presentation software meaning with example

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Presentation Software Definition and Examples

Presentation software brings complex ideas to life, one slide at a time

• Brock University

Klaus Vedfelt / Getty Images

Many software suites offer a program designed to accompany a speaker when he or she delivers a presentation. The specific presentation program in this suite of programs is usually (but not always) in the form of a slide show. This category of program is well-established; it doesn't change much, and it supports not only online visual display but also, generally, the printing of related handouts and speaker notes.

Benefits of Presentation Software

These programs make it simple and often fun to create a presentation for your audience. They contain a text editor to add your written content; they support charts and graphic images such as photographs, clip art or other objects to enliven your slideshow and get your point across crisply.

For a deeper dive into some of the leading applications in this software category, check out:

Other Forms of Presentation Software

PowerPoint and its clones work on a slide-based logic: When you move to the next point in your conversation, you advance to the next slide. An alternative model of presentations sets aside the slide model in favor of some other navigation system. Examples include:

Prezi offers a visual navigation tool that allows for zoom-in/zoom-out detail across a logical map of your presentation.

Microsoft Sway

Besides PowerPoint, Microsoft also offers Sway, which is a presentation and newsletter designer that supports simpler and more image-focused designs along a familiar linear flow path.

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• Software applications

presentation software

• Rahul Awati

What is presentation software?

Presentation software, also known as graphics presentation applications or presentation graphics programs, is a category of software used to create content where information is often represented in a graphical or visual way. A variety of presentation software is available to help tell a story or support written information using pictures, charts, graphs and other visual elements.

Types of presentation software

There are two main types of presentation software: business presentation software and general multimedia authoring tools.

Business presentation software products generally emphasize ease of learning and use, particularly for nontechnical and business users. However, they can include more advanced functions for experienced users. Most business presentation applications let users include visual elements like images , and sometimes audio and video.

General multimedia authoring software lets users create sophisticated presentations that might include photos, icons , audio narrations, transitions, animations and video sequences. Some presentations products combine ease of use and sophisticated features.

Key features in presentation software

Presentation software often includes templates to create visually rich presentations and slide decks. Templates can be easily edited to match user requirements or company brand guidelines. The software usually includes a search feature to discover these templates, as well as approved layouts and previous presentations.

Cloud-based presentation applications generally include shared workspaces and team folders that let multiple people securely collaborate, provide inputs, set status updates, and add comments and reactions. Users can also share presentations, project plans, conference keynotes, sales decks and more in real time. Versioning capabilities might be included so authorized users can manage version history, recover previous versions and view current progress.

Many vendors offer a centralized library of images, photos, icons and animations, and regularly update these libraries so customers can access the visual elements for their presentations. Some applications also integrate with external image sources like Unsplash, Giphy and Brandfetch, so business users can find additional digital assets such as images, logos, fonts and colors.

Other vendors' presentation software integrates with external video sites like YouTube or Vimeo, enabling users to embed video to support the deck's story or main message. Still other graphics applications include audio and data capabilities so users can add narrations to content and integrate data from Google Analytics , Google Sheets and other sources to accompany and strengthen the text.

Some applications include a built-in designer that implements predefined design rules and guardrails. Once content is added to the software, the designer converts notes, data and more into visually rich slides. The slides automatically adapt to the rules, so users don't have to make manual adjustments to change text font and resize images, for example. In addition, the software might include intuitive editing options and smart formatting capabilities to let users make quick edits and finalize a presentation.

The best presentation software includes support for brand esthetics. The application updates every slide and deck with the brand's specific fonts, colors, logos, themes and templates to create consistent brand presentations with the approved brand style. In most cases, style themes are customizable so company logos, colors, fonts and icon styles can be added to the presentation theme and updated as needed.

Artificial intelligence in presentation software

Presentation software products have evolved with more advanced capabilities and intuitive options for edits, sharing and collaboration. Sophisticated applications also include conversational AI engines so users can automatically generate new presentations quickly.

Depending on the software's capabilities, the AI engine may create the first draft of the presentation based on a user's description and needs.

Some AI-powered presentation products include smart templates that can quickly edit the autogenerated software and adapt the content to a user's or brand's story. The application might also include a designer bot that takes design inputs from the (human) user in natural language and generates unique images.

Common applications of presentation software

Presentation software is especially useful to create presentations and decks that include some combination of text, animations, images, video, audio and transitions. These might include creative briefs, pitch decks, moodboards , competitor analyses, proposals, bulletins, project reports, annual reviews, marketing plans and meeting discussions.

All these presentations can be displayed in a slideshow format. Built-in templates, content libraries and editing tools accelerate the design process, regardless of the presentation's purpose or intended audience.

Popular presentation software products

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most popular presentation software applications available today. It includes numerous user-friendly features for design, sharing and collaboration, object insertion, slideshows, text formatting, audio and video.

Other popular products include Lotus Freelance Graphics, Google Slides , Prezi, Slidebean, Canva and Keynote. Most of these products offer PC and Mac versions. In addition, many are free to download and use, while others come in free, paid or freemium versions.

Presentation software might include different features and capabilities. Organizations and users must assess their requirements, technical stack, audience type and budget before making a purchase.

For example, a geographically dispersed team might be better suited to a cloud-based application that supports borderless collaboration than a desktop application that can't be accessed from outside the enterprise network . Similarly, a marketing plan might require more visual elements while an investor update might require more graphs or charts. The software that is ultimately selected should satisfy these specific requirements.

For more on this topic, learn how to create a successful presentation .

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15 Best Presentation Software for 2024 (Full Comparison Guide)

Written by: Orana Velarde

In this comparison guide, we’ll analyze each of these tools and many more to understand what the difference is between them so you can  choose the best presentation maker for your business.

So, if you want to stand out from run-of-the-mill PowerPoint presentations and have a reliable presentation software that will help you collaborate with team members and design stunning slide decks in a fraction of the time, you’ll need this guide. 

Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

• Google Slides
• Microsoft PowerPoint
• Beautiful.ai
• Microsoft Sway

What are Presentation Tools

Presentation tools are software applications that enable users to visually present ideas or share knowledge. These presentations are delivered in a slide-show format using a combination of text, images and other graphic elements.

Presentation software is frequently used to pitch an idea to investors , present proposals to clients , introduce new products or services to customers, train staff on new policies or ideas , or teach your students new or complex concepts.

Best Presentation Software: A Visual Comparison

When choosing the right presentation programs for your projects, there are some things to consider:

• Does the price point fit your budget?
• Is it easy to use?
• Who is the program geared at: businesses, educators, bloggers or social media managers?
• Does it have lots of templates to choose from? Are they good quality and helpful?
• Is the built-in graphic asset library extensive and varied?
• Can you embed content, add videos or GIFs?
• Can you add audio to your presentations?
• Can elements be animated?
• Is it desktop or cloud-based ?
• Can you use it to create presentations on any of your devices?
• Can finished presentations be viewed offline?
• Can you have team accounts or business accounts for easy collaboration inside your company?
• Does it include a Brand Kit? Is it easy to use?
• Can the finished presentation be shared online straight from the presentation software?
• Can your presentations be uploaded to the cloud privately with password protection?
• Does the presentation software include analytics to see how your projects perform on social media?
• Can you use the finished presentation as a lead generator straight from the software?

We'll take a look at all these aspects in the following list of best presentation software so you can make your own well-informed decision.

Last updated on May 30, 2024.

Visme is a powerful presentation software and all-in-one content authoring tool. It has a user-friendly interface and an extensive set of tools that make it easy for both beginners and experienced professionals to design and deliver impactful presentations.

Presentations made with Visme go beyond the standard slide deck to incorporate interactive elements and easy, full-featured offline sharing.

Making professional presentation slides with Visme is easy and straightforward. Create slides from scratch using content blocks and the extensive slide libraries categorized by style. Browse the presentation template library to find pre-designed slide decks which you can easily customize to fit your needs.

That's not all that Visme can do, though.

You can also use Visme to create other visual content, such as digital documents, animated infographics, interactive reports and whiteboards. There are tons of customizable templates that come built-in with the app.

You can also use Visme to create other visual content, such as infographics, reports and interactive charts. There are tons of customizable templates that come built-in with the software.

Visme can be used for free to test it out for as long as you want. With a free account, you can create up to three projects.

To access all of Visme's capabilities, you can upgrade to one of the paid plans .

• Starter: $12.25/month paid annually
• Pro: $24.75/month paid annually
• Visme for Teams: Custom – learn more here

If you're a nonprofit organization, you may qualify for a discount. Visme also offers separate Education plans for students and teachers.

Ease of Use

Visme is incredibly easy to use. Switching from slide to slide is a breeze, and you can even save a slide to your content block or slide library to reuse later.

The editor comes with a handy sidebar that lets you browse media, graphics and data tools and drag and drop relevant elements onto your slides. You can also use the /shortcut feature to open a search bar and quickly find what you need.

The dynamic fields feature ensures you don’t miss out on any critical information. With single click, you can easily update content throughout your presentation.

Who Is It For

Visme is perfect for small and large businesses, enterprises, marketing teams, project managers, educators, content creators and so much more. The resources and tools available in Visme reach far beyond the ability to create presentations.

• Social media teams can create content for their company’s social channels.
• Sales agents can create branded and personalized proposals in minutes.
• Professionals can build visual CVs to find the next ideal job.
• Project managers can conduct team meetings with a collaborative whiteboard.

Template Options

The template options in Visme are extensive and varied in style. From minimalistic to photographic, there are many presentation styles to pick from.

Presentation Templates

Ecommerce Webinar Presentation

Buyer Presentation

PixelGo Marketing Plan Presentation

Product Training Interactive Presentation

Company Ethics Presentation

Work+Biz Pitch Deck - Presentation

Create your presentation View more templates

You can choose from dozens of fully designed presentations tailor-made for specific industries and topics or mix and match hundreds of slide layouts by choosing a presentation theme.

You can also start with a blank canvas, add new blank slides to existing presentation templates, and save custom slides to use later as your own templates.

Graphic Assets Library

When selecting the best tools for presentations, the visual capabilities and creative design elements should be a top consideration. Visme’s graphic library includes thousands of free icons, illustrations, stock photos, videos , 3D graphics , audio clips, charts and graphs to include in your presentations.

The best part is that every graphic asset that comes built-in with the Visme editor is fully customizable. Resize, rotate or change colors to fit your brand, content and theme.

AI-Powered Tools

Visme comes with a wide variety of useful AI-powered tools, making it one of the best presentation software.

Let's start with the AI presentation maker . This advanced tool is engineered to make your presentation creation process as quick and efficient as possible.

To create a presentation using this tool, you only need to provide a text prompt outlining your requirements. The tool will then generate the slides, complete with text, images, illustrations and any other content you specify.

After that, you can use Visme's presentation tools to personalize the AI-generated slides and add the final touches.

Next up is the AI writer . This user-friendly tool is your key to overcoming writer's block and crafting engaging copy for your presentation. It can help you create layouts, edit and proofread text, summarize the content and much more. Explain to the AI writer what you want to generate, and it will take care of the rest.

Visme offers several AI image editing tools , including erase and replace, background remover, unblur, and upscaler. These tools can be used to edit the image content or enhance its quality. For example, you can use the Image Upscaler to resize your image without sacrificing quality, ensuring your visuals always look high-quality.

And as always, you just need to provide the right text prompts. Feel free to tweak the prompts as many times as you want until you achieve the perfect outcome.

Videos and GIFs

It's easy to insert or embed videos and GIFs inside a Visme presentation. This is another that makes Visme a powerful video presentation software .

To insert a video, upload a video from your computer or cloud storage and place it on a slide of your choosing. Once you’ve uploaded it, it’ll be in your Media library for future use.

