Help choosing an alternative to PowerPoint that will churn out reports

[johnbro23]

I'm a part of an investment group at my school, Penn State. Students manage a $4.7 million portfolio of 40-50 stocks, with 65 individual investors. Anyway, we put out PDF reports to our investors on a weekly basis. I've attached an image of our reports - it's 50 pages or so that look very similar to this.

PowerPoint is an awful program to use for this. We spend most of our time manually adding mindless information and format graphs, that could easily be pulled from the internet. Any suggestions for a program that will produce better reports? I'm thinking Adobe Illustrator, but the catch is that all 30 undergraduate fund managers need to work on this. Making all of them buy a copy of Illustrator probably won't work.

So what do you think? Any input is greatly appreciated.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Have you tried Pages? It handles graphics pretty fluidly, though 50 pages worth may slow it down a bit. You can always download the trial and see how it goes...

 

[johnbro23]

Pages would be great, but it's Mac only. Almost all 30 fund managers contribute to the weekly report, so it's unreasonable to expect them to go to a Mac computer lab on campus every week to do the report. The whole point of changing formats is to save everyone about 30 minutes a week.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Pages would be great, but it's Mac only. Almost all 30 fund managers contribute to the weekly report, so it's unreasonable to expect them to go to a Mac computer lab on campus every week to do the report. The whole point of changing formats is to save everyone about 30 minutes a week.

Remind me why you're asking for advice in the Apple Software -> Mac Applications forum again?

If it needs to be platform agnostic, someone else will have to help you.

 

[johnbro23]

Remind me why you're asking for advice in the Apple Software -> Mac Applications forum again?

If it needs to be platform agnostic, someone else will have to help you.

Right, that's a good point. I'm a Mac user, too. But I'd imagine that there are plenty of apps that can accomplish this task that are on Mac and PC. Pages just happens to be one of the few apps that is found only on one operating system.

 

[flyfish29]

But I'd imagine that there are plenty of apps that can accomplish this task that are on Mac and PC.

Never never never imagine this in a market that Microsoft has a strong hold on!

 

[HLdan]

Although Gochogolpher made a very valid point of the OP posting in the wrong forum if he expects software help outside of Macs the but OP could try Open Office or Neo Office which supports presentation software however not as good as Keynote or Powerpoint but it's an alternative that runs on both Macs and PC's.

Not sure why people were recommending Pages as a Powerpoint alternative, Pages is a Word equivalent.

 

[longwood]

Not sure why people were recommending Pages as a Powerpoint alternative, Pages is a Word equivalent.

Agreed. I think maybe they are thinking of Numbers?

 

[johnbro23]

I'm thinking that PowerPoint is in the wrong category of applications for this type of task. The finished product is a 50 page PDF report, so it really doesn't make sense to use presentation software. Maybe Adobe Acrobat would be our best bet?

 

[xUKHCx]

Agreed. I think maybe they are thinking of Numbers?

Keynote

Numbers is in the same category as excel

I'm thinking that PowerPoint is in the wrong category of applications for this type of task. The finished product is a 50 page PDF report, so it really doesn't make sense to use presentation software. Maybe Adobe Acrobat would be our best bet?

Acrobat isn't for creating content. What about word?

 

[longwood]

Keynote
Numbers is in the same category as excel

Although I was able to get some nice graphs/spreadsheets which were then exported as PDFs.

 

[gauchogolfer]

Although Gochogolpher made a very valid point of the OP posting in the wrong forum if he expects software help outside of Macs the but OP could try Open Office or Neo Office which supports presentation software however not as good as Keynote or Powerpoint but it's an alternative that runs on both Macs and PC's.

Not sure why people were recommending Pages as a Powerpoint alternative, Pages is a Word equivalent.

I don't think what the OP wants is a PP alternative, I think what they want is something to create 50 page PDFs in a page layout style program. Since they said InDesign wasn't a good option I recommended Pages.