Airtime (formerly mmhmm) is an app that, when used as an add-on to a virtual camera, is designed to make video chats, meetings, and presentations more engaging.
$12
per month
LibreOffice
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
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).
$0
free and open source under the Mozilla Public License v2.0
mmhmm is, by far, the absolute best presentation platform I have found - and I have looked a lot and demoed a lot of them. The flexibility, ease of use and visually engaging experience that mmhmm provides has, without fail, been a game changer tool no matter the presentation styles. While it is, hands down, the best virtual presentation platform, I have not been able to level up my in-person experiences to the same degree as I have online. I will continue to explore how and where I can integrate the mmhmm Studio toolsets to pump up my in-person experiences.
If you're working with numbers, LibreOffice doesn't get in your way and try to make changes as it sees fit, forcing you to repeatedly go back and undo processes you didn't want, didn't ask for, and that have no place in the document you are trying to produce. All I want to do is assemble the data, process it for the task at hand, and then print it for distribution. LibreOffice allows me to do that.
Easily integrates static slides, animations and video without having to have vast technical skills.
It's an intuitive application to use. In a few minutes you sign up, start a new presentation and you're underway. It's pretty plug-n-play.
I've recommended it to my "non-technical" friends and they love it. They told me it was super easy to use and has made them more excited to create and share their presentations.
In the future I might like to see a fast-swap handoff to fellow presenters like we do in a live presentation.
Getting more updates on the platform advances in emails would be helpful. Like the recent sharing of useful templates was awesome.
I'd like to see more user stories shared to see how others are using the platform to make their presentations stand out. These kinds of things are helpful in feeding my ideas and insights for my next meeting, presentation and lessons.
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.
For all of the reasons in the foregoing evaluation. Its menus are clean, intuitive and straightforward. Any function I need to use can be accessed via keystrokes, without having to stop, move my hand to the mouse, deal with it, and then get back to the keyboard to proceed. It helps me keep my mind on my work and not worry about dealing with the mouse all the time.
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.
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.
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).
Of all the platforms out there - believe me, I've tried them all - or try to avoid them whenever I can - mmhmm stands on its own with its unique platform benefits, visualizations, ease of use, sharability, affordability, and overall "Wow" factor that we hope to get from our audiences. No matter what it is we are presenting. To have that ability to integrate and gravitate to our presentations has proven to be a game changer that really did not take a lot for us to do. Even better is the fact that we still may have to - for whatever reason - build a presentation in one of the slide builder apps we can still import them seamlessly into mmhmm and use the mmhmm interface as our camera when we use the other platforms. It's been a complete win, win, win all around.
If you are looking for a well-rounded, GNU-licensed product that will encompass word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and database then LibreOffice is probably all you need.
For online collaboration, links with cloud storage, and more robust support, Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs are probably what you or your organization needs.
LibreOffice is at its best for regular document creation and spreadsheet management. It is more cumbersome when it comes to fonts but also when it comes to linkages with cloud-based services. It is there, but you need some more computer knowledge to make it work.
There are other free alternatives, most notably Apache Open Office, which is also a very good alternative if you do not like LibreOffice.
Having said that, I honestly think off-line computers or laptops used off-site can certainly benefit from having LibreOffice installed.
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.
We've only seen positive impact since deciding to use mmhmm
The ROI is a bazillion-fold. It's not an expensing platform, but the positive impact has been priceless!
Even the Powerpoint burnt out team members have taken easily to using mmhmm
Our presentations get comments like, "Wow... this is cool." "We really loved this presentation. It was completely engaging." "What are you guys using? This is pretty dang cool!"
I am able to quickly create and edit word processing documents and spreadsheets which are for all intents and purposes equivalent to documents I could create and edit in other tools such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs/Sheets.
Lack of an online portal for sharing documents necessitates the use of Google Sheets for automation/integration. Ideal would be an all-in-one solution.
Having open-source software that provides common functionality eliminates the need for expensive licenses.
Lack of dedicated support is negligible. Most issues can be resolved using online search.
