Adobe Presenter is a PowerPoint plugin for converting PowerPoint presentations into elearning content. It allows for multimedia and interactive integrations and can be mobile accessible. Presenter can also integrate with standalone LMS products, including Adobe Captivate.
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LibreOffice
Score 8.9 out of 10
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LibreOffice is a free and open-source Office Suite from The Document Foundation, presented as the successor to OpenOffice.org. The suite includes Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
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free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0
As I mentioned earlier, it's best used for "presentations," rather than bona fide "training." That's why we tend to use it when the information is relatively simple and/or doesn't need to be fully internalized or mastered (which would require providing opportunities for practice and feedback and a more engaging, interactive learning experience). However, it can be used as part of a blended-learning solution, with some information provided via an Adobe Presenter module first, and then some kind of instructor-led session as a follow-up, which would include more role-specific info, as well as practice and feedback opportunities. Also, as I mentioned earlier, Adobe Presenter Video Express is great for creating quick overview demos about a new system -- more of a "see what it can do" type thing than a "here's how you do it" thing (unless the "it" is very simple and the video is used more as a microlearning/performance support type of offering).
LibreOffice is a good alternative to MS Office. I like it better than Google Docs. It's compatible with MS Office applications. However, many of the features or functions are difficult to find even when utilizing the help menu. The website isn't too helpful either. My greatest disappointment is that I paid for the premium version a year ago but never received the features that were supposed to be available with a premium subscription. The upper right-hand corner of the app shows the subscription type and date of expiration of the subscription. I have premium yet every time I try to access a premium feature it requests me to pay. I have contacted LibreOffice several times over the year and they never responded or provided a refund. I can only recommend the free version because even with a premium subscription, which mine is supposed to expire on 10/22/21 (the date of this review is 08/04/21), I have yet to be able to utilize the premium features I paid for last year. I would not use this as my primary app for Word processing which is where I am experiencing the majority of the blocked features issues. Even with a paid premium subscription, I am unable to create labels. It's asking me to pay again. I think LibreOffice has greater potential but a user must get the features they paid for. I hesitate to call the company a scam but I can say I have contacted LibreOffice numerous times over the past year about the ongoing issues and have not received a response at least once. Along with the features and subscriptions issues that needed to be addressed, another area of improvement is their website. It is very difficult to locate information. Even when using the search field the instructions often do not match the app. I am not sure how often they update their online guides but I have never found it to be helpful. I have also found it very difficult to impossible to download templates. I usually get weird links with garbled codes and no template when trying to download a template. I'm not sure if it's an issue with their site or not but since they don't respond to inquiries I cannot determine a possible cause for the problem.
Because it integrates with PowerPoint, it is possible to go from planning outline to storyboard to final output withing a single document and as part of a seamless and logical design process.
Its ability to create videos that capture screens along with web-cam recordings, then edit them within the solution means higher level training recordings can be created versus, say a recorded WebEx training session.
Presenter's ability to create quiz elements similar to Adobe Captivate, add interactions, and interface with Adobe's LMS means it is capable of functioning as a complete e-learning development environment. .
If up front cost is a consideration, Presenter wins hands down over many better known training development and e-learning solutions.
The text word processing (Writer) has come a long way and, if you are able to install your corporate fonts, there is basically nothing LibreOffice cannot handle. It works very well with document reviews and comments, and it can save in a variety of formats, making it compatible with the likes of Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
The spreadsheet software (Calc) can also handle most of the common tasks you may need, link various sheets, and perform some automated functions quite well. It is, I must say, somewhat less complete than the word processing side (Writer).
The Draw program allows you to do organizational charts and basic publications very well. It was a deficit in the past, but not anymore.
Name brand office suites vendors such as Microsoft and Google have online portals where documents can be saved and shared for automation/integration. LibreOffice would do well to expand into this space.
Memory handling in large spreadsheets (i.e., 60k rows or more) seems a bit quirky on my Macbook Air. It might just be a memory issues, but scrolling with the trackpad behaves strangely (i.e., cell selection jumps around unexpectedly).
