iSpring Free

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on August 01, 2011

Let's face it: PowerPoint presentations can be pretty boring, especially if the presenter reads directly from the slides, one by one. But with iSpring Free, you can take your PowerPoint presentations up a few notches by inserting Flash files directly into your slides and even publishing the presentations themselves as Flash videos.

If you're familiar with PowerPoint's user interface, then you'll have no trouble navigating iSpring Free as it integrates itself into the Ribbon as an extra tab. The menu options are few, but they get to the point: Publish and Insert. As its name suggests, the Publish option gives you two options, Quick Publish and Publish, to publish your entire presentation as a Flash video. The Insert option let you insert Flash files and YouTube videos into your slides. We pulled up an existing PowerPoint presentation that we had saved, found a YouTube video, and very easily inserted the clip into a slide. We were able to drag and resize the video to any place we wanted on the slide. To view the video, we simply had to start the slideshow. Sure enough, it played right there in the presentation. Using the Quick Publish feature, we were able to publish the presentation as a Flash video using the current settings. The Publish feature offered more in-depth settings for our presentation, such as naming it and selecting the slide range to be converted into Flash as well as options for starting the video presentation automatically, looping it, and adjusting slide duration and autoclick. Each feature performed without a hitch, and in no time, our presentation was converted into a Flash video that opened in our browser, which allowed us to pull the HTML code to insert into our blog. iSpring Free doesn't include any kind of help feature, but it's really not necessary.

This free add-on installs a desktop icon without permission but uninstalls cleanly. We highly recommend iSpring to all PowerPoint users.