BIG HINTProsper is a Latex document class that produces beautiful powerpoint-like presentations without the agony of resetting all of your nice latex formulas. It is free and it works great with the familiar MikTex and WinEdt combination that I strongly recommend to all of my friends.
If your work contains formulas and you continue to use powerpoint, you are simply causing yoursel great and unnecessary pain.
The Prosper Homesite lays out the benefits of Prosper, explains the origins of Prosper, and freely provides you with everything that you need to use Prosper.
The UMBC Prosper Tutorial is also quite useful, although it is directed and unix users and you are perhaps more likely to be working in a Windows environment.
If you have MikTex you probably already have the files that you need to use Prosper, but you will need to tell MikTex to make Prosper available. You can read about this in Chapter 3 of the MikTex manual. If you are missing a package that is need by prosper, the more recent versions of MikTex will tell you what is missing and prompt you to do the installation. This is a very nice feature that carries over all of the packages.
BIG HINTAfter I installed Prosper, it looked like it was not working, but it was working properly! I just did not take time to learn that one must process the file in a way that differs from the "usual" way.
This is described in the Prosper manual, whose slim 12 pages are very rewarding reading. Mainly because, if you skip this step, you can waste the better part of a day. That's what I did. Doh! (Click the Doh!, go ahead, click it).