Timothy Nary

SlideShare and authorSTREAM make sharing PowerPoints online Easy!

I’ve been casually working on a PowerPoint presentation for my IST 240 class the past few days.  My teacher asked my group if we were willing to talk to the class about our project and how a game engine works.  Tonight, as I was working on the website for our project (because, it’s just that cool!) I was looking for some way to share my PowerPoint online.  I know there are ways to save the slides as images and make a photostream of sorts with Flickr, but I have a lot of animations that help to explain how it works which would be lost.

Enter SlideShare and authorSTREAM. These are two of the best online slideshow sites that I have found.  Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, but I was equally impressed with each one.

SlideShare is the more versitle of the two, supporting many formats, including PowerPoint, OpenOffice and Keynote presentations.  It also supports common document formats such as Microsoft Word, Excel, OpenOffice, PDF files and text files.  You can also very easily upload an mp3 (”podcast”) and create a “slidecast”, which is an annotated mashup which is perfect for webinars.

Unfortunately, I had some issues uploading my PowerPoint.  I’m not sure whether it didn’t like a font or certain animations, but it errored the three times I uploaded it.  I tested a few other PowerPoints I had, and they worked fine.

SlideShare also is unique in that it has a partnership with LinkedIn, where you can share your slideshows and presentations on their social network.  Definitely a good networking tool and would help to boost one’s online presence.  I also liked that SlideShare has developer APIs, and I can forsee some cool widgets being created.

authorSTREAM may be limited in only support PowerPoint files (PPT, PPS, PPTX & PPSX format) but that was exactly what I was looking for.  authorStream also does one thing really well and sticks with it.  The PowerPoint I had issues uploading to SlideShare uploaded fine on authorSTREAM on my first try.  I was impressed that it kept all of my animations and transitions.  It had a few minor issues with image placement and fonts, but overall I felt it better at converting the PowerPoint than SlideShare.

Both SlideShare and authorSTREAM were easy to use and convienient.  Neither of them required registration to upload the slideshow, and both of them allowed you to edit settings post-upload.  I also enjoyed the fact that both of them had privacy settings, so that I could choose who to share my presentation with.  Both sites made sharing my presentation a breeze, and both have flash viewers for embedding slideshows in websites.

In summary, if you have a slideshow that you want to share or upload online, I recommend trying either SlideShare or authorSTREAM, depending on your specific needs.  Both are quick, convienient, and offer comperable quality.