If you don’t have videos of your own, Visme has hundreds of stock videos to choose from in lots of categories. Browse them by clicking the / shortcut on your keyboard and opening the videos tab.

Edit your videos with the integrated timeline feature. Trim video clips and customize playback settings. Resize the video on your slide easily by dragging the corner. Or you can resize any video into another shape for more flexibility.

GIFs are available through the Giphy integration, which you’ll find in the Media tab. These are a great choice when you want to make a meme-based presentation.

Take note that all presentations that have videos or GIFs in the slides must be shared as a live link or downloaded as HTML5 or MP4. If you download it as a PDF or PPTX, all the interactive elements won’t play back.

Adding audio to a presentation is easy on Visme. Either along with a video or as the audio on its own. You can also record a voice over.

Another great option is accessing our Presenter Studio to record a video of yourself presenting your content. You can turn on your camera or record audio only before sending a link to your audience. This is a great way to present asynchronously or save your presentation for people to view again and again.

Embed Third-Party Content

There is more content that can be embedded into Visme presentations, like polls, quizzes , forms , online videos and any content that can be turned into code to insert in an iframe.

You can also take advantage of several integrations to embed even more engaging and interactive content into your slides.

Some of our integrations include SurveyMonkey, Hubspot, Giphy, and many more.

Animations and Transitions

With Visme, you can animate your content and create interactive experiences such as:

• Hover effects or clickable pop-ups, link your slides or content blocks to objects
• Pre-animated assets like characters, illustrations and gestures
• Custom animation and motion effects

Features inside Visme presentations can be animated, and we also have a number of seamless slide transitions that make your content pop, like "Enter from Side" or "Staggered Fade."

If you want to make your content even more dynamic, you can access our Custom Animation feature. This is perfect for creating video presentations or making your elements look like they're floating on your slide.

Visme also comes with a 3D Character Creator that helps you elevate your storytelling and connect with your audience. You can create and customize 3D animated characters to embody your brand or message.

Tweak everything, from gender and hairstyles to outfits and skin tone, until you achieve the perfect look. You also have the ability to choose their entry, waiting and exit poses.

Desktop or Cloud

Visme is an online cloud-based app that can be easily used on your computer. We also provide a desktop app that you can download and use outside of your regular browser for seamless content creation.

And if you need to create content on the go, you can easily edit existing projects right from your mobile device or tablet using the Visme iOS app .

Data Widgets

Visme offers a wide selection of data widgets that allow you to creatively visualize statistics and figures in the form of gauges, clocks, pictographs and icon arrays.

Data visualization in Visme goes beyond widgets. Add tables, graphs, and charts to your presentation slides and connect them to a live data source . Create a data stream from Google Sheets or Google Analytics into customized data visualizations.

Offline Viewing

Finished presentations can be viewed offline in four different formats.

The best option is to download it as an HTML5 file. That way it will maintain all the animations when opened on Google Chrome, even without internet. Downloading as an HTML 5 file is a premium feature. Presentations can also be downloaded as a collection of JPG or PNG images, as a PDF or as an editable PowerPoint file.

Create a stunning presentation in less time

• Hundreds of premade slides available
• Add animation and interactivity to your slides
• Choose from various presentation options

Sign up. It’s free.

Collaboration Possibilities

Visme has a premium teams plan that lets all team members customize and complete projects together. Leave comments with edits and feedback, edit projects simultaneously and easily share with other people on your team to move the project along.

Plus, Visme's workflow management features give the project admin complete control over your team's collaboration process. You can assign tasks, manage roles, set deadlines and more, all from a centralized platform. These features are useful for streamlining communication and reducing the time between briefing and final presentation design.

Branding Capabilities

Visme's brand design tool makes it easy to keep all of your content on-brand regardless of who's creating it. It works in three easy steps:

1. Upload all of your branding assets (colors, fonts, logo) to Visme with the Brand Wizard . Input your website URL and watch as our Brand Wizard automatically pulls in all of your branding.

2. Access a bundle of 30+ automatically branded templates that have your logo, fonts and colors already ready to go.

3. Easily access thousands of other templates and input your brand fonts and colors with just a click in Visme's editor.

Then boom! All of your content will always have the same branding, helping increase brand strength and recognition.

Share to Social Media

Once a presentation is finished, it can be shared to social media seamlessly right from the editor. It can also be downloaded.

Privacy and Password Protection

Presentations on Visme can be published privately with password protection so that only the people you want can access it. It is advisable to only use strong passwords for this purpose. There are a few free password managers that could help you do that and keep your account secure .

Visme’s analytics is what makes it stand out as the best tool for presentation. When a presentation is shared via a live link, it can be analyzed for views and sharing.

Access in-depth analytics that show you how much of your presentation is typically viewed, for how long and which slides seem to be the most popular.

Lead Generation

You can add a signup form to your presentations to collect leads that could potentially become clients. Simply head over to our  Advanced Settings tab before sharing your project and turn on  Requires Registration to collect emails from each person who views your content.

The best part of using Visme is that you get access to an interactive online form builder that's proven to generate 2X more conversions than traditional forms. You can choose your preferred form type and customize every aspect, including character appearance, color, background and animations to match your design and branding requirements.

Prezi offers a great alternative to the traditional presentation format that goes slide by slide. The creative idea behind Prezi is you can create an animated, non-sequential flow with topics and subtopics that are hidden until you zoom in.

While Prezi's interface can be slightly complicated to use, it's a good option for people who need to add a creative touch to their presentations.

Prezi is free for basic capabilities and limited templates.

For the paid plans, there are three tiers.

• Standard: $5/month
• Plus: $12/month
• Premium: $16/month
• Teams: Upon Request

There are separate plans available for students and teachers.

Prezi has a slight learning curve, but once you create a couple of presentations, you get the hang of it. However, it doesn't offer too much customizability inside the templates.

Businesses and educators who are in need of a different style of presentation. Prezi offers a “conversational style” of zooming and moving around between information. So, who Prezi is for really depends on who needs this sort of presentation style.

There are plenty of templates to choose from, and you can also start from scratch. The templates are different in color and style, but the idea of zooming into topics and subtopics is the same.

AI Presentation Assistant

Prezi has an AI assistant that automatically generates presentations for users.

The assets library has some icons and shapes available, the usual ones like arrows and buttons. Premium plans get access to over 80,000 icons and 500,000 images.

Videos can be uploaded or embedded from YouTube. Embedded videos are not viewable in offline mode. GIFs aren’t supported.

Voice over can be added in premium plans.

No other content can be embedded into Prezi presentations.

Prezi is all about animations between topics and subtopics. The presentations themselves are viewed as animations.

Prezi is a cloud app but can be accessed to view offline with premium plans.

Available to Create on Multiple Devices

Prezi presentations can only be created on a computer but can be viewed on all devices.

Prezi for teams is available upon demand and has a Slack integration.

Brand Kits are only available with Prezi's team plans, but each presentation can be customized to fit your brand with color customizations and some available fonts.

Prezi presentations can be shared to social media via a special share button at the top-right of the Prezi page. They can be shared to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Prezi presentations can only be downloaded from the Prezi app. There are two options, as an EXE file for PC and a ZIP file for Mac. Presentations can then be viewed without internet connection or the need to connect to the Prezi app.

Presentations are public unless you have a paid account.

Analytics are available with premium accounts but it only applies to Prezi presentations you share via a link to someone.

There are no lead generation capabilities with Prezi.

3 Google Slides

Google Slides is the presentation software available via your Google account. Just like you can create documents and spreadsheets with Google Docs and Sheets, you can create presentations with Google Slides.

The setup is very similar to PowerPoint and is free to use for anyone with a google account. There is a business version called G Suite, which includes the same things with more storage and management capabilities.

Google Slides is free to use for anyone with a Google account. All features are available to everyone.

There are plans for business accounts so that teams can be created and information can be managed in a more organized way. Plans start at $6/user/month and go up to $18/user/month.

Compared to other examples of presentation software, Google Slides is very easy to use. The controls are very similar to Google Docs and Sheets.

Business professionals, educators and students who need fast and easy access to a presentation software that can get things done.

There is a general collection of templates, but there are not very many. Presentations can also be started from scratch.

The graphic assets are average and simple. The shapes are classic and generic. Photographs can be uploaded from your desktop, your Google Drive, a URL or searched online.

Videos can uploaded with a YouTube link or from Google Drive. GIFs can be added just like images.

Audio and Embed Third-Party Content

Anything from your Google Drive can be added in. Also there are some available “add-ons” that can be integrated for icons, stock photography and audio.

Elements inside each slide can be animated and so can the transition between the slides.

Google Slides is a cloud-based program.

Google Slides can be used fully on any device with their respective apps for Android and iPhone. Presentations can be edited and viewed on all devices.

Collaborating with other people is easy with Google Slides

There is no brand kit feature.

Presentations can be shared via email or link.

Google Slides can be viewed offline with a Chrome Extension and the use of Backup and Sync.

Presentations can be shared privately, but there are no password capabilities, only invitations.

Analytics and Lead Generation

These features are not available.

Read either PowerPoint vs Google ,  or you can check out  Google Slides vs Visme to get a detailed overview of each tool and find the perfect presentation software for your needs.

Keynote is the native Apple presentation software — one of the original PowerPoint Alternatives. Anyone with an Apple ID can use the Keynote editor. It is the most similar to PowerPoint and also Google Slides.

Keynote is free for downloading and also accessing via the cloud with an apple ID.

If you know how to use PowerPoint or Google Slides, Keynote is a breeze. This feature makes it stand out as one of the best tools for presentation.

Keynote is good for businesses, educators and anyone who needs a practical presentation software.

The templates are limited but come in standard or wide sizes. Templates can also be found outside of Keynote and uploaded into the program.

There are plenty of classic symbols and icons available which are also customizable in terms of color and gradient. Images can only be added from your computer.

Videos are not embeddable in Keynote slides but that is sorted with a plug-in like LiveSlides. GIFs can be added as .gif images.

You can upload existing audio files in Keynote to play on specific slides. There's also an option to record your own voiceover to create a narrated presentation.

Including these is not available

Slides and objects can be animated in a number of ways, including path creation, scaling, bounce or jiggle effects, and more.

Keynote is available on both desktop and cloud.

You can create keynote presentations on any apple device and PC.

Keynote presentations can be downloaded as .pdf or as .pptx to view offline.

Keynote presentations can be collaborated on via a link or email with permission settings set to “can make changes”.

Brand Kit, Share to Social Media, Analytics and Lead Generation

None of these are available on Keynote.

Presentations are private until shared and there is no password protection capabilities.

5 Microsoft PowerPoint

This list wouldn't have been complete without the most popular presentation software in the world. Even though there are tons of more advanced presentation tools out there now, PowerPoint is still a favorite of many because of its familiarity, ease of use and availability.

The desktop-based PowerPoint program is part of Microsoft 365, which has different plans for businesses that start from $6/month and go up to $22/month. You can also buy an unbundled digital PowerPoint account for $159.99

PowerPoint Online is free on any device, including mobile.

Most, if not every, computer user knows how to work a PowerPoint. The traditional sidebar interface is easy to use simply because it's familiar. But for people who are using PowerPoint for the first time, there might be a slight learning curve.

Businesses, individuals, students, teachers and anyone who uses a Windows PC or device. PowerPoint is also a good fit for people who want to create simple, conventional presentations, and aren't looking for fancy new features or capabilities.

There are dozens of themes that come built-in with PowerPoint, and there are all customizable so you can play around with the styles.

You can browse stock images, icons, stickers and more by searching for relevant keywords in PowerPoint's graphic library.

Videos and GIFs can be uploaded from your computer. You can also embed videos from YouTube and other online sources. However, this feature is only available to Windows users.

You can upload audio files from your computer. You can also record audio directly inside PowerPoint and edit the settings for playback.

