Up Your Preso Game This Fall

Once upon a time, everyone who had to do a presentation used Powerpoint. That's pretty much all there was and since most of the business world ran on Windows and web-based apps were limited by html and browsers, it was fine.

Once Macs started invading marketing and comms departments, presenters discovered how much better Keynote was for creating presentations that were more than slides full of bullet points and dense charts.

Finally Google and Prezi ushered in the era of web-based, platform-neutral presentation apps that could make decks simple (Google) or flashy (Prezi), but not both.

Lately there's been some interesting movement in the staid world of deck apps and a lot of that has to do with AI. While the old guys try to play catch up by layering some light (and not terribly convincing) AI functions onto their programs, some new players have made it worth your time to think about switching it up.

And a new fall season is always a good time to try on some new stuff.

So what's new and what should you try? It depends on how you use presentation apps but in most cases, beautiful.ai or Canva are definitely worth your time. Read on to see why:

Powerpoint

Although PPT is ubiquitous, that doesn't make it good. For MS365-based orgs it may seem like your best -- or only -- choice. But Powerpoint is a bloated mess of competing and conflicting menus and functions. It was first released decades ago and following Microsoft's software North Star, features and user interfaces are added but (almost) never removed. There are almost too many choices and nearly all of them are graphically dated and have very poor user experiences. Then again, if you're creating presentations that need to be shared widely and approved by others in the org who don't know anything but Powerpoint, moving to something better may not be the hill you want to die on.

I get it. So for this fall, try radically simplifying your slides and decks. Treat a new project as if you don't have a million different animation options and janky shapes. And don't use the pre-set templates and designs since they really are terrible. Don't believe me? Ask anyone you know who works in design.

Instead, pick a 5-6 color palette, create a super-basic header and/or footer, choose a classic font like Helvetica, and then make slides with almost no words. Huh? But what about my bullet points!?!?

You. Don't. Need. Them.

Not for presentations. Leave-behinds are different but for the times your work is going on a screen and someone is talking, think headlines, not novels. A couple of words that give the theme and then an image or chart with the info.

This won't fix Powerpoint, but it will make your presentations shine. And, for the reasons in the next section on Keynote, you should at least play around with one of the newer options just to see what you may be missing!

Keynote

For a long time, most presentations are marketing conferences were Keynotes. And for good reason. Keynote is Powerpoint's arty cousin. Much better looking, much easier to get great results, and much better designed. But, you can't share it with your PC-based colleagues so, unless you're free to make your own decks just for you, Keynote is not a great option.

Since I've been on both Macs and PCs for decades and I've almost always been the end -user for presentations, Keynote has been my go-to for a long time. Apple has done a remarkable job of keeping it best in show for those who can live with the limitations. So, if you use Keynote and see no reason to change, don't!

But...you really should try one of the newer apps just to see where things are going. To be sure, neither Apple nor Microsoft will lead in this space ever again. They have MUCH bigger things to tackle.

Slides

When Google debuted its own "Office" suite, most of the attention rightly went to Docs and Sheets. After all, they really did upend the game in word processing and spreadsheeting by allowing for real-time collaboration. It's still their killer feature.

Slides was, and still is, a bit of a sorry stepchild. It has pretty limited functionality compared with PPT and Keynote, and collaborating on a deck in real time is less killer feature and more, "well, that's nice." But, if you're in a G Suite (sorry, Google Workspace) company, you may be in the same boat of PPT users in MS orgs: It's just easier to keep it in the fam.

If so, the advice from the PPT section above, applies here. Simplify. This is way easier to do in Slides since it suffers from the opposite of feature bloat -- feature drought.

Prezi

I remember the first time I saw a Prezi presentation at a conference in 2010 not long after it came out. Everyone wanted to know: What IS that app? Prezi's unique way of transitioning between slides was its wow factor. Nearly 15 years later, it is still the thing most people know the app for.

The company has added plenty of features and new AI actually has some real purpose. But Prezi's key differentiator is still zooming and panning all over your slides. It can be very dynamic and impactful if done well. Like Illustrator or Photoshop, however, there's a pretty big gap between great decks and lower-skill deck builders.

If you're a Prezi user, you owe it to yourself to see what new competitors are doing. It may give you a flashback to the early teens when Prezi was the disruptor!

Canva

Canva has very quickly (for a SaaS company) gone from a nice little app for one thing to a multi-function beast taking on some of the biggest tech companies on the planet. If you're familiar with Canva, you may think of it as the place to make fliers or social media posts. It does do that and is quickly becoming a key tool in marketing departments thanks to its combo of features and ease of use across teams. But it's also becoming so much more.

As Canva works to become an Creative Cloud killer, it has added presentations to the list of features and, for all intents and purposes, it can totally replace any of the apps above by making your presentations look better and by making them so much easier to build and deploy.

The templates are head and shoulders above anything in PPT or Slides in terms of design, the UX is solid (every design-y app has interface issues IMHO), the new AI tools are actually very useful, and the teamwork aspect is top notch. You will need a paid account to get the best benefits but with so much packed into one platform, the price is a steal -- especially compared with MS365 or Abode CC.

beautiful.ai

One of the newest players in this space is also, arguably, the best. Launched in 2017, beautiful.ai has developed into a singularly-focused tool for giving everyone the tools to be a great presentation builder.

Adding "ai" to the end of your company name is (rightly) seen by many as a way to make yourself look more tech-y than you are. In this case, beautiful.ai has grown into its name by adding very useful AI tools. Image and text creation are both well executed but even better is the way it can create an entire presentation from either a simple prompt or a prompt coupled with a website.

The result is NOT a presentation you can use but instead acts like a smart template. Instead of trying to start from scratch with a generic template, beautiful.ai builds a deck that, in most cases, gets you 75% of the way to a complete project by using appropriate slides and pulling in relevant data and text.

Add in very current and professional designs, excellent automated animations (especially of charts), the most intuitive UX in the sector, and first-rate collaboration features and you've got a winner. Current pricing is very reasonable and certainly worth dropping $12 for a month to play around.

Of course the presentation tool you choose to use can't fix some things that make presentations suck -- like too much text, being too literal, slides that steal attention away from the presenter, et al -- but they can make what you're already doing much better. So, this fall, try something new. You just might like it!