Presentation Assistant Review

Hi everyone,

I’m sure that, at some point, you’ve been on a webinar or watched a tutorial video or some sort of presentation. Have you noticed that the speaker often has some sort of tool whereby he can actually draw right there on the screen on top of what it is you’re currently viewing? Alex Jeffreys refers to this as his “magic pen” and it’s something that I think is a very useful tool indeed.

Having done a bit of research into how this is achieved I just kept coming across various hardware options in the way of graphics pens, tablets, etc. With video tutorials being something that I shall be wanting to do in the very near future I was considering purchasing something like this. However I recently stumbled across this standalone software called Presentation Assistant.

Presentation Assistant isn’t free but you get a free, 30 day trial, so I decided to download it and see how it performs. In a nutshell, for what I will be wanting to do it does exactly what I need it to do. I have done a video review of the software that doesn’t cover every single tiny detail but I’ve tried to cover the most important aspects, both good and bad.

You can check out my video review below. It’s my first ever review so I hope it does the job well enough. I tried not to waffle too much! Below the video I’ll include a brief synopsis and overview if you’d rather just skip to that.

So what is Presentation Assistant? Basically, it’s a piece of software that allows you to draw on screen and zoom certain portions or even the whole screen if you wish. It includes various annotation tools, such as the ability to draw lines or shapes and write text. You can also highlight certain points on the screen by means of spotlight or highlighting tools.

Presentation Assistant includes a built-in whiteboard/blackboard that you can switch to if you want to draw diagrams, etc. This is useful if you are, for example, explaining something by means of a Powerpoint type presentation but wish to illustrate a particular point visually live on screen. You can switch to the white/blackboard for this and back again.

• The good points: You can easily draw live on screen and highlight specific portions effortlessly. It is an ideal solution if you need to be able to direction attention to certain parts of a presentation live on screen when creating videos or hosting webinars. It contains some very useful and innovative functions.

• The bad points: The software contains a lot of bugs. There are a few functions that either don’t work at all or work intermittently. Also the whiteboard page often won’t close, forcing you to just minimise it rather than being able to switch back to your main view. There are functions that contain obscure shortcuts using the Windows button rather than the normally-used shift, control or alt keys and these shortcuts don’t always work. Furthermore, some of the functions have to be switched off by clicking on the desired button in the software again rather than by means of a shortcut or the oft-used escape key. There are also a few functions that I feel just add clutter to the program and aren’t needed at all.

In summary, if you want a piece of software that allows you to draw live on screen and highlight certain portions as you go without the need to purchase separate hardware, then this could be for you. But the glaringly obvious flaws severely limit it. If the bugs were fixed, the shortcuts were more user-friendly, there were more standard functions included such as the ability to exit certain tools by pressing the escape key and there was an “OK” or “Apply” button in the settings windows (I forgot to mention this in the video review) then this could be a real winner. As it stands, it currently falls short as a complete package but, as I’ve said, if you want something that you can use to draw and highlight live on video or on webinars, then this is ideal for that. For me, this is all I need it for and, so far, it does this job perfectly.

If you want to check out Presentation Assistant for yourself, go to www.presentation-assistant.com