You can embed files created in other Microsoft Office applications, such as charts created in Excel, or any other programs that support Object Linking and Embedding (OLE.)

There are tons of animation and transition options available in PowerPoint, which can actually get confusing at times. However, if you know your way around these options, it gets easier to create a professional-looking slideshow.

There are both desktop and cloud versions of PowerPoint available.

You can download the PowerPoint mobile apps on both Android and iOS devices.

It's possible to share your presentation with specific people.

Brand kits are not available, but you can save custom themes.

Presentations cannot be shared to social media.

You can download your PowerPoint presentations in various formats, including PPTX and PDF. This makes it easy to access them on any device offline.

You can mark your presentations as read-only to prevent users from editing the file.

This feature is not available in PowerPoint.

Ludus is one of the best-looking presentation tools available online. The main attractions with Ludus are the clean black screen to edit on and the number of integrations that give importing capabilities for all sorts of content. From photography to .svg to code builds.

Ludus starts at $14.99/month for teams of 1-15 people. Teams that need more licenses are encouraged to contact for more pricing information. Ludus does offer a 30-day free trial.

Ludus is quite easy to use and includes lots of keyboard shortcuts. It is easy to learn how to use and pretty straightforward. It seems to be easier for designers than for non-designers to use.

This presentation software is geared more towards designers or business owners who have some design knowledge to totally be able to use the broad capabilities.

There are no templates to choose from. You have to start from scratch or use smart blocks that you can create to use over and over easily. Smart blocks are kept in their own library.

Ludus has minimal in-house graphic assets like simple shapes, but the integrations are epic. You can import .svg icons and edit them inside Ludus quite easily. Photos can also be imported via Unsplash, Instagram, Facebook or uploaded.

Videos and GIFs are easily imported via the integrations like YouTube, Vimeo, Giphy and more.

Audio can be embedded as an audio file from SoundCloud, Dropbox and other integrations.

You can pretty much embed anything into Ludus. The integrations are impressive and there are also iframe and HTML options.

Internal elements can’t be animated but there are so many integrations that animations can be done in different ways.

Ludus is a cloud-based app. No need to download anything.

Presentations can only be edited on computers. Finished presentations can be viewed on all handheld devices that have access to the internet via a URL link.

Collaborations are possible with the team plans. This includes live collaboration, workspaces and more.

With collaborations, smart blocks and the Brandfetch integration, a brand kit can be organized quite easily. But it’s not an internal feature.

Finished presentations can be easily shared to social media straight from Ludus.

Ludus presentations can be downloaded as .pdf or .html to be viewed offline.

Pro Plans have password protection.

There are no analytics or lead generation capabilities available in Ludus.

Slides is the only presentation software that promotes itself as being “pixel perfect” as the editor includes a built-in grid to help with composition. Slides has a lower cost at the highest price tag which is good for smaller businesses.

Slides is free to use, but finished presentations will be public and available. 

The paid plans start at $5/month, and the Pro plan sits at $10/month and go up to $20/month for features like unlimited collaborators, privacy, shared media library and Google Analytics.

Slides is very easy to use, the editing board is minimal but all tools are at easy reach. No need to get confused with Slides. There are no templates so presentations are built from scratch.

Small business owners or startups. Individuals that know what they want and don’t need templates to help them along. Also for developers because it has HTML and CSS building capabilities.

Slides has a very limited template library with just a handful of different options to choose from.

The available shapes and icons are common and minimal. Photos have to be uploaded or imported from a URL.

Videos and GIFs are easy to add. Videos can be uploaded or linked and GIFs can be uploaded as .gif or .mp4 as video.

Including audio is not possible with Slides.

Anything with code can be added in an iframe.

All elements and features can be animated to fade in, fade out etc. Length of duration can be customized.

Slides is a cloud-based presentation software that can only be used online.

Slides can be used on the computer and handheld devices. To edit and to view.

Paid plans have very capable collaboration possibilities. Users can leave comments with feedback for the creator to review and make edits.

There is no set section for a brand kit but branded decks can be created and then cloned to use as a template.

Yes, quite easily.

You can also share presentations via URL, email or embeddable code.

A Slides presentations can be downloaded as a ZIP file with an .html file inside that can be viewed offline on any browser.

Privacy and Analytics

Possible with paid plans.

This is not possible on Slides.

8 Slidebean

Slidebean is an easy-to-use presentation software with interesting templates and customizable content blocks.

The highlight of this presentation software is that it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help you put together the best possible slide layouts and configurations. They also have a team of experts that can both write and design your pitch deck for you if you don't want to take the DIY route.

The free plan has limited capabilities but it's enough to see how Slidebean works. To export your presentation, you'll need to upgrade.

There are three price levels from $8/month to $19/month to $149/month. The last one is the Founder's Edition plan, which includes help from the experts on your presentations.

If you choose to get their help on your presentation design, it starts at $29 per slide or $1,999 for the full project.

Slidebean is quite easy to use. You can choose between templates or start from scratch. Adding content is simple and to the point from a popup.

Editing can be done in outline or design mode. The editing is limited to how the content blocks are set up, but there are lots of choices. There's no free size changing or moving around.

Startups, small businesses and entrepreneurs.

There are plenty of template options. They are organized in sections and niche. The template collection has presentations by known brands like Snapchat and Buzzfeed.

There are plenty of icons and images to choose from. However, there are no shapes, but icons can be used as shapes.

GIFs can be added via the Giphy integration in a content block. Video can be added in the paid plans.

There are no audio capabilities.

The code snippet content block has lots of options so a lot of different kinds of third-party content can be added in.

Content blocks and their elements can be animated with a couple features.

Slidebean is an online program on the cloud.

It can be used to edit or view on any device.

Collaboration is possible in the paid plans.

This feature is available in the paid plans.

Sharing to Social Media

Slidebean presentations can be exported to download as both .pdf and .html files to view offline.

This feature is not available.

Analytics are available in the paid plans.

9 Zoho Show

Zoho Show is a presentation software that mimics Microsoft PowerPoint in the way it is set up, with a menu up top for all the actions. However, Zoho's version is much nicer and polished.

Zoho is a complete CRM for businesses and the company offers different types of apps for teams and office use — Zoho Show is only one of their programs.

Zoho show is completely free and without ads.

Zoho Show is pretty easy to use. The content blocks can be chosen as themes but they can also be moved around freely and resized. The presentation can be viewed in three ways, with a handy grid view to see all slides next to each other.

Businesses, entrepreneurs, educators and students. Anyone who needs to make a presentation.

There aren’t exactly templates, but there are themes. These do not come with images or lorem ipsum but are more like visual canvases that can be customized in terms of color, layout and more.

The shapes are pretty good, there are quite a bit to choose from. An added bonus is the possibility to draw shapes or scribble anything yourself with the trackpad.

Videos can be added via the YouTube integration and GIFs can be added as an image.

Audio can be added via Soundcloud with an embed code.

There are a number of sites that are supported via Embed codes but not that many. Zoho Show says that you can ask your needs to be added in the permitted list.

All elements and transitions can be animated.

Zoho Show is a cloud bases program and can be broadcast from anywhere and on any device. The live broadcast includes a chat window and the audience can download the presentation if they want to.

You can only create presentations on a computer.

Teams can easily use Zoho Show, even in the free version.

Custom branding is only available in the highest paid plan.

Sharing to social media is not possible unless downloaded as a PDF file and then uploaded to something like SlideShare.

Presentations can be downloaded as .pptx or .pdf files for offline viewing.

Yes, this is possible on all plans.

Analytics are possible on the paid plans.

10 Beautiful.ai

Beautiful.ai is a presentation software that helps you create great-looking slides with the help of Artificial Intelligence. This means that your presentation will look professional every single time, regardless of who designs it.

Beautiful.ai currently offers a Pro plan at $12/month and a Team plan at $40/month, both billed annually. They offer a 14-day free trial to test out their tool.

This is probably the best thing about Beautiful.ai — it's incredibly simple to use. All you need to do is add smart slides, plug in your content, and choose from different preset layouts.

Of course, that also means that you have limited customization options. But if you're looking for a simple solution and you don't trust your design skills, this may be a good option for you.

Beautiful.ai is a great tool for absolute beginners and non-designers who are looking for a no-nonsense presentation software.

For example, startups and entrepreneurs can use this software to create a nice-looking pitch deck or proposal quickly without any design help.

There are a handful of slide themes available, but they're mostly basic in terms of design. You can play around with the layouts inside each theme to put together a unique presentation.

The graphic assets library comes with a bunch of free stock photos and icons to choose from, but the options are pretty limited.

Videos and GIFs can be uploaded from your computer. You can also import videos from YouTube and Vimeo to embed in your slides.

Audio can be uploaded from your computer.

It's not possible to embed third-party content into Beautiful.ai presentations. However, you can add interactive links to your slides.

Each slide comes with a preset animation style that you're unable to customize. However, you can change the speed, timing and triggers for the animations. 

Beautiful.ai is a cloud-based application.

The software only works on your desktop computer.

You can invite people to collaborate on your presentation by either giving them "view" or "edit" access. Collaborators must have a Beautiful.ai account to view or edit the presentation.

While there's no brand kit feature available, you can customize a theme (colors and fonts) and save it to your library to use in future presentations.

There are several options to share your presentations. Send an email invite, share a public or private link, generate an embed code or share directly to social media.

You can export your presentations to PDF or PowerPoint to view offline.

There is no password protection, but you can use the Secure Viewing option to only share your presentation with other Beautiful.ai users via an email invite.

This feature is only available in the paid plans. You can access a number of viewing and usage statistics for your presentations.

This feature is not available in Beautiful.ai.

11 Genially

The main idea behind the Genially presentation software is interactivity.

This program is good not only for presentations and video presentations but also for other visual graphics. It’s great for adding a modern, interactive feel to your presentations.

There is a free plan in Genially, which gives you unlimited creations but limited resources. The paid plans are as follow, paid yearly:

• Pro: $7.49 / month
• Master: $20.82 / month
• Team: $79.15 / month

Genially is easy to use if you are accustomed to programs with lots of choices. There is a lot that can be done with the features in Genially.

Any change can be applied to all slides with a single click of the button in the menu. When editing, there is a "design view" and a "layers view."

Professionals and educators of any field who can benefit from interactive presentations.

There are plenty of template options. Some are free and some are only available via the premium plans. Presentation templates are also available as "video presentations."

The graphic assets in Genially are quite varied; there is plenty to choose from. Images can be uploaded or found on the Pixabay integration.

Videos can be added via a YouTube link and GIFs can be imported with the Giphy integration.

Audio can be uploaded from your computer, added via SoundCloud and a couple of other integrations, or recorded directly in Genially.

Third-party content can be added to your presentations with Genially integrations. For example, you can add an interactive map via Google Maps.

All elements can be animated, as can the transitions between slides. Animation effects are quite extensive. There is a similar tab called “interactivity,” which are pop-ups and hyperlinks supplied with lots of button choices.

Genially is a cloud-based presentation program.

This program is only available to edit on computers but can be viewed on any device.

It seems that a professional plan allows 5 team members, but the pricing plan shows that all plans have collaborative capabilities. Collaborators can be added in the dashboard where  all creations are stored.

Brand kits are available in the premium plans. It is an internal feature with easy access.

Finished presentations can be shared to social media.

Finished presentations can be downloaded as a set of .jpg images, as a .pdf or as an .html5 file which will keep all animations.

Premium plans have these features.

This is not available in Genially.

Canva is not only a presentation software but also a full editing program for all visual needs. Presentation creation is only one of the possibilities with Canva. It has become a favorite with bloggers and home-based businesses.

The free version of Canva is pretty extensive. The only restrictions are the use of premium resources that can be either bought separately or through the Canva Pro plan. Canva Pro is charged at $12.99/month or $119.99/year.

