Frequently asked questions about Live Presentations

The following points answer commonly asked questions about Live Presentations. For any other questions, please drop us a line at info@instacoll.com

What Is Live Presentations?

Live Presentations is Presentations for the Internet Generation – a powerful web-enabled presentation application that provides for every part of the presentation lifecycle that can be used on the desktop or on the browser and whether you are online or offline .

What Does It Do?

Live Presentations integrates flexible authoring, intelligent asset management, secure delivery and analytics tools in a single on demand application. Live Presentations allows you to quickly create stunning presentations, store, organize, tag and search your presentations, collaborate with your colleagues, securely share your presentations online or offline and measure the results, all in one integrated environment.

When Will Live Presentations Be Available?

Live Presentations is available to everyone right now. You can sign up for a free account today.

How Much Does Live Presentations Cost?

Live Presentations has two price points starting at free. The free plan allows you to create 20 presentations and use up to 100 MB of space on our server (whichever is lower) - you can share the presentations that you create with any number of people - all of whom can view and edit it without having to pay anything. If you reach the document count or storage limit specified above, you cannot create any new presentations - you have the option of either deleting documents to keep you under the specified limit or upgrading to a paid plan. To keep things simple, we offer a single paid plan of $6.99 per month that allows you to create unlimited presentations subject to using a maximum of 500 MB of space on our server. For more details, please see the pricing page.

Where can I access Live Presentations?

Point your browser to our web site– www.live-documents.com and click on “login”. If you are not a registered user, you can sign up for a free account any time.

Does Live Presentations compete with Microsoft PowerPoint?

Yes.

I already have Microsoft PowerPoint. Why should I use Live Presentations?

With Live Presentations, you can:

• Access your presentations on the web using any common browser
• View and edit your presentations from anywhere at any time in your browser in a rich user interface that provides the functionality and responsiveness that you expect in your familiar desktop applications.
• Easily share your presentations with your colleagues and contacts
• Make presentations from anywhere without having to worry about PowerPoint version compatibility
• Track changes made to your presentation at a slide level - no need to upload or download entire presentations each time anyone makes a change.

Does Live Presentations have all the features of Microsoft Powerpoint?

While we are not focused on blindly replicating all the features of PowerPoint , Live Presentations has most, if not, all of the capabilities of Microsoft PowerPoint. Live Presentations takes presentations to the next level - embracing the capabilities of the Internet without giving up the comfort of the desktop. We also think there are several aspects of PowerPoint that lend itself to bad presentations and are attempting to address those - for instance, ill-thought use of bullet points! Bullets are available but not emphasized in Live Presentations - any bullets embedded within uploaded presentations are preserved and you can add a grand choice of a single bullet character to apply to text within the presentation!

Where are my presentations kept?

Live Presentations keeps your resources secure and available with the help of Amazon's S3 Internet Storage .

What if I want greater security and privacy for my documents?

We offer a server version that allows you to host our application inside your enterprise premises. Contact us at sales@instacoll.com for details about this version.

How do I share a presentation with others?

Click on the “Share” button and add the email address of the person with whom you would like to share the presentation. You also have the option to make documents “public” in which case any body can view the document – all you have to do is share the link that appears in the browser toolbar.

Can I conduct an online meeting sharing my Live Presentation in slide show mode like in Webex and other web meeting solutions?

Absolutely. Just share your presentation with others, wait till they come online and then click on "Invite to Presentation" in the "View" menu - thereafter you can go into slideshow mode and all your actions are seen by other users in real-time full fidelity preserving animations and effects.

Can multiple people work on a presentation at the same time?

Absolutely, any number of people can work on a presentation simultaneously – you can see updates coming into your document in real-time without having to do anything manually like save or refresh.

When multiple people are editing a document together, how are conflicts avoided?

Live Presentations tracks and updates content at a slide level, so the possibility of conflicts is quite small. In the event that multiple people make changes to the same slide at the same time, it operates on a “last-save wins” mechanism and the person whose changes were made last appears in the presentation. However, you can revert such changes at any point of time by clicking on the “Revisions” button on the slide thumbnail where you can see all the slide versions – from this screen, you can revert to any previous version that you wish.

What operating systems Does Live Presentations Support?

The browser version of Live Presentations will run in any browser on any platform that supports Adobe's Flash Player 9 plugin . This means Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, and Opera on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

What kinds of document formats does Live Presentations support?

