Create, Collaborate on Stylish Slideshows with Acrobat Presentations

Building PowerPoint-style presentations in your browser is nothing new, but that hasn't stopped Adobe from throwing its hat into the ring: Acrobat Presentations lets you create and collaborate on slideshows. And unlike most Adobe products, this one's free (for now, anyway).

Though currently in beta (and technically an Adobe Labs product, so don't use it for mission-critical stuff), Acrobat Presentations already shows a lot of polish. If you've ever created a presentation, you'll have no trouble using these simple, straightforward tools. In a matter of minutes I was able to whip together one seriously stylish-looking slideshow, complete with transitions, uploaded images, and even FLV video files.

Presentations also supports a high level of collaboration: You and multiple co-workers can work on a slideshow simultaneously. This could be a major timesaver: Instead of sending a document around and around for changes upon changes, just get everyone on a conference call and hammer the sucker out together.

Alas, Presentations can't import PowerPoint documents, nor can it export them -- it's limited to PDF. It also lacks support for audio and requires each collaborator to have an Adobe ID. I don't expect the latter hassle to disappear, but I expect Presentations will flesh out its feature set as it develops.

I must say, Adobe's been doing some interesting stuff lately. There's Photoshop Express for online image editing/storing/sharing, the Buzzword word processor (arguably the most attractive of its ilk), the Acrobat.com Outlook plug-in for sending large files, and now this.

As I said earlier, online presentations are nothing new. Check out our previous posts on Present.io, SlideShare, SlideRocket, and Zoho Show.

While you're at it, see everything BNET has done on the subject of presentations. There's enough good reading there for a month. [via Digital Inspiration]