Canva Teams is $14.99/month + $14.99/month for every team member after the 5th.

Canva is easy to use as all elements are easy to find and are mostly customizable. Presentations are viewed scrolling; there is no master view and you can’t change something on all slides at once.

Bloggers, small home-based businesses and startups

There are lots of customizable template options, and each slide inside the templates can be used individually.

There are plenty of options in the graphic assets library, including shapes, icons, photos, frames and stickers. Some are free, while others are paid.

Videos and GIFs can be uploaded to Canva.

You can add music to your presentations using the available options inside Canva.

Canva offers dozens of integrations and media embed options, including YouTube, Google Maps, Vimeo, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter and more.

There are several animation options that apply to entire slides inside Canva. You can also add animated stickers to your slides.

Canva is a cloud-based app. Presentations can be seen on any device.

Canva is available as an iPhone app and an android app for editing capabilities.

Presentations can be shared for editing with team members.

Canva Pro has a brand kit feature.

Presentations can be shared on Twitter and Facebook.

Presentations can be downloaded as a group of .png or .jpg images or as a .pdf. You can also download it as an MP4 video for offline viewing.

All designs on Canva are private unless they are made public or shared via a link. There is no password-protected sharing though.

These features are not available in Canva.

While Canva offers a wide range of features for various visual design needs, you can explore better alternatives to find solutions that may better fit your requirements. If you want to explore other options, read our article about 12 excellent Canva alternatives .

13  FlowVella

FlowVella is a downloadable presentation software that can be used offline. The main attraction of FlowVella is the Kiosk Mode, in which you can create interactive presentations like the ones used in museums or information counters at malls or hotels.

FlowVella is free to try out. You can use it free forever but the options are limited and the finished presentations has a watermark. P aid plans are as follows:

• Premium : $10/month or $60/year
• Pro : $20/month or $200/year
• Enterprise : Upon request

FlowVella is pretty easy to use, and the controls are straightforward and uncomplicated.

This presentation software is for professionals and educators that need to be able to create presentations offline. Also for those who can take advantage of the Kiosk Mode.

The template options are quite varied and well designed.

The graphic assets library is very limited. Photographs and images need to be uploaded from your computer.

Videos can be uploaded or found via YouTube, iCloud and Dropbox integrations when online. GIFs can be added as images.

Audio can be uploaded from your computer, or added via iCloud or Dropbox.

You can add PDF files.

Only the transitions are animated minimally.

This is a desktop-based application. It must be downloaded.

There are iPad and device apps available for editing on those devices as well.

Paid premium plans can work with teams.

Brand kits are not available.

Presentations can be shared on Facebook and Twitter.

Since this is a desktop application, offline viewing is not a complication.

These features are available in the paid plans. Analytics can be viewed once the presentation has been published online.

This feature is not available on FlowVella.

14  Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is a presentation software that is straightforward with a simple interface that makes quick and practical presentations. Presentations can be created on the computer and on mobile devices.

Haiku Deck can be tried for free with one available presentation. The Public plan is USD 7.99 a month, Pro plans are USD 9.99 a month billed annually and USD 19.99 billed monthly, and Premium plans are USD 29.99 a month.

Haiku Deck is quite easy to use and menus are easy to follow. There are word size limiters and specific text placement choices for each slide. Charts are simple to create and can be customized. The editor can be connected via cloud to all devices. The new addition, Zuru, is an Artificial Intelligence system that creates creative presentations from simple PowerPoint files or outlines.

The Haiku Deck presentation software is geared mostly toward educators and classrooms. Businesses and bloggers can also use it for practical purposes.

Templates on Haiku Deck are more like an inspiring collection of photographs for a specific niche with some suggestions on where to place the text and what charts to include.

The available graphic assets library in Haiku Deck are millions of photographs, numerous font choices and charts and graphs.

YouTube videos can be embedded easily in a Haiku Deck. GIFs cannot be added to Haiku Decks but a finished presentation can be turned into a video or into a GIF.

Narrations and voice overs are easily recorded on a presentation in Haiku Deck.

Only videos can be embedded.

Features can't be animated in Haiku Deck

Desktop or Cloud / Available to Create on Multiple Devices

Haiku Deck is a cloud-based app that is available for editing and viewing on your laptop and also as an app on phones and tablets.

Haiku decks can be downloaded as .pptx files for offline viewing.

Presentations can be easily shared to social media from the editor.

Haiku Deck offers team possibilities upon request.

There is no brand kit, but you can add your logo to the finished product.

Pro and Premium plans have private and password-protected capabilities.

Premium plans have analytics for who has viewed your presentations.

Emails cannot be captured with Haiku Deck but slides and presentations can be sent with invitations to your existing email contacts.

15  Microsoft Sway

Microsoft has its own alternative to PowerPoint — Sway.

This online presentation software is completely different from PowerPoint and introduces a new concept of building "Sways" instead of "presentations."

Sway is free to use for anyone who has a Microsoft account.

It's super easy to use Sway and kind of fun too. It has a non-traditional storyline editor, which lets you add "blocks" of content that the software configures into layouts.

Sway is mostly for people who don't want to spend too much time designing a complex presentation. For example, students and nonprofit organizations.

There are several templates for different purposes, such as photo slideshows, sales trainings and even personal portfolios.

You can upload your own media or search from various sources inside Sway, including Flickr and Bing Images. There are no shapes and icons included.

You can upload videos from your device or embed from YouTube.

You can add audio to Sway by uploading or dragging and dropping the audio file onto your storyline from your computer.

You can embed images, videos, maps and other content from tons of websites, including Google Maps, Soundcloud, Twitter, Facebook and more.

Sway automatically adds animations to your slides. You cannot change or customize them; you can only increase or decrease the level of animation added to your Sway.

Sway is an online, cloud-based software.

Sway works on any device with an internet browser.

You can invite people to view or edit your Sway presentation.

Sway presentations can be shared directly to Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

You can download your Sway as a Word or PDF file to view offline.

There is no password protection available, but you can choose to share your Sway with specific people, anyone with a link or only people in your organization who have a link.

You can view reader statistics for your Sway if you have a Microsoft Office 365 subscription.

This feature is not available in Microsoft Sway.

Presentation Software FAQs

Still have questions? We've compiled answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about the best presentation tools available.

Q. Which Is the Best Software for Making Presentations?

There are many presentation tools out there but Visme stands out as a top pick and a creative presentation app with a full suite of advanced features tailored to the needs of individual users and businesses. Visme offers real-time collaboration, interactive and animated elements, hyper-customization options, robust data visualization tools and a brand wizard to maintain brand consistency across your presentations.

Q. What Is Better Than PowerPoint?

Visme is often considered a top presentation software and offers several advantages as a PowerPoint alternative software. Its intuitive interface and extensive template library make creating visually stunning presentations seamless, even for beginners. Visme's collaboration features are superior, allowing teams to work seamlessly. On top of that, Visme is packed with advanced interactive and animated elements to keep your audience hooked.

Q. Is PowerPoint or Prezi Better?

PowerPoint and Prezi each have strengths and are suited for different presentation styles. PowerPoint is easy to use, has a clear structure, and is widely available, making it suitable for traditional slide decks and formal presentations. On the other hand, Prezi excels at non-linear, visually engaging presentations with its zooming and panning features, making it ideal for creative or storytelling presentations. The best choice depends on your content, audience and desired presentation style.

Q. What Is the Best App to Do a Presentation On?

Visme offers a powerful presentation app that allows you to create, edit and present your slides from anywhere. Its mobile app is designed for on-the-go editing and presenting, ensuring you always have your presentation at your fingertips.

Q. Is Canva Better Than PowerPoint?

Canva and PowerPoint are tailored to suit the diverse preferences and requirements of different users.

Generally, Canva is known for its drag-and-drop interface, extensive library of design-focused templates and emphasis on visual appeal. It is an excellent choice for those who value aesthetics and want to create content quickly. On the other hand, PowerPoint offers more traditional features and is super flexible. It is often preferred due to its integration and compatibility with other Microsoft Office tools.

Q. What Is Replacing PowerPoint?

Visme is quickly gaining popularity as a PowerPoint replacement and a free presentation software with a user-friendly interface, tons of customization options, and powerful tools that make creating presentations a breeze. With a plethora of templates, interactive elements, and powerful data visualization tools, Visme empowers you to create presentations that truly captivate your audience and leave a lasting impression

Don't just take our word for it. Hear what Kendra Bradley, Graphic Content Developer at WOW!, has to say about Visme:

“Previously we were using PowerPoint, which is fine, but the interactivity you can get with Visme is so much more robust that we’ve all steered away from PowerPoint.”

“PowerPoint templates are plain and boring, and we want to create more fun and engaging content. Visme has multiple slide templates to choose from, which makes this so much easier.”

“I just made a deck recently and it took me about 15-20 minutes. I found a template I really liked and tweaked it and put it in our brand colors. In PowerPoint, it would take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half.”

Read the full case study to learn how they streamlined their presentation creation process and found a better alternative than PowerPoint.

Looking for a Presentation Software?

Choosing the best presentation program for your business is a great first step towards better and more effective slide deck development. In this guide, you learned about 15 different types of presentation software and we gave you a checklist to help you decide.

If you're looking for an easy-to-use presentation maker that also comes with unique features that you won't find in most other tools, Visme might be a great option.

You can look for the right pricing plan for your needs and even apply for a discount if you're a nonprofit organization. And if you just want to try out Visme to see if it's a good fit, sign up for a free account and use it for as long as you like — no strings attached.

Which of these best presentation software options fits your needs? If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you below.

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About the Author

Orana is a multi-faceted creative. She is a content writer, artist, and designer. She travels the world with her family and is currently in Istanbul. Find out more about her work at oranavelarde.com

What is Presentation Software Anyway? A Complete Guide to Essential Features and Why Your Team Needs Them

It’s estimated that 30 million PowerPoint presentations are created on any given day— and those numbers have likely spiked even higher given our new norm of virtual communication and remote work. Between startup pitches, business plans, all-hands meetings, and school presentations, everyone has a different story to tell. Regardless of who you are and what you do, we’d be willing to bet that you’ve created a deck or two in your day. But having a handful of presentations under your belt doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an expert. 

In fact, it’s very likely that the majority of those presentations created on a daily basis are cobbled together the night before the deadline. The result? A poorly executed deck (or frankendeck, as we like to call them) that doesn’t support your overarching purpose. In fact, 79% of people think that most presentations today suck. Your content means nothing if it gets lost in transition, and a bad deck can derail your entire presentation in the blink of an eye. Luckily, presentation software can help you create something brilliant in a fraction of the time— with no design experience required. 

Sounds great, right? But what is presentation software , anyway? Let us tell you. 

What is presentation software?

Presentation software is the deck designer you’ve been looking for, without actually having to hire a designer. At its core it’s a platform or software that enables you to create visual presentations. Everyone knows the household names like PowerPoint , Keynote , and Google Slides , but there are plenty of PowerPoint alternatives out there making presentation design simpler and more innovative. Alternative software, like Beautiful.ai, offers unique features that are not available in the dated software like PowerPoint. 

What features should you look for?

Depending on whether you work for a small business, startup or larger enterprise, finding a good presentation software program is a must. There are many different softwares to choose from, but these are the key features that you should consider when choosing your app or platform. 

A lot of inexperienced designers might dread starting a presentation from scratch (can you blame them?). A big selling point for a lot of PowerPoint alternatives is that they offer pre-built templates to help get you started. But even still, presentation design can be a big undertaking if you don’t know how to structure your story. Beautiful.ai offers a free gallery of pre-built presentation templates by our resident designer to help you start inspired. Each template is fully customizable so you can make it your own, while using our layouts to spark your own creativity.