• IMAGES
• JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg)
• PNG (.png)
• GIF (.gif)
• FLASH
• SWF (.swf)
• VIDEO
• Flash Video (.flv)
• MICROSOFT POWERPOINT
• PowerPoint 97-2003 presentation (.ppt)
• PowerPoint 97-2003 show (.pps)
• PowerPoint 2007 (.pptx)
• OPEN OFFICE IMPRESS
• Open Office Impress presentation (.odp)

In addition, you can export presentations to a number of formats:

• IMAGES
• JPEG (.jpg, .jpeg)
• PNG (.png)
• GIF (.gif)
• TIFF (.tiff)
• PORTABLE DOCUMENT FORMAT
• PDF (.pdf)
• VIDEO
• Flash Video (.flv)
• MICROSOFT POWERPOINT
• PowerPoint 97-2003 presentation (.ppt)
• PowerPoint 97-2003 show (.pps)
• PowerPoint template (.pot)
• OPEN OFFICE IMPRESS
• Open Office Impress presentation (.odp)
• OPEN DOCUMENT PRESENTATION TEMPLATE
• OTP (.otp)
• PIPELINE CONFIGURATION TEMPLATE
• PCT (.pct)
• WINDOW META FILE
• WMF (.wmf)
• ENCAPSULATED POSTSCRIPT
• EPS (.eps)
• MACROMEDIA FLASH (without animation support)
• SWF (.swf)

Please note that the export feature is available only to the author or a document - this check is in place to ensure that people with whom you share your document respect the permissions and privacy policy that you have specified for a document.

Can I upload my existing presentations to Live Presentations? What file formats do you support?

Yes, you can upload your existing presentations into Live Presentations. Live Presentations supports a variety of file formats - ppt, pps, odp & sxi. Support for pptx is also available. Please note that some unsupported shapes and objects such as charts and tables are skipped. Animations are not preserved either because we feel that our animations are far richer than what PowerPoint offers currently!.

Are there any upload limits?

Each presentation you upload (import) into Live Presentations should be less than 10 MB. This limit will be raised further in future. There is a limit of 20 presentations that you can import and the total storage for your documents is 100 MB for the free plan.

Can I create a presentation from scratch in Live Presentations?

Yes, you can create a new presentation from scratch. Click on the "Create New Document" button on the dashboard or from the documents list at any point of time and get started.

Can an existing presentation be edited? Can slides be inserted, duplicated or deleted in an existing presentation?

Live Presentations offers the full range of editing capabilities. All of your presentations can be edited. New slides can be inserted, existing slides can be edited and duplicated. Text boxes can be moved around, shapes and symbols can be resized and rotated.

Can everyone access my Live Presentations documents?

The presentations you create (or import into) Live Presentations are all by default private. They will be accessible only to you and are protected by your Live Presentations ID / password authentication. You can optionally share your presentation to other users by entering their e-mail addresses in the "Share" tab in the document listing at any point of time. You can specify what each person can do with the presentation.

Can I delete my presentations?

Yes, you can. You can delete a presentation from the document list by enabling the delete checkbox and clicking on delete. Please note that once you delete your presentation, the desktop versions of the document are rendered inaccessible as well.

Can I share a presentation with my friends/colleagues? Can they edit my presentation?

Yes, you can share your presentation with others. And they can edit presentation as well (provide you have given them edit permission).

Can I add notes to my presentation?

Yes, you can. Each slide can have notes added to it.

What formatting text options does Live Presentations offer?

Live Presentations offers many text formatting options. You can bold, italisize, change font type, increase/decrease letter size, indent etc. Text boxes can be moved around by easy drag-and-drop too. In addition, you can apply a range of sophisticated effects such as shadow, glow, blur, bevel and reflection to your text.

Can I embed images from my desktop into a presentation?

Yes, you can. Click on the "Insert Image" icon from the Live Presentation toolbar to select an image from your desktop. Once the image is uploaded, you can move and resize it as per your requirements.In the desktop version, you can also drag and drop any image into a presentations.

Can shapes/flowcharts be inserted/created?

Yes. Live Presentations has a wide variety of shapes & symbols from which you can choose from.

Does Live Presentations offer readymade themes from which I can choose from?

Yes.

Can I have transitional effects between slides?

Live Presentations offers a number of transitional effects between slides.

Does Live Presentations support animation, video and sound?

Live Presentations supports animations, video and sound file embedding.

Can I embed URLs, YouTube clips in my Live Presentations presentation?

This feature is currently in development and will be available shortly.

Can Live Presentations support gradient and transparency effects?

Yes.

Can I embed charts and tables in my Live Presentations?

Yes.

I want to use my own fonts in Live Presentations - how do I do that?

To add fonts to Live Presentations, send us the font file by email - fonts@instacoll.com and we can explore adding the new font to the available list.

Is Live Presentations available in other languages?

Currently, it's available in English only. We plan to add more languages in the future.

I would like to offer my cliparts and images within the Live Presentations application ?

If you would like to offer your cliparts, images and backgrounds within the Live Presentations application, drop us a line at partners@instacoll.com. We intend to support both free and commercial stock art and icons and let users purchase these assets from within the application shortly.