome coder!! Every single URL works flawlessly -- even the long ugly ones and the link to a graphic! Bravo, clap clap and well done! I think you should release this bad boy into the wild!!! Thank you for doing this, this is really neat! (Please feel free to quote me -- I am THRILLED with your product and intend to mention it in several of my courses and seminars -- thanks again for your most excellent work!)
John Oliphant of Heathkit Educational Systems bought PPT2HTML to convert his PowerPoint presentations for use on the company web site and emailed us to say:
... my boss' reaction was "How'd you do that! We need this!" We were just discussing how to distribute this stuff differently, and this tool fits the bill and the timing is perfect. ... Great stuff!
PPTools user Larry Barsh had this to say after using the Optimizer to knock a PPT file down to size prior to sending it to Word:
"I tried it and it works beautifully!!! I reduced a 39.5 meg file to kb's and the Word file reduced to 3.5 megs. Thanks for everything."
WUGnet thought the Place Exactly tool rated a tip of the day
A few more random quotes and then we'll stop bragging:
Wow! What customer support! I didn't expect an answer for a couple of days. Your fix works great. I am so glad I found your software.[Previous] [Home] [Next]