My company is pretty invested in the Adobe ecosystem and is unlikely to change that in the foreseeable future. Also, Adobe Presenter is a very valuable tool and, with the new subscription model and the pricing we have, a relatively modest expense now. It's also fairly easy to learn and use, so it is starting to spread beyond the sphere of the various Learning & Development departments.
We use it consistently and have a lot of documents in the OpenDocument format so it will be necessary to use LibreOffice or a compatible product such as Openoffice in the future to be able to open these files. Because the license fee for Libreoffice is zero it is not very costly to keep using it - the costs are mostly for keeping it installed on the office PCs and regularly updated, and solving employee issues with the user support.
Most people can quickly start using Writer or Calc or Impress for basic tasks even if they see Libreoffice for the first time, because the interface is similar to older (97-2003) MS Office or other software. Some features are less intuitive than in recent MS Office and some power users of MS Office need to re-learn some things before being proficient in Libreoffice.
It is easy to access since it is an added tool to the Powerpoint program. We have not had complaints from faculty members regarding not having it available when they need it.
Libreoffice is a desktop app not requiring any server part so it is always available when the PC is working normally. Installing it on another machine if one PC fails is very quick and easy. This is a non-issue.
Due to the aforementioned issues with Flash, it can be discouraging to get to the publishing stage and begin receiving error messages. Once we are able to move past that issue, we have great success with the performance of Adobe Presenter.
For big/imported tables or text documents with images loaded from the internet it is sometimes getting very slow, RAM and CPU intensive, and sometimes even hangs due to some memory leaks or other bugs. This is a long-term problem and is still not resolved perfectly.
I think I pretty much answered this earlier....premium support is extremely expensive and online support can be difficult to navigate. Although, to be fair, when it comes to Presenter (compared to, say, Captivate), there isn't too frequent a need for support, since Presenter is a rather simple tool to use
Support is not officially offered. However, you can find answers to any usage questions or trouble-shooting online easily, typically starting with a Google search. (I believe that all forums / tips for OpenOffice apply equally to LibreOffice, and vice versa.) While Microsoft Office, for example, officially includes support, I find that typically you end up going to a Google search in any case. So, this is not really a downside. However, in all these cases, you end up doing a lot of figuring things out for yourself.
Generally easy to perform, issues are how to ensure regular automatic updates on Mac OS X. Fortunatly we have only a few machines with OS X run by management and we can do these updates manually occasionally. Windows updates are quite easy with the support of third party software such as Ninite or Chocolatey, and Linux updates are super-easy thanks to the package manager (apt-get).
LMS365 and Adobe Presenter are not that much different, the major issue that we faced with LMS was that we had to integrate that with the SharePoint, for accessibility and that cases whole lot of confusions and keeping things clean as SharePoint was being used for file store and sharing within the company. Moving to Adobe Presenter was taken as it was independent platform and didn't have any dependency.
As noted previously, LibreOffice blows Google Docs (G Suite) out of the water in terms of singular application quality, and comes close but misses the mark as a drop-in replacement to Microsoft Office. We currently are evaluating the latest release of LibreOffice to see if we can replace Microsoft Office with it entirely as we've had more time to fill in the holes that were left when losing out on Outlook and OneNote and all of the integrations that come with Microsoft Office.
The program still seems to rely heavily on Adobe Flash even though the online community is moving away from it. When publishing, users will experience error messages regarding Flash, which can make it difficult to complete your work.
With more users using it in the company there are more cases when a simultaneous editing of the same document is needed and this feature is lacking in Libreoffice even though the files concerned are shared and synced by some solution (we use ownCloud). Google Docs or MS Office365 via Sharepoint/Onedrive offer a better function for this.
It will be safe to say that overall impact had been positive in regards to ROI
Training costs have been reduced by a huge margin since we started using this tool.
Time consumed in training staff is also decreased, as with Adobe Presenter training can be done remotely and are able to train different groups at the same time.
