Powerbullet Presenter is freeware for Flash

“Powerbullet Presenter is a small, simple and free program for creating presentations in the Flash™ format. You don’t need any experience to create slick animated presentations by simply typing, clicking and dragging.”

“Powerbullet Presenter is specifically designed for creating multi-page presentations that are commonly used in electronic sales brochures and catalogues, splash screens, slideshows and student projects.”

“You can also create a self-running show, specifying delays on each page, or you can link the timing to the sound attached to each page.”

“Your presentations can be exported as an HTML page with an embedded SWF (Flash) file or as an executable file which you can run on any Windows PC.”

Entirely freeware.  Use at your own risk, as usual.

Zamzar goes for the conversion

Zamzar will convert a number of formats to other formats, for free, and email you a link to the new format’s file.

Zamzar does documents, images (graphics), music (audio/sound), video, and compressed formats — far too many to list. Check the list for all the current files.

While you do have to wait for the email to get the link to your converted file, it’s free and will convert things like Real Player files to mp3, and Windows .wma to mp3, and so on.

It will also convert YouTube videos to formats that work in PowerPoint.

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OpenOffice and OxygenOffice freeware

[last updated May 11, 2008]

Microsoft sells its software, so the University is not able to provide free copies of Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) to anyone. The University has to pay for licenses to use that software on campus computers.Student discounts are available from Microsoft and through many distributors.
However, a FREE substitute is OpenOffice, which can save documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint formats. This would allow you to work in OpenOffice at home, for example, and save in a Microsoft Office format to bring to use on campus.
The software is free, but requires very large downloads (93MB for version 2.0.3, for example). You can also get a version from the Library Software CD-ROM which can be checked out overnight from the Library. For an enhanced version of this with more extras, try OxygenOffice Professional.

OxygenOffice has all the simple extras including everything from a rich clip art gallery to variety of standard document templates (CV, greeting cards, etc.), plus over 90 text fonts, OOOWikipedia (an integrated Wikipedia Search Tools), ability to run Visual Basic for Applications from Calc (the OpenOffice alternative to “Excel”), ability to import Office Open XML (Microsoft Office 2007), and option to export (save as) documents to PDF, LaTex and MediWiki. To top it all off, OOOP has been able to integrate importing of Works and WordPerfect documents.

Note: there’s a lot of file names listed at the site, but the one to select for English is usually the shortest: OOo_2.3.1_071211_Win32Intel_install.exe (for example) the ones with “install_” and more letters (such as “install_de.exe” are non-English language versions. This is for 32-bit Windows. If installing on a Linux system, the shortest file name is usually the English version, again.

Note: 64 bit Linux version are avaliable from these sites:

• http://ftp.fsn.hu/pub/oxygenoffice/
• ftp://ftp.devall.hu/oxygenoffice/
• http://mirror.nedudu.hu/ooop/

There are also versions of OpenOffice which can be run from a USB Flash drive. Click here for links.