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If you're like most people who buy desktop presentation software, you use your package mainly for printing charts and handouts. Gold Disk Inc.'s Astound for Windows, Version 1.5 integrates sound, video, and animation so well that you may soon have no excuse for leaving multimedia out of your presentations.
As a well-rounded desktop presentation graphics package that integrates multimedia, Astound 2.5 for Windows (the follow-on to the well-regarded Astound for the Macintosh) has no peer. Lotus Development Corp.'s Freelance Graphics, Microsoft Corp.'s PowerPoint, and Software Publishing's Harvard Graphics all let you add animation, sound, and video to your presentations, but they do it through Windows' OLE facility, a clumsy process. Asymetrix Corp.'s pioneering Compel, now in Version 1.1, integrates multimedia but lacks routine features such as an outliner. Micrografx Inc.'s powerful new Version 4.0 of Charisma equals Compel's and Astound's multimedia capabilities (see review, January 31, page 82) but Charisma's appetite for resources makes it disappointingly slow.
Astound is not only a reasonably complete desktop presentation package, but it also makes using multimedia practical. It lets you run all of your multimedia components directly, resulting in slicker, more easily orchestrated presentations. The only drawbacks we found are some relatively minor ease-of-use problems and a couple of bugs in this first release. (Gold Disk is working on fixes.)
We tested Astound 1.5 using the criteria developed for our June 21, 1993 product comparison of presentation graphics software (page 74).
PERFORMANCE:
Presentation setup and import: Multimedia savvy aside, Astound is a full-fledged desktop presentation package that provides the "top-down" organization that is by now de rigueur. There's an outliner for listing your slide text, a slide editor for adding charts and polishing the look of each slide, and a slide sorter for arranging your slides. Astound's templates contain sets of master slides with placeholders that preset the locations of your text and any charts you need, and establish a consistent slide-to-slide color and text scheme. Astound also lets you print speaker's notes and audience handouts to aid your final presentation.
We installed Astound in about 20 minutes from eight high-density disks. We chose a custom install option that let us select the import and output capabilities we were going to use. The included CD-ROM also contained...