PowerPoint VS. Keynote

Creating a presentation is a common task for students and workers alike. It’s basically a rite of passage. Somehow, somewhere, at one point in your student or professional life, you’ve slaved over charts, pies, graphs, and slides to present in front of a bunch of people. Thanks to the internet, people no longer need to actually draw or cut clippings to make an eye-catching presentation.

Nowadays, there’s a lot of commercial software available for creating awesome slides and engaging documents. But when it comes to it, people often choose between two options: Microsoft’s PowerPoint (PPT) and Apple’s Keynote. Sure, there are tons of up-and-coming programs that actually offer great features, but it almost feels like you’re doing something wrong if you don’t use either of these programs. They’re just the go-to tools when it comes down to presentation-making… and for good reasons.

PowerPoint and Keynote: The Pros

Now, let’s take a look at the advantages of both programs. Checking their pros can help you decide which one is better suited for the kind of presentation you need to make. Microsoft PowerPoint Arguably the best thing about PowerPoint is its usability. It is somewhat like an “institution” because it certainly has been around way longer than Keynote’s first appearance in the market. It’s also the most popular program for presentation-making. All of these make it a familiar tool for everyone who have made a presentation before. In fact, even those who haven’t made one are still aware of MS PowerPoint. Also, it doesn’t hurt that the program can be used on either a PC or a Mac.

PowerPoint’s popularity is its main selling point. It can also conveniently add animations and graphs that make the slides richer in context. PPT slides can be exported to YouTube without stress. The program is also designed to manage different text formats so it’s ideal for text-heavy slides. Advantages of Using PowerPoint

User friendly – The program’s features are easy to understand and master. They can make you look ready and organized even if you feel otherwise. Bullet points – The use of mighty bullet points drive your message to the point. Bullets make it easy to highlight the key messages and topics of the entire presentation.

Eye-catching slides – PPT offers templates and themes you can use or tweak to create visually-appealing slides. You don’t need to know a lot about graphic design to pull this off. Easy to tweak – PowerPoint slides are easier to edit than other visuals like charts, graphs or posters.

Drag and drop – It’s easy to reorder slides using the program’s drag-and-drop feature or its special keystrokes.

Easy to integrate – The program enables you to add spreadsheets and/or documents on the slides.

Viewer’s consideration – PPT slides are easy to see and read even by the people at the back of the room.

Presenter’s consideration – It’s easy to present the slides using the keystrokes so you won’t have to break eye contact with the audience.

No handouts needed – With PPT slides, you don’t have to make hard copies of the presentation to distribute to the audience.

PowerPoint is the safe option when it comes to presentation-making. It’s the ideal program to use if your slides are more into context than design. People creating slides for the first time can appreciate the program’s straightforwardness.

Apple Keynote Keynote features a neat, eye-catching design. It presents a variety of built-in templates that give the slides a modern perspective. The program also provides engaging themes, cool animation effects, and streamlined transitions.

Apple’s presentation-making program can create high-quality output. Keynote also features easy exports using QuickTime files to be converted for YouTube viewing. It’s also media-based and delivers easy integration of multimedia files. And since it’s an Apple product, it offers unfussy synchronization with the company’s flagship gadgets, particularly the iPhone and the iPad.

Advantages of Using Keynote

User-friendly – The program features a simple interface that even newbies can navigate.

Theme options – Keynote offers a wide range of eye-catching themes to create a more engaging presentation.

Position-ready – It allows you to easily align and position elements with basic setup options.

Multimedia-friendly – The program is specially designed to naturally integrate images, sounds, videos, and other multimedia files.

Magic Move – Both the animation and transition effects of the program are show-stoppers.

Straightforward preview – The program provides an easy-to-use formatting toolbar and inspector window for instant preview and tweaking.

Product integration – Keynote’s integration with other iPhones, iPads, and iPods is 100% smooth.

Transparency effects – It allows you to smoothly blend an image’s background into the slide’s background creating a transparent effect.

After using both softwares for quite sometime I personally found that PowerPoint has become more diverse than Keynote and can help you achieve some visual effects that Keynote just can't. I'm interested in learning about your opinion. What's your take on that?