Alternatives to Powerpoint
About 10 years ago there was an online service called Wimpy Point. The idea was the Powerpoint was a bit overkill and people only really needed a “whimpy” version of presentation software. The idea was fairly unusual a decade ago, but now there are many different options for online presentation software. Guiding Tech has a list of 5 Online Powerpoint Alternatives that is worth taking a look at.
Here is the list from the post:
- Prezi – This is what presentation software would look like if it wasn’t descended from slide shows.
- Google Docs – I always thought that Google Docs was a stripped down version of Powerpoint, but checkout the writeup and video to see what it can do. The collaboration is also a great feature.
- 280 Slides – This looks almost like Keynote on OS X.
- Zoho Show – Part of Zoho office with some nifty remote presentations features.
- Slide Rocket – Seems to be fairly well designed and brings analytics to presentation software which can be very helpful when you are sharing things online.
I often get discouraged by how slowly progress is being made in broadband adoption, but it is interesting to see how many high quality online presentation web apps there are compared to 10 years ago when it was an oddity. This is only possible because broadband is growing. In fact presentation software is one of tools that probably most indicates that broad band is becoming ubiquitous and reliable. If you can’t get to email without an Internet access it isn’t any big deal because you can’t send and retrieve messages anyway. If you can’t do wordprocessing when you don’t have Internet, it is inconvenient, but not too bad. However, presentation software is a bit different. If your connection isn’t there when you go to make an important presentation, it means you can’t present. And messing up your ability to give a presentation is something most people won’t tolerate.
So even if things aren’t moving as fast as I’d like, we’ve made it quite a ways in the last 10 years.
