Originally appeared in the Saint Paul Pioneer Press

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Last month I was asked to give a talk in Florida on a business topic and I realized my old 486 laptop wasn't up to the job. So I bought a new laptop. But that's not what this column is about.

The reason I bought the laptop is because I've been playing on my desktop machine with the latest presentation software products, and they are really good. But they require more of everything -- disk space, chip speed, multimedia capabilities, and operating system -- than my old machine could provide.

The products I have been working with are Microsoft PowerPoint, Astound Dynamite, and Lotus Freelance Graphics for Windows. All do the customary tasks that presentation packages are expected to do. But nowadays they come with a special extra feature: the capability for Internet presentations.

What's an Internet presentation? Just about anything you can imagine. It can be an animated website. Visitors go to it, sit back, and watch the show. Or it can be a regular web site, allowing visitors to navigate on their own, but that uses presentation conventions, as opposed to web conventions.

The site can be retail commercial, describing your wares and ideas. It can be used to entertain internal audiences on an intranet -- employee or supplier training. Or it can be a teaching tool showing your customers exactly how to install, maintain, or get repair help for the products they bought from you.

You can create dedicated, net-based "electronic kiosks" for people on multiple sites to access information about you and your company or organization. You can create real-time long distance presentations -- teleconferences that look not at you but at the materials you have created. Long-distance college courses, scientific symposia, and news teaching can all be done by computer.

You can create slide shows, teach-ins, photo albums, animations, home movies -- anything at all, for anyone at all, that shows and tells.

Bottom line: you no longer have to be standing at a dais speaking into a microphone to "present." You don't have to be a "presenter" at all. Net presentation software frees you from the constraints of geography (having to be in the same room as the people you are talking to) and history (having to present your findings at one moment and one moment only).

It's like an auditorium that is open around the clock, that people don't have to travel to get to, and that seats millions of people, whenever they feel like drifting in. It's very cool.

This development also allowed me to make peace, after many years, with PowerPoint. Because it is part of MS Office, PowerPoint is ubiquitous in most businesses. But it was never the top product in its category. Harvard Graphics (for its capabilities) and Lotus Freelance (for its ease of use) have ruled the roost.

The thing I hated about PowerPoint was that you could not save a presentation to simple text. You had to save one slide at a time, because the program wasn't stable enough for really big files. Conversion took hours.

Now that that problem is solved, I feel free to take a fresh look at PowerPoint. It is still not the leading edge -- Astound Dynamite, with its revolutionary use of Dynamic HTML, is the program hotshot presenters are flocking to.

PowerPoint's most important new feature is the Save As HTML Wizard. Whenever you save a presentation, it offers you a ton of very clear options, which lead to very different results. You can create a sequence of simple static GIF or JPEG images, which the viewer can pole through manually. Or you can create an animated presentation which moves along at the pace you determine.

The typical presentation is created for cybertime -- people can view it whenever is convenient for them. An alternative PowerPoint allows, called Presentation Conferencing, is real-time presentations: people tune in to your presentation around the world at Noon while you sit on your deck in the Hebrides narrating the talk and controlling the slides.

Standalone upgrade costs approximately $109. You needn't pay the $339 full price if you have some Microsoft application installed somewhere on your system.

As far as sound goes, PowerPoint is trying to move beyond the cumbersome WAV standard. You may want to download Netshow from the Microsoft Web site. Netshow, an ActiveX control used with Microsoft Internet Explorer, turns voice-narrated PowerPoint presentations into streaming "illustrated audio" files. Microsoft also offers a Netshow On-Demand Server to speed up the streaming.

Powerpoint's Publish To RealAudio utility converts narrations and music to streaming audio for quicker playing. If you are serious about sound, consider the dedicated utility RealPresenter, a PowerPoint plug-in from Real Audio ($39, http://www.real.com/publisher/presenter.html) that turns any PowerPoint presentation into a streaming video/audio show.

If you're looking for the next generation presentation package, you will want to look into Astound Dynamite. If you want to stay in the Microsoft corral, you'll have no beef with PowerPoint.

For an example of a PowerPoint Internet presentation, visit Mike's web site at this site.

America's Best-Loved Technology Writer(TM), Michael Finley has a free gift for visitors to http://mfinley.com.