If you’re not a designer by trade, a presentation software with artificial intelligence is smart (literally, and figuratively). Beautiful.ai’s smart slides take on the burden of design for you so that you can focus on what’s really important: your message. With smart slide templates , we apply principles of good design to each slide restraint so that it’s nearly impossible to create something that doesn’t look good. Simply add your content and watch the slides adjust without having to worry about aligning text boxes, configuring charts, or resizing text. 

Some presentation softwares do animations better than others (no, we aren’t going to name any names). Your animations should be subtle, but effective. The last thing you want is your animations to give the audience motion sickness. But when done correctly, dynamic animations build in a way that directs the audience’s attention back to your slides.

We may be biased, but Beautiful.ai’s animations bring your slides to life without overwhelming viewers. We give you the power to decide how your animations will build on each slide. You control the speed, the order, and whether they build automatically or advance with a click. You can create a custom timeline, which is a manual control of your animation build. And you can also customize the animation timing and style to choose overlapping, simultaneous, sequential, or no animation at all. Depending on your content, and talking points, you may select a slow, normal, or fast animation speed— it’s all up to you. 

Collaboration

We can all agree that working in the cloud is better than working without it. Eliminating lengthy email chains and attachments from your workflow can save a lot of time. Especially when you’re working in tandem with colleagues or clients, the cloud ensures that you are always working in the most updated version. Collaborating in presentations means that you can work on building a deck in unison with your team, which is something that’s critical in a work-from-home environment. 

With Beautiful.ai, not only can you collaborate with teammates— internal and external— in real-time, but you can also comment on slides to provide feedback or questions. Each collaborator on the presentation will receive a notification via email and within the product when a comment or edit is made on the slide so nothing falls through the cracks. 

Shareability

Shareability is something that older presentation software— like PowerPoint— lacks. Instead of having to send a file attachment with every update, newer presentation software will allow links for simplified sharing. This also helps teams with version history and content management. 

In Beautiful.ai, it’s easy to share your link out via email, social media, or embed it on a webpage. Because everything is saved on the cloud, you can edit your presentations on the fly and it will be updated immediately without having to resend a new link to your colleagues or clients. This is a game changer for board meetings, pitches, or sales proposals when a piece of information might come in at the last minute but you have already sent a link out to the deck.

Analytics is an essential tool for any business. With analytics you can see which slides performed well, and which slides your audience skipped altogether. This allows you to evaluate which information is resonating well with your audience and what might be getting lost in transition. As a business, this can help you understand your final call-to-action, and how you need to pivot to encourage a more favorable outcome. 

Beautiful.ai’s analytics shows you time spent on the presentation, total views, when the presentation was last viewed, and completion rate all within the product. 

Jordan Turner

Jordan is a Bay Area writer, social media manager, and content strategist.

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• Presentation Design

The 10 Best Presentation Software for 2023: Complete Guide

There are literally hundreds of presentation software tools in the market today and keeping track is getting increasingly hard. Most of them have been optimized for a specific purpose or type of user from a wide range of possibilities, and it's very likely that THE ideal tool for you is actually one that you've never heard of.

We've created this best presentation software list to shed some light and to give you a comprehensive presentation software list to ensure you make the right call in the platform you select. This article is the result of several weeks of research and review of 50+ presentation tools currently available on the web.

What is a presentation software?

A presentation software is defined as an application built to display information in the form of a slide show. Any presentation tool must have three fundamental functions:

• ‍ A text editor: to input the contents of the presentation.
• ‍ An import function: to insert and manipulate images and other content.
• ‍A slide-show or presenter mode: that displays the content in a nice, formatted way, sometimes synced in real time with the presenter across devices.

Slide shows often consist of a combination of text, video, images and charts. Their primary function is displaying clear, readable and summarized data to an audience.

Most presentations are shared and presented on a larger screen or through a digital projector. In rare occasions, slide presentations are printed out as a replacement for text documents, but this is a really inefficient way to review data, that Garr Reynolds calls ‘ PresDocs ’ (Garr Reynolds is the author of Presentation Zen, one of the most important go-to reference for successful presentations).

Related Read: What Makes Up the Best Presentation Templates?

What makes a good presentation tool?

The functions and results of presentation programs have evolved significantly in the past decades, since the original launch of ‘Presenter’ (the PowerPoint predecessor) in 1984. In 1987 PowerPoint 1.0 was released for the Macintosh and it started a revolution in the way we prepare and consume content in meetings.

For the purposes of this article we are going to classify all presentation tools using 3 variables that we consider extremely important:

Ease of use: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This rating looks at the learning curve, or time required to learn to use the platform. An easy to use interface is fundamentally important to ensure that users feel confortable working with the platform and doesn’t require complex training to take advantage of its features. This also accounts for the average time it takes to build a presentation.

Customization: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

The ability to customize a presentation to the smallest details. This varies depending on the number of advanced features in the platform, like the ability to set different transitions to each slide, the ability to add customized elements or to design/code the final outcome of the slides to the last font size and color code.

Final result: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

This indicator looks at the outcome of a finished presentation, assuming the user is an average person with basic design skills and intermediate knowledge on the tool itself.

Best PowerPoint Alternatives (Death by Power Point)

As we mentioned before, PowerPoint is the most used presentation builder in the market today. It is distributed by Microsoft as part of their Office Suite, which is estimated to have over 500 million users worldwide. Microsoft has also revealed that approximately 35 Million presentations are delivered every single day, that’s a staggering 400 presentations per second.

But still, PowerPoint’s popularity has decreased significantly in the past few years. Their boring presentation templates, the large learning curve and complexity as well as the terrible slides many users end up making have started the Death to PowerPoint movement.

What presentation software is better than PowerPoint?

For this section, we summarize the top PowerPoint alternatives and examples, that is, presentation tools that work in a fairly similar manner and that provide similar (but significantly better) results. If you are an avid PowerPoint user, then migrating to these platforms should be rather easy for you.

Best 10 presentation software alternative list for 2023

(Updated December 2022)

• Keynote presentation
• Google Slides

1- SLIDEBEAN PRESENTATION SOFTWARE

Ease of use: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ - Fantastic!

Customization: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Good

Final result: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ - Fantastic!

Slidebean is an online presentation tool that uses artificial intelligence to design beautiful slides. Simply add content blocks to your presentation without worrying about formatting. Slidebean’s AI finds the best possible design for every element on your slide. This level of automation allows you to create a professional looking presentation in a fraction of the time it normally takes on PowerPoint.

When comparing it to PowerPoint, Slidebean’s interface is much easier to learn and work with, and it lets you create fantastic looking presentations really fast. The platform is web based and allows you to export to both PowerPoint and PDF format. It also lets you track viewer interactions and activity from people you share your slides with!

Slidebean also has a unique advantage which is a rich gallery of presentation outline templates. These are pre-filled decks that work for numerous purposes, like business proposals, classroom decks, thesis presentations and even startup pitch decks : all you need to do is import them and fill in your content.

You can sign up free for Slidebean here

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2- apple keynote.

Ease of use: ★ ★ ★ - OK

Customization: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ - Fantastic!

Final result: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Good

Keynote is what PowerPoint should have been all along. Apple's version of the popular presentation tool has improved significantly in the last few years, and has recently included a cloud version that works on any browser on any computer (as long as you have at least one Apple device).

Keynote is basically an improved PowerPoint, it offers the same approach to creating slides, but offers nice and clean customizable templates, a simple interface and great details like smart guides.

The biggest issue with Keynote is the long learning process that it requires. Similar to Microsoft's tool, you'll need to sit down for a few hours to learn to use the platform, and another larger set of hours to make a professional presentation.

More info about Apple Keynote is available here

Final result: ★ ★ ★ - OK

Visme is a web based platform for building presentations. Their familiar interface is similar to PowerPoint, but they have successfully simplified a complex UI to a nicer and more understandable navigation. Still, you'll need to spend a few hours to get a good grasp of where all the customization options can be found.

The platform offers an interesting (but certainly limited) gallery of images, but they succeed at delivering beautiful infographic elements (which they call ‘Charts and Graphs’) that you can use to add some color and make your slides much more dynamic.

You can read more about them here . ‍

4- GOOGLE SLIDES

Customization: ★ ★ - Passable

Google's version of PowerPoint is hosted as part of the Google Apps suite, that you can access from Google Drive or from Google Apps for Work. Sadly, their presentation builder feels like a limited version of PowerPoint, with less features, limited fonts and very little customization options.

Still, Google's platform is available for free, has a lot of integrations and probably one of the best online collaboration systems out there. Checking it out is easy, just visit your Google Drive.

You can find a more detailed review here .

5- FLOWVELLA

Ease of use: ★ ★ - Passable

Customization: ★ ★ ★ - OK

Flowvella is available on the Mac App Store as a desktop application. It provides a simple interface (certainly cleaner than Microsoft PowerPoint and somewhat similar to Apple Keynote) and some very nice design templates, which set good grounds so you can start building a nice looking set of slides on top of them. This is by far their biggest strength! If you want to start from scratch, however, you might feel a little lost creating something that looks good.

We found, however, that the oversimplified interface makes some basic options hard to find, like changing the color of a shape. Also, while running as a desktop app it still requires an Internet connection to download some elements, which can lead to a slower performance than a 100% desktop tool.

Update: We also read recently that they launched a tvOS app for the new AppleTV, making them, as far as we know, the first presentation tool to leverage the new platform.

You can find more details here .

Customization: ★ ★ ★ -

Pitch offers an innovative solution for fast-paced teams looking to quickly create effective, stylish presentations. With a combination of productivity features and design elements, Pitch makes it easy to get professional results—quickly

You can find more information about them here .

Final result: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Good!

The premise of Canva is an ‘amazingly easy graphic design software'. It lets you create anything from print design to banners and presentations. They provide an easy to use interface with a huge selection of pre-built designs that you can modify to your liking.

These pre-built elements let you quickly draft a nice presentation even if you have no design skills, but it does require you to drag and drop and arrange the content of your slide, which can become time consuming.

Canva has been gaining significant popularity in the last few years, especially after they hired Guy Kawasaki as a Chief Evangelist. Their platform is beautiful, you can find more about them here .

8- HAIKU DECK

Ease of use: ★ ★ ★ ★ - Very Good

Haiku Deck launched as an iPad app in 2011. They made a big bet towards mobile productivity and came up with a solid iPad application that allowed you to create slides in less time than the then-only alternative of Keynote for iOS.

Haiku Deck has a nice set of custom templates that you can use as a guideline for your slides, and their content input system is clear and easy to learn.

Still, we believe their approach that focused on mobile devices could only take them so far and they've since been working on a web version of their platform that works for any computer. As we mentioned, the personal computer continues to be a much more efficient productivity platform.

'Slides' is a nice website that lets you create and share presentations online. Formerly slides(dot)io and slid(dot)es, they finally settled for slides(dot)com. This startup was founded by Hakim El Hattab and Owen Bossola in Stockholm, Sweden, and it makes use of the reveal.js framework that we mentioned above.

Slides has a nice web interface that encourages you to create a nice and clean presentations, however, it still depends on the user’s ability to manipulate the elements and arrange them in a nice style. Still, their pre-defined formats and their grid system help guide you to a better result.

The platform also allows for custom HTML and CSS coding, which lets experienced users with coding skills, customize their templates even further.

Some more info about them here .

Ease of use: ★ - Bad

Prezi has been around for years and they have had a huge head start compared to any other online presentation tool out there. Their unique zoom styling makes it immediately obvious to the audience that they are looking at a Prezi deck.

Prezi has the advantage of allowing you to create really stunning interactive presentations if you know how to leverage their zoomable, infinite canvas. However, this can become a double edge sword if users overuse the feature and come up with a presentation that is literally capable of making people dizzy.

