Serious Magic Ovation

List Price: $99.95 Discount Price: $56.95

Features:

• Select from over 100 sensational themes called PowerLooks – to add subtle motion, high-resolution text, dynamic transitions to plain PowerPoint slides
• Be confident with powerful built-in presentation tools that help deliver your message better
• Go Deeper prepares you for audience questions by attaching hidden, expanded information that you can optionally dive into in response to audience questions
• TimeKeeper keeps you on pace by letting you know at a glance if you're ahead or behind schedule
• PointPrompter helps you stay confident by helping you remember facts, figures, dates and other data without cluttering up your slides

Customer Reviews:

A product that has a future ... but just not there yet. [Posted on 2006-07-04]
Add fairly good add-on and support for Power Point presentations, but it does currently have limited things to offer.

after the initial impressive presentation and probably after you've downloaded the 15-day trial version, you'll begin to rethink your initial views of the software.

It does work and can indeed brighten up presentations. But in my honest opinion as a presentation skills coach and trainer, I would say that the software has potential but is not quite there yet in terms of wowing and retaining that initial impression you get when you come across it.

Try the 15-day trial first before you commit to any purchase decision. It'll help you make up your mind better.

NOT ANYWHERE CLOSE TO AS ADVERTISED [Posted on 2006-08-22]
First, I should have listened to my instincts and downloaded the trial version BEFORE purchasing. Had I done this I would HAVE NEVER purchased this product. As it is, having bought the product from a box store and NOT online, I made a $99.00 mistake, plus tax.

The product has too many limitations to be considered as a viable add-on to your powerpoint presentations. As a presenter, using PPT every week, in training presentations, I can tell you that this product does more to limit PPT's slide producing capabilities than it does to add to them. As a matter of fact, I found the product to "take away" from PPT's slide building procedures, NOT "add" to them.

Save your money and wait for the next PPT add-on to come along. This product is worth neither your investigative time, nor your monetary investment.

Useful, but limited capability [Posted on 2007-02-06]
This program can really spice up the right presentation; however, it has some significant limitations when it comes to imbedding and linking objects, among other Powerpoint functions that I considrer essential.

DO NOT BUY THIS DEADWARE ! [Posted on 2007-03-08]
Ever since Adobe bought out this small operation, customer service has been severely lacking. Software will NOT work on Excel 2007. The promise for additional POWERLOOKS has become dead. Granted that the program makes presentation more interesting, the Powerlooks that was in production are no longer on the website. This is highly disappointing as I purchased this program in anticipation for further development on the Powerlook templates.

Great stuff - until you upgrade to Office 2007 [Posted on 2007-09-14]
I got the trial and bought the software shortly thereafter. For those who are PPT maniacs, it's pretty limited. For the other 99.99999% of us, it's great because you don't have to spend a ton of time on animations, tweaking it, or worrying about everyone having seen it before (at least the first few times :D ).

However, Adobe bought Serious Magic last year. Microsoft released Office 2007. And having Office 2007 installed on a computer is sufficient to cause Ovation to work in creative and unique ways that are not especially helpful. In my case, I have a 1300-slide deck I use for training. No, I don't use 1300 slides - more than half are hidden and exposed only as required. But when I open Ovation on my Office 2007-enabled laptop, I see 1300 title slides.

Called Adobe Ovation support, and eventually got the right answer: Yes it's broken, no it won't be fixed any time soon. My only saving grace was that I never anted up for a support plan.

Bottom line: If you're on Office 2003 or earlier AND have no plans to upgrade to Office 2007, I strongly recommend it. But if you've gone to 2007, it's too late - run screaming in the other direction from this dismal excuse for a revenue scheme.

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