Reflection on Presentation Programs

I enjoyed checking out the 4 free presentation programs and thinking about how they could be used in my business courses. 3 of the 4 I was not too keen on; however, I did find Spresent to be fairly user-friendly with enough creative features to engage my 8th and 9th graders. Following is a brief rundown of my experiences with these programs:
Google Docs: Fairly easy to use overall, difficult to name and rename files, did not always open on my school computer (probably more issues with our school server--meaning it could be a problem for my students)
Zoho: limited background choices, easy to reposition shapes, poor on colors and resizing shapes, overemphasis on spinning objects, liked the ability to add text to the notes pane (good for citing sources-something we emphasize to our students!)
Empresser: No way! Too unlike PowerPoint (which I teach), difficult to grab placeholders, hard to re-open and edit, this might be a program that works best for someone unfamiliar with PowerPoint (hard to break PPT habits)
Spresent: The winner! My Business Venture students could utilize Spresent to present the 4 P's of their Marketing Mix. This would be done as part of mock-presenting their Business Plan to venture capitalists, bankers, or angel investors. I could provide what basic information is required for each slide and let my students go from there.
Positives about Spresent:
--Wide range of text formatting tools (color, style, even transparency which has a convenient slide adjuster)
--Extremely easy to resize placeholders (even easier than PPt)
--Edit undo (useful when trying out a new program and making many mistakes)
--Easy-to-access Help menu with relevant content
--Very easy to log in, retrieve, and edit compared to the other 3 programs
--Similiar animations to PPt with more preset effects
Negatives about Spresent:
--Cannot animate ClipArt
--No bolding
--No line spacing
--Could use a search function for ClipArt
--Limited backgrounds, especially basic colors
Overall, I like Spresent because it offers a creative and easy-to-use option to PPt. It will be interesting to see if my students like it or would rather stay with PPt. My guess is that those most familiar with PPT may have difficulties adjusting to Spresent.