Still, Prezi's biggest weakness is on its ease of use. There's a long learning curve towards dominating their interface and even if you do, you need to be a designer to make a great presentation on the platform.

This is a huge company that is not going away anytime soon. With 50+ million users, they have proven the world wants and needs a PowerPoint alternative, and we have huge respect for them for doing so.

More information about them here .

Which one to pick?

In the world of presentation software, there's a big bunch to pick from. It's kind of like a crowded market with lots of options. And guess what? The best one for you might not even be on your radar.

Our list is here to help you out. We've put together this bunch of presentation software choices after digging into over 50 of them on the internet. We're here to give you the scoop on what's out there, so you can pick the one that suits you best.

Now, remember, presentation software is like your helper to make cool slideshows. These slideshows could be for showing stuff to people, like at school or work. These helpers, or software, should be good at a few things: putting words and pictures on slides, making things look nice, and showing your stuff in a cool way on a screen.

The options we've found have different things they're good at. Some use fancy computer thinking (AI) to make your slides look great without you doing much. Others let you customize your slides a lot, which is nice if you want them to look exactly like you want. And finally, how your slides look when you're done is super important too.

Picking the right presentation tool is a bit like picking the best tool for a job. You wouldn't use a hammer to write a story, right? So, whether you want something easy, something that lets you be creative, or something that gives you good results, our list has got you covered. Your choice will help you make cool presentations that people will remember. Our recommendation is to give Slidebean a try, but is up to you to consider the options. So, pick smart and happy presenting.

Try Slidebean

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This guide explores top companies like Slidebean, 4th and King, Slide Genius, Sketch Deck, and Canva, comparing their strengths, drawbacks, and pricing to help you make an informed decision. Discover why Slidebean is the industry’s preferred choice and the best pitch deck company.

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August 8, 2023

Michael C. McKay

Understanding Presentation Software: Definition and Real-Life Examples

allows users , create visually , their slides , users create , visually appealing , your presentation

Presentation software is a computer program or application that allows users to create and present visual aids, slideshows, and presentations. It is a powerful tool that combines design, technology, and software to enhance communication and engage audiences. The most well-known presentation software is PowerPoint, which is widely used in education, business, and other professional settings.

Presentation software provides a platform for users to create and organize slides and content. Users can add text, images, videos, charts, and other media elements to their slides, making their presentations visually appealing and informative. The software also offers various design templates and themes, allowing users to customize the look and feel of their presentations.

One of the key features of presentation software is its ability to display slideshows on external screens or projectors. Presenters can connect their computer to a projector or a large screen to showcase their presentations to a live audience. The software provides tools for navigating through slides, zooming in on specific content, and controlling the flow of the presentation.

In addition to offline programs, there are also online presentation software platforms available. These web-based tools allow users to create and share presentations online, eliminating the need for installation and providing easy access from any device with an internet connection. Online presentation software often includes collaboration features, enabling multiple users to work on a presentation simultaneously and share feedback in real-time.

Overall, presentation software is a valuable tool for creating and delivering engaging and professional presentations. Whether in a classroom, boardroom, or conference hall, this application enhances communication by combining visuals, text, and media to effectively convey information and captivate audiences.

• 1.1 Overview of Presentation Software
• 2.1 Slide Creation
• 2.2 Formatting Options
• 2.3 Interactive Elements
• 3.1 Microsoft PowerPoint
• 3.2 Google Slides
• 4.1 Visual Aid
• 4.2 Engagement
• 4.3 Efficiency
• 5 FAQ about topic “Understanding Presentation Software: Definition and Real-Life Examples”
• 6 What is presentation software?
• 7 What are some examples of presentation software?
• 8 What are the benefits of using presentation software?
• 9 Can presentation software be used for purposes other than making presentations?

What is Presentation Software?

Presentation software is an application or software tool that enables users to create and deliver visual presentations to an audience. It is commonly used in business, education, and other professional settings to convey information, ideas, and data through a combination of graphics, text, and media.

One of the most popular presentation software programs is Microsoft PowerPoint, which revolutionized the way presentations are created and delivered. It provides a user-friendly interface and a wide range of design templates and slide layouts to help users create visually appealing and engaging presentations.

Presentation software allows users to create slides that consist of text, images, charts, graphs, and other visual elements. These slides can be arranged in a logical sequence and displayed one by one using a projector or shared online.

With advancements in technology, presentation software has evolved to offer more features and capabilities. Many presentation software applications now include media integration, animation, and interactive elements to make presentations more dynamic and interactive.

Online presentation platforms have also become popular, allowing users to create and deliver presentations over the internet. These platforms offer cloud storage, collaboration features, and access from any device with an internet connection.

In summary, presentation software is a powerful tool for creating and delivering visual presentations. It provides users with the ability to design and organize slides, incorporate multimedia elements, and engage the audience with compelling visuals and content.

Overview of Presentation Software

Presentation software is a type of software that allows users to create and deliver multimedia presentations. It provides a platform for combining text, graphics , and other forms of media to create visually engaging slideshows. One of the most popular presentation software programs is PowerPoint , which is widely used in business, education, and other fields.

With presentation software , users can design and organize their slides to effectively convey information to an audience . Each slide can contain text, images, videos, charts, and other visual elements to enhance the message being presented. The software also provides tools for adding transitions between slides, animating objects, and incorporating audio to further engage the audience .

One of the key features of presentation software is its ability to create slides that can be projected onto a screen using a projector or displayed on individual devices via online platforms and technologies. This allows presenters to deliver their presentations to large or small groups, whether in a classroom, conference room, or remote location.

Whether you are a student, business professional, or educator, presentation software is a valuable tool for creating engaging and informative slideshows. It provides a user-friendly interface and a wide range of features to help you organize, design, and deliver your presentation effectively. By leveraging the power of technology and visual storytelling, presentation software allows you to communicate your ideas and messages in a compelling and memorable way.

Features of Presentation Software

Presentation software is a powerful tool that allows users to create visually stunning and interactive presentations. With the advent of online platforms, presentation software has become even more accessible and easy to use. Whether you are presenting in front of a room full of people or sharing your presentation virtually, presentation software offers a variety of features to engage your audience.

One of the most important features of presentation software is the ability to create visually appealing slides. This includes the option to choose from a wide range of pre-designed templates or to create your own custom design. With the help of graphics, colors, and fonts, you can make your presentation stand out and capture the attention of your audience.

Another key feature of presentation software is the ability to add multimedia elements to your slides. This can include images, videos, and audio files, which can help to enhance the overall impact of your presentation. By incorporating multimedia elements, you can make your presentation more engaging and memorable.

Presentation software also offers various tools for organizing and structuring your content. This includes the ability to create and rearrange slides, add transitions and animations, and incorporate interactive elements such as quizzes and polls. These features can help to create a more dynamic and interactive presentation.

One of the defining features of presentation software is the integration with other applications and technologies. For example, many presentation software platforms allow you to import and export slides from other applications such as PowerPoint. This enables users to work across different platforms and collaborate with others.

Whether you are presenting in a boardroom or using a projector in a conference hall, presentation software provides the flexibility to adapt to different presentation environments. This includes the ability to adjust the size and resolution of your slides to fit the screen, as well as the option to present in fullscreen mode for a more immersive experience.

In summary, presentation software is a versatile tool that allows users to create visually engaging and interactive presentations. With features such as customizable designs, multimedia integration, organizational tools, and compatibility with other applications, presentation software is an essential tool for effective communication and presentation in today’s digital age.

Slide Creation

Slide creation is one of the main features of presentation software. It allows users to design and create visual slides that are used to present information to an audience. With the help of presentation software, users can easily create slides by adding text, graphics, and media elements such as images and videos. The program provides a platform for users to organize and structure their content in a visually appealing way.

When creating slides, users have the option to choose from a variety of pre-designed templates or create their own custom designs. Many presentation software applications, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, offer a wide range of built-in slide templates that users can customize to fit their needs. These templates provide a starting point for users to create their slides and help them maintain a consistent design throughout their presentation.

Furthermore, slide creation tools often include features that allow users to enhance their slides with animations, transitions, and multimedia elements. For example, users can add slide animations to make the content appear more engaging and visually appealing. They can also insert audio or video files to incorporate media into their slides. Presentation software typically provides a user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality, making it easy for users to organize and arrange their slides in a logical sequence.

During a presentation, slides are typically displayed on a projector or large screen using the presentation software’s slideshow mode. This enables the presenter to deliver the content to the audience in a visually appealing and structured manner. With the advancement of technology, many presentation software also offer online platforms where users can create and share their slides. This allows users to collaborate with others and access their slides from any device with an internet connection.

Formatting Options

When using presentation software, there are various formatting options available to enhance the visual appeal of your slides. These options allow you to create professional and engaging presentations that effectively communicate your message. Here are some formatting options commonly found in presentation software such as PowerPoint.

• Themes: Themes provide a set of pre-designed visuals that can be applied to your slides, offering a cohesive and professional look to your presentation. Themes may include color schemes, font styles, and background designs.
• Templates: Templates are pre-designed slide layouts that can be customized with your own content. They save time and effort by providing a structure for your presentation, while also ensuring a consistent design throughout.
• Transitions: Transitions are the visual effects that occur when moving between slides. They add a dynamic element to your presentation and can help maintain audience engagement. Popular transition options include fades, slides, and flips.
• Animations: Animations allow you to add movement to individual elements within a slide. They can be used to highlight important points or create visual interest. Animations can include entrance effects, exit effects, and emphasis effects.
• Fonts: Fonts play a crucial role in the overall design of your presentation. Presentation software often offers a variety of font options to choose from, including different sizes, styles, and colors. It’s important to select fonts that are readable and appropriate for your content.
• Graphics: Graphics can be incorporated into your slides to enhance visual appeal and convey information effectively. Presentation software may provide tools for inserting and customizing graphical elements such as images, charts, diagrams, and icons.
• Arrangement: The arrangement of your slides can greatly impact the flow of your presentation. Presentation software usually allows you to reorder slides, create sections, and group slides together based on content or themes. This can help you organize your presentation and make it easier for your audience to follow along.

These formatting options, among others, contribute to the versatility and creative capabilities of presentation software. Whether you’re using a desktop program, an online platform, or a mobile application, the availability of such formatting options allows you to create visually appealing and engaging presentations that effectively communicate your message to your audience.

Interactive Elements

Interactive elements are a crucial component of a presentation to engage the audience. These elements can be incorporated into various slides and design layouts using presentation software applications. Through the use of interactive elements, presenters can create a dynamic and captivating presentation experience.

One popular interactive element is the inclusion of multimedia, such as videos or audio clips. This can be achieved by embedding media files into the slides, allowing the audience to directly interact with the content. Additionally, interactive elements like hyperlinks can be used to navigate between different slides or external sources, enhancing the overall flow and accessibility of the presentation.

Interactive elements can also be used to foster collaboration and audience participation. Polls, quizzes, or surveys can be integrated into the presentation software, enabling real-time feedback and interaction with the audience. This not only keeps the audience engaged but also provides valuable insights for the presenter.

Furthermore, presentation software provides various interactive tools and features that allow presenters to create visually appealing and interactive slides. These tools may include drag-and-drop functionality, animation effects, or interactive charts and diagrams. By utilizing these tools, presenters can enhance the visual appeal of their slides and create an engaging experience for the audience.

With the advancements in technology, presentation software has evolved to include online platforms and cloud-based solutions. These platforms enable real-time collaboration and interaction, allowing multiple presenters or participants to contribute to the presentation simultaneously. This fosters teamwork and enhances the overall interactive experience for both presenters and audience members.

In summary, interactive elements play a vital role in presentation software, allowing presenters to create engaging and dynamic presentations. These elements provide opportunities for audience interaction, multimedia integration, and collaboration. By utilizing these interactive features, presenters can captivate their audience and deliver impactful presentations.

