Hi Clive,
PowerPoint can be saved in formats that can be shared with non-PowerPoint
owners. Mac and Windows PowerPoint can save as a web page. Mac PowerPoint
can save as QuickTime movies. If the folks who send the presentations to you
are considerate of your non-PowerPoint status they might be willing to send
you HTML or QuickTime formatted presentations.
If for some reason you are not comfortable with asking for special
consideration or you don't think the creators of the presentations would be
inclined to accommodate you, then you could purchase PowerPoint. It is
available as a stand-alone application, so you don't have to purchase the
entire Office suite.
Another alternative is Impress, the free "poor-man's" PowerPoint. You can
download Impress for free from this web site: <
http://www.openoffice.org/>.
Impress is part of OpenOffice and can not be installed separately.
I'll probably take a lot of heat from worshippers of OpenOffice for saying
this, but Impress is only on version 1, so please don't expect a lot from
it. Most fonts will not look the same as they do in PowerPoint. Graphs will
are likely to very different. Visual Basic is not there. AppleScript is not
the same. Animations and transitions may play differently or not at all.
Pictures and artwork often display poorly. The Impress experience is
definitely not "the same" as PowerPoint, but Impress will open and attempt
to display presentations that are saved in Microsoft PowerPoint file format.
You can also create presentations in Impress brand software and save them
in Microsoft PowerPoint file format, with results that may be unpredictable
at times. Still, Impress is free, which is its main allure. The fact that
Impress exists may be a disincentive for Microsoft to make a free player of
their own. Safari, another open source product, killed future development of
the free Microsoft Internet Explorer, which was not a good thing overall for
the Macintosh platform IMHO.
-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
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