Price:	$8.95		Reviewed by:	Philippa
Supplied:	Westtek		Review date:	14/04/2005
Pros:	Reads native PowerPoint files Integrates with some external display hardware (not tested) Cheap!		Cons:	Can't display all PowerPoint files Occasionally crashes if it can't read a file No facility to edit or save overlay notes from presentations

Introduction

Whilst the Pocket PC world is rapidly catching up with Palm in terms of stability and great software, one area where they still lag behind is integration with Microsoft Office. Pocket Word and Pocket Excel are greatly inferior to their desktop cousins and PowerPoint isn't catered for at all. I frequently give presentations as part of my job so this is a real omission for me. Clear Vue Presentation is an inexpensive PowerPoint file reader that I've been using for a couple of months now, with mixed results. Performance and Features

ClearVue Presentation is purely a native PowerPoint file viewer. It has several different viewing modes accessed either via buttons on the top right or via the menus. Normal View (shown above) has one slide displayed in a large window, with a small slide sorter below. You can resize the slide sorter if you wish. A different version of the Normal mode is available which allows you to view any notes attached to the slides. Slide View is simply a slide sorter (i.e. all slides displayed the same size). The final view is the Slide Show which will display your slides one by one. There are various settings available in this mode. You can advance the slides either manually, using existing timings or with automatic advancement after a certain number of seconds. You can display the slides either in portrait or landscape mode, and you can choose to end with a blank slide. Whilst you can't edit the content of the slides, you can set up a custom show, re-ordering or removing slides. One nice feature in the Slide Show mode is the ability to draw on the slide using your stylus, or to display a mouse pointer which is also controlled by the stylus. This feature may not seem particularly useful when just viewing your slides, but the software includes integration with some external video adapters namely, Colorgraphic - Voyager, I-O DATA - CFXGA, Margi - Presenter-To-Go, and Toshiba e750 and e800 Expansion Pack. The ability to, for example, circle important parts of a slide can be very useful during a presentation. Since I don't have any of the external display products I was unable to test how well the software integrates I'm afraid. Slightly oddly, the drawing features are accessed from a popup menu which is displayed in portrait mode even if you are viewing the slides in landscape mode (i.e. it's at 90 degrees to the slide display). In addition, it would be nice if there was the facility to save any notes made on your slides this way, as they may help provide a record of discussions during your presentations, but this is not an essential feature. The software seems to work well in both landscape and vga modes on my Loox. The feature that first attracted me to this software is it's ability to read native PowerPoint files. I like to use my Loox as a laptop replacement which means any files passed on to me during meetings or via email are inevitably in native format. Unfortunately, I havn't found it to be 100% reliable. Westtek's documentation claims that "ClearVue Presentation supports desktop PowerPoint transitions, animations, sounds, and inserted charts, graphs, text and images." in all PowerPoint slides created in MS Office 97 and later. I've found that nearly every file I've tested which was purely created with PowerPoint was ok, but if there are embedded images from other packages (e.g. Visio which I use a lot) then I was much less likely to get the file to display. I can understand that it is difficult to deal with all file formats but it would be nice if it could be a bit more elegant when it fails as it either refuses altogether (see screenshot below) or displays a set of completely blank slides. Putting blank boxes in the regions it couldn't display would be a much nicer solution. Once it has failed to open a file the software will fail to open any other files (even if they are normally ok). If you are lucky you will only have to exit and then restart the software, however, on a few occasions I've had to soft reset my Loox as the software has just frozen. Conclusions

ClearVue Presentation is the only software I've found which will allow me to view native PowerPoint slides, and it is extremely cheap. As such, I was happy to pay as it's better than nothing and when it works it's a very nice piece of software. However, I would recommend potential users do some testing with the demo to see how well it deals with the types slides they are likely to encounter.