Popular Presentation Software Examples

There are several popular presentation software examples available that offer a wide range of features and capabilities to create visually appealing slides. These platforms provide tools to design attractive presentations using graphics, media, and interactive features.

PowerPoint: Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most widely used presentation software applications. It offers a variety of templates and slide layouts to create professional and engaging presentations. With PowerPoint, users can easily insert visuals, graphics, and multimedia elements to enhance their slides.

Prezi: Prezi is an online presentation tool that allows users to create dynamic and non-linear presentations. It offers a unique zooming feature that allows presenters to navigate through different slides and sections, providing an engaging experience for the audience. Prezi also provides a wide range of templates and design options to create visually appealing presentations.

Google Slides: Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation software that allows users to collaborate and create presentations online. It offers a range of templates, themes, and design options to create professional-looking slides. Google Slides also allows users to easily share and present their slides with others, making it a popular choice for team collaborations.

Keynote: Keynote is a presentation software developed by Apple for Mac users. It offers a variety of themes, transitions, and animations to create visually stunning presentations. Keynote also allows users to collaborate and share their presentations with others using iCloud, providing seamless access across devices.

These presentation software examples offer powerful tools and features to create visually appealing and engaging presentations. Whether it’s for business, education, or personal use, these platforms provide the necessary tools to captivate and inform the audience with effective visuals and designs.

Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation software program developed by Microsoft. It is a powerful tool that allows users to create and deliver presentations using a computer and a projector. PowerPoint provides a platform for designing and presenting visual and media-rich presentations that captivate the audience.

With PowerPoint, users can create slideshows that include text, images, videos, audio, and other media. This software application offers a wide range of features and tools to customize the design and layout of slides, including transitions, animations, and effects. Users can also add charts, tables, and graphs to present data and information in a visually appealing and easy-to-understand way.

One of the key advantages of Microsoft PowerPoint is its user-friendly interface and easy-to-use features. It enables users to create professional-looking presentations without the need for advanced design skills or coding knowledge. With PowerPoint’s drag-and-drop functionality and pre-designed templates, anyone can quickly create a visually impressive presentation.

In addition, Microsoft PowerPoint offers online collaboration features, allowing multiple users to work on a presentation simultaneously. This makes it easy for teams to collaborate on projects and share their ideas and feedback. PowerPoint also allows users to save their presentations in various formats, making it accessible across different devices and operating systems.

In summary, Microsoft PowerPoint is a widely used software application for creating and delivering presentations. Its intuitive interface, powerful features, and flexibility make it a preferred choice for individuals, students, educators, and professionals who want to communicate their ideas effectively and engage their audience.

Google Slides

Google Slides is an online presentation software that allows users to create, edit, and present slides using a web browser. It is a powerful tool for creating visually engaging presentations that can be easily shared with an audience.

With Google Slides, users can create professional-looking slides with a wide range of graphics, including images, charts, and diagrams. The application provides a variety of templates and themes to choose from, making it easy to create visually appealing presentations.

One of the advantages of using Google Slides is its online platform, which allows for easy collaboration and sharing of presentations. Users can work on a presentation simultaneously with others, making it ideal for group projects or team presentations.

Google Slides also integrates seamlessly with other Google products, such as Google Drive and Google Docs, allowing users to easily import and embed media from these platforms into their presentations. This makes it easy to incorporate videos, images, and other multimedia elements into a presentation.

In conclusion, Google Slides is a powerful presentation software that provides users with a wide range of tools and features to create visually appealing and engaging presentations. Its online platform and integration with other Google products make it a versatile and convenient choice for both individual and collaborative presentations.

Prezi is a presentation software that offers a unique approach to creating and delivering presentations. Unlike traditional presentation programs like PowerPoint, Prezi allows users to create dynamic and interactive presentations that engage the audience and tell a story.

With Prezi, users can design their presentations on a single canvas, zooming in and out to highlight different elements and create visual connections between ideas. This non-linear approach to presentation design allows for a more fluid and engaging experience for the audience.

Prezi can be accessed online, making it a convenient and versatile platform for creating and sharing presentations. Users can create, edit, and present their slides from anywhere with an internet connection, which is especially useful for remote or team collaborations.

One of the key advantages of Prezi is its emphasis on visuals and graphics. Users can easily add images, videos, and other media to enhance their presentations and make them more visually appealing. The software also offers a variety of templates and customization options to help users create professional-looking slides.

With its innovative technology and user-friendly interface, Prezi has become a popular choice for individuals and businesses looking to create engaging and interactive presentations. Whether it’s a sales pitch, a training session, or a conference talk, Prezi offers a dynamic and visually impressive way to captivate and inform the audience.

Benefits of Using Presentation Software

Enhanced visuals: Presentation software allows you to create visually appealing slides using graphics, images, and videos. These visual elements help to capture the audience’s attention and make the presentation more engaging.

Easy design: Presentation software provides user-friendly tools and templates that make it easy to design professional-looking slides. You can choose from a variety of themes, layouts, and fonts to create a visually cohesive and attractive presentation.

Wide application: Presentation software can be used in various settings, including business meetings, educational presentations, and even personal projects. It is a versatile platform that allows you to customize your slides to fit the specific needs of your audience.

Online accessibility: With the advancement of technology, many presentation software programs offer online platforms. This enables you to create and access your presentation from anywhere, making it convenient for collaboration and remote presentations.

Real-time edits: Presentation software allows you to make real-time edits to your slides. This means that you can easily modify the content, rearrange the order of slides, or add new elements during a presentation, without interrupting the flow of your presentation.

Integration with multimedia: Presentation software seamlessly integrates with multimedia elements such as videos, audio, and interactive media. This allows you to enhance your presentation with rich media content, making it more dynamic and engaging for your audience.

Compatibility with projectors: Presentation software is compatible with projectors, making it easy to display your slides on a larger screen for a larger audience. This feature is especially beneficial for presentations in conferences, classrooms, or large meeting rooms.

Visual aids are an integral part of presentations and serve as a powerful tool to enhance audience engagement and understanding. PowerPoint, an online program commonly used to create presentations, offers a variety of features that allow presenters to design visually appealing slides.

With the help of PowerPoint or any other presentation software application, presenters can easily incorporate multimedia elements, such as images, videos, and audio, into their slides, creating a visually appealing and dynamic presentation. These visual aids help to captivate the audience’s attention and provide additional information and context to the presenter’s message.

Using presentation software as a visual aid also allows presenters to organize their content in a structured and logical manner. The use of different slide layouts, themes, and templates makes it easier to present information in a clear and visually appealing way.

Moreover, presentation software provides tools for adding graphics, visuals, and animations to the slides, making it easier to convey complex ideas or data to the audience. Presenters can emphasize key points or highlight important information through the use of visuals and animations, ensuring that the audience stays engaged and follows the presentation.

Visual aids can also be used in conjunction with technology such as projectors to display the presentation slides on a larger screen, making it easier for the audience to see and understand the content being presented. This combination of technology and visuals enhances the overall impact of the presentation and ensures that the audience can fully experience and comprehend the information being shared.

Engagement is a vital aspect of any presentation, and presentation software serves as a valuable tool in achieving it. With the advancements in technology, online presentation software has made it easier for presenters to captivate their audience through visually appealing design and interactive features.

One of the definitions of engagement in the context of presentation software is the ability to hold the attention of the audience and create a meaningful connection. The use of tools like projectors and PowerPoint programs allows presenters to project their slides onto a larger screen, making it easier for the audience to follow along and stay engaged.

Engaging presentations often include multimedia elements such as graphics, videos, and interactive features. Presentation software provides a platform for presenters to create visually stunning slides that enhance the overall message and captivate the audience’s attention.

Additionally, online presentation software enables presenters to easily collaborate with others, allowing for seamless teamwork and the creation of more engaging presentations. Presenters can share their work with others, receive feedback, and make improvements, all within the same software application.

Overall, engagement in presentations is crucial for conveying information effectively and keeping the audience interested. Presentation software provides the necessary tools and features to create captivating slides that enhance engagement and make presentations more impactful.

In the world of presentations, efficiency plays a crucial role. Presentation software is designed to streamline the process of creating and delivering presentations, making it easier and faster for presenters to communicate their ideas to an audience.

Thanks to advancements in technology, presentation software has evolved from traditional offline tools like PowerPoint to online platforms and applications. This shift to online presentation tools has allowed for greater flexibility and accessibility, as presenters can now create, edit, and share their presentations from anywhere with an internet connection.

One of the key advantages of using presentation software is its ability to enhance visuals and deliver impactful messages. With features like slide templates, graphics, and media integration, presenters can create captivating and engaging presentations that grab the attention of their audience.

Furthermore, presentation software provides a structured format that guides presenters through their content, ensuring a cohesive and organized flow. Presenters can easily arrange their slides, add transitions, and incorporate multimedia elements to enhance their overall message.

Additionally, presentation software allows presenters to present their slides on a variety of devices, from laptops and tablets to projectors and large screens. This versatility allows for seamless integration with different presentation environments and enhances the overall effectiveness of the presentation.

In conclusion, presentation software is a powerful tool that helps presenters create and deliver engaging presentations efficiently. Its diverse range of features and capabilities make it an invaluable resource for anyone looking to communicate their ideas effectively to an audience.

FAQ about topic “Understanding Presentation Software: Definition and Real-Life Examples”

What is presentation software.

Presentation software is a computer program that allows users to create and display visual presentations. It provides tools and features for designing slides, adding text and images, and incorporating multimedia elements such as videos and animations. The software allows presenters to organize and structure their content in a visually appealing and professional manner.

What are some examples of presentation software?

Some examples of presentation software include Microsoft PowerPoint, Apple Keynote, Google Slides, Prezi, and Adobe Spark. These programs offer a wide range of features and templates to help users create dynamic and engaging presentations.

What are the benefits of using presentation software?

Using presentation software has several benefits. Firstly, it allows presenters to create visually engaging slides that can capture the audience’s attention. Secondly, it provides tools for organizing and structuring content, making it easier for presenters to communicate their ideas effectively. Thirdly, it allows for the incorporation of multimedia elements, such as videos and animations, which can enhance the overall presentation experience. Finally, presentation software often offers features for collaboration, allowing multiple users to work on a presentation simultaneously.

Can presentation software be used for purposes other than making presentations?

Yes, presentation software can be used for purposes other than making presentations. For example, it can be used to create interactive educational materials, such as tutorials or e-learning modules. It can also be used to design product demos or prototypes. Additionally, some people use presentation software to create visual resumes or portfolios to showcase their work. The versatility of presentation software makes it a valuable tool for various creative and professional projects.

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13+ Best Presentation Software to Bid Farewell to PowerPoint

Renderforest Staff

07 Dec 2023

11 min read  

Attention, all presenters, innovators, and knowledge sharers! Brace yourselves, because the era of boring and forgettable presentations is officially over. 

We all know that presentations are the beating heart of every business, work endeavor, and educational pursuit. And let’s face it, captivating your audience is an art form that can make or break your success.

Plain slides filled with text and bullet points will no longer do the job! To grab your audience’s attention, you need to shake things up a little.  

Luckily, we’ve done the legwork and compiled the ultimate list of the best presentation software in one place to help you make creative and captivating presentations.

No more dull slides. No more snooze-fest presentations.

By the time you’ll have finished reading this article, you’ll have discovered: 

• The 13 best online presentation tools to upgrade your presentations – their advantages and disadvantages. 
• How does each software compare to PowerPoint, and what are their unique features? 
• How to use each software to convert your ideas into strong narratives and keep your audience hooked. 

Consider these presentation software gems as your trusty sidekicks, ready to transform your ideas into captivating narratives that will leave your audience begging for more.

So buckle up and join us as we explore each presentation software individually, unveiling the best presentation software for your unique needs. Let’s dive right in!

The Finest Online Presentation Tools to Try Now!

Imagine you have an important project coming up, and you need to create a cool presentation to share your ideas with others within a short amount of time. Instead of just plain slides, you can make your presentation awesome by using some really impressive online presentation tools – tools you may not have heard of before. 

These tools make it easy to add pictures and videos and make your slides look super interesting as they take your regular presentation and turn it into something that will make everyone go, “Wow!” 

So, let’s check out some of the best presentation software you can try right now to make your presentations stand out!

1. Renderforest

You can use Renderforest’s slideshow video maker online and completely free of charge to create videos, branding, presentations, and graphics. 

If you upgrade to the lite version, you can enjoy an early-stage growth boost plan for promotional and explainer videos, powerful presentations, and graphics.

Now, if you choose to have the Pro plan, you can make use of advanced growth tools, the highest quality videos, outstanding designs, and a professional website.

For much larger projects, the Business plan gives you advanced-level solutions for teams and businesses to deliver high-end results for your campaigns.

The presentation software goes beyond the ordinary by providing you with a treasure trove of ready-made presentation templates that cater to every occasion, from personal projects to business endeavors. With just a few clicks, you can unlock a realm of visually stunning designs that are guaranteed to captivate your audience from the very first slide.

Extended Template Library

Whether you’re seeking to dazzle clients, engage students, or simply impress your peers, Renderforest has your back with an extensive library of slideshow video templates . From mesmerizing 3D animations to sleek corporate slideshows and whiteboard animations, the possibilities are limitless.

EXPLORE MORE!

Pre-Made Color Palettes

Give yourself a break from doing all the work of finding the perfect font and color palette for your presentation. Renderforest provides you with a large selection of ready-to-use, pre-designed sets that give your presentation a modern and professional look. 

All color palettes align with the main design principles, so you can rest assured that your presentation is aligned. 

Go to the left-side editor in your presentation template, open the color and font sections and click on your favorite mix.

GIFs, Stickers, Icons, and So Much More

Renderforest presentations are like a magic toolbox for making your presentations extra awesome. With it, you can do way more than just stick to regular pictures and words. 

One of the best presentation software out there, Renderforest lets you sprinkle some fun into your slides by adding GIFs, which are short, moving pictures that can make your points pop! Not just that, you can throw in stickers and icons to make things more lively and interesting. 

All of these elements help you show your ideas without even saying a word. 

Renderforest gives you all these tools to help you turn your presentation into a masterpiece that everyone will remember!

Premium Images

With Renderforest, you can access a treasure trove of amazing pictures through a royalty-free premium stock images library.

These are high-quality images that you can use in your presentations without worrying about any copyright stuff. It’s like having a secret stash of amazing pictures at your fingertips.

But here’s the exciting part – you can also bring pictures to the party! So, if you have some awesome photos you took on a family trip or nice shots you found on the internet. You can toss them into your presentation as well.

Ultimately, you have your gallery of pictures that makes your presentation uniquely yours. With Renderforest, you’re not just limited to what it provides – you can mix and match to create a presentation that tells your story in your style!

Prezi is offered in three different subscription tiers, including access to all three main parts of the suite – Prezi Video, Prezi Design, and Prezi Present.

Prezi’s Standard plan costs just $5 per month, the Plus plan costs $15 per month, and the Premium plan costs $19 per month.

The presentation software is built from the ground up to remove as many of the traditional limitations imposed by web applications as possible and enable users to create stunning, rich presentations with minimal effort and design skills.

It doesn’t take long to get used to how Prezi works and where everything is located, including some of the more advanced features of the application.

Its price is quite attractive compared to most of its competition, too, making Prezi a great offer for you in general!

General Overview

Prezi is a feature-rich online presentation suite that aims to enable anyone to create stunning presentations, including those without any in-depth knowledge of design and related practices.

It comes with various advanced tools that can help you do pretty much anything you want with your presentation, and it doesn’t take a lot of time to get used to how everything works.

It’s important to note that Prezi does have some minor flaws in its UI, but those are mostly limited to features that aren’t used that often to begin with.

There are three main tiers to Canva subscriptions. You can use it completely free to design anything, on your own or in collaboration with others, and you can choose from 250,000+ templates.

However, there are a lot of wonderful templates that are labeled as premium, as well as the option to integrate your own Brand Kit, which can only be accessed when you upgrade to the Pro plan at $12.99 USD/month.

Canva for Teams includes all the features of Canva Pro but also allows large teams to collaborate easily and efficiently together, and it is priced at $29.99 USD/month. 

The key selling point of Canva is how easy it is to use, even for people with no design background. It offers a range of design options, from social media posts to presentations, all in one place.

You can create professional-looking presentations at the tip of your fingers, especially with the newly released Magic Media™ apps that use AI to help you create consistent imagery.

Instead of wasting precious time scrolling through image libraries,you can try some of the AI image generator apps in the Canva Apps Marketplace. Simply type what you’d like to see, and watch it come to life.

Canva works as a web-based tool, so you don’t have to download it. It offers many ready-to-use templates and design elements like fonts, images, and illustrations.

You can either start from scratch or use these templates to create various designs, including social media graphics, presentations, flyers, and more. It also allows for collaboration, enabling multiple people to work on a project simultaneously.

Once you sign up, you can create designs by selecting a template or starting from scratch. You can then customize your design using the drag-and-drop editor, where you can easily add and adjust text, images, shapes, and other elements.

So, whether you’re one of the many small business owners, marketers, bloggers, or creative freelancers—Canva has something for everyone!

4. Google Slides

There are free trials available. For Personal and Free Business Starter plans, it is priced at $6 USD/month per user, for Business Standard, it is priced at $12 USD/month per user, while for Business Plus, it is priced at $18 USD/month.

Enterprises can contact Google to find out about pricing details for their needs.

Google Slides is very handy if many slideshows are required for certain projects. The presentation software acts as an easier alternative to PowerPoint because you don’t need to download anything in order to use Slides.

It’s as easy as going online and opening the program, while with PowerPoint, you need to download the program to start using it.

Google Slides is a cloud-based office suite that helps create, edit, and collaborate on presentations. It has features like themes and fonts, embedded videos, animations, and transitions.

The presentation software lets users create personalized presentations using ready-to-use templates with custom fonts and styles, color schemes, animations, transitions, and background images. If you’re a larget team, you can also upload files from Google Drive or Dropbox.

5. Microsoft Sway

Microsoft Sway is free to use for anyone with a Microsoft Account (Hotmail, Live, or Outlook.com).

This presentation tool dynamically adapts online to any screen and can be shared or co-edited with a URL.

It is best for people who are too occupied with work to spend time creating presentations, as it literally helps produce interactive reports, newsletters, presentations, and other personal stories in a matter of minutes, thanks to the help of AI.

Sway helps create presentations and other documentation in minutes by adding photos, videos, and other multimedia.

It’s connected to the Microsoft account, so the users can easily add files from OneDrive, or turn their Word or OneNote documents into a dynamic Sway.

6. Beautiful.ai

The Pro plan is for individuals and is priced at $12 USD/month. The Team plan is for team collaborations and starts at $40 USD/month, while the Enterprise plan boasts advanced security, support and control and require you to contact the sales team to get a quote.

Beautiful.ai saves you time and provides everything necessary for making great presentations.

You can use the right colors, font, and logo every time with its foolproof features, and when you sign up, the presentation software unlocks millions of modern images and icons that reflect your own brand guidelines. What else could you ask for?

With the Team Plan, you can also control your brand from one account and scale productivity across all departments of your organization.

Beautiful.ai is an AI presentation maker you can use to visualize your ideas easily. It offers 50+ beautifully designed customizable templates that are enhanced with presentation design best practices to keep your projects professional and clean. Besides, you can find and add stock images and icons from the image library.

7. Keynote (for Mac users)

The software comes free with most Apple devices.

This interactive business presentation software allows you to create engaging and dynamic slides, add charts and graphs to them, edit photos, and add effects to sharpen your project.

Now, you can remove backgrounds from supported images a lot more easily. You can even remove live videos or adjust them accordingly.

The software also lets you know when people join, edit, or comment on your collaborative presentations and lets you get in touch with your team using Messages and FaceTime.

Apple Keynote is the most successful competitor of PowerPoint among other Mac free presentation software solutions.

Access your presentations either online with iCloud, with a mobile app, or download a desktop version for Mac.

8. Haiku Deck

The Edu plan starts at $5 USD/month, Pro at $10 USD/month, and the Volume plan is at $100 USD/month.

Haiku Deck helps you focus on one idea at a time, letting you choose a powerful image from a library of 40M+ royalty-free photos and applying consistent formatting across your presentation in just one click.

All presentations you create with this software are hosted online and allow for easy audio narration recording and the ability to save as videos or export to PowerPoint/Keynote format for offline viewing and editing.

Haiku Deck is labeled as the “Instagram for pitch decks” by Mashable, for a good reason!

Even if you’re not a designer, the software helps you deliver presentations that connect with your listeners, spice up your social media feed, illustrate your blog, promote your product, inspire a movement, and more. It is centered around the best practices that presentation experts are after.

You can quickly design slides that don’t look like PowerPoint, and you can find related pictures to your keywords.

You can even view what other designs people have done on the same topic and use it as inspiration for your own presentation.

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9. Slidebean

The Slidebean All-Access Advanced plan for founders starts at $149 USD/year, and this includes features such as pitch deck templates, unlimited fundraising kit, sharing and exporting decks, and tracking presentation views.

There is also the Slidebean Incorporation plan at $649 USD/year, which includes everything in the All-Access Advanced plan but allows businesses to incorporate their company in the US.

Slidebean offers everything you need for a successful creation process – images, icons, fonts, to name a few.

It is very easy to use and has beautiful graphic design elements. Even if you’re not a graphic designer, Slidebean makes your presentations look great.

It also helps you create pitch decks. Through its advanced analytics section, individuals can see which investors viewed their decks and how long they viewed each slide or whether the investor finished the deck, which is very helpful information to have on hand.

Slidebean is an easy-to-use and simple presentation software that provides professional templates to present your ideas with simple styling features.

Its target market includes startups, marketers, and small and medium-sized businesses that are trying to get their powerful ideas across to professional thinkers.

Streamline the process with the help of integrated automation features. Choose the templates depending on your field to simplify the creation even more. You can see insights into how users interact with the slides.

Visme is an all-in-one online presentation maker that offers custom, high-quality templates. Pick a template and customize it according to your needs, or create a presentation from scratch.

The tool offers 50+ charts and other data visualization tools, 120+ custom fonts, stock images, and vector icons. You can add website links, emails, and pop-ups. When your presentation is ready, share it online, embed it on your website, or download it.

11. SlideDog

There are 3 plans available. The first is $19/month per 2 seats, billed monthly, and you can cancel anytime. You also have a yearly plan at $99/month (1st year) per 2 seats, $79 2nd year with a 20% renewal discount. The last option is a lifetime purchase of $299 per 2 seats, where you only pay once and can access it forever.

SlideDog is a presentation software that lets its users create playlists from presentation files and easily switch between them.

The features include real-time sharing, interactive elements, and remote control with various devices to streamline the presentation process.

12. Zoho Show

Zoho Show is completely free for individuals, while larger teams and organizations are billed $2.70 USD/month.

The tool can be used by those who need to tell a story, such as educators, authors, and business owners, helping them create and publish presentations with stunning visuals in a short period.

Choose from a variety of integrated themes designed to fit all kinds of needs. Make your slides more interactive by adding transitions and animation, using charts, tables, images, videos, and more.

Zoho Show is a dedicated online presentation tool, simplistic and easily customizable. From creating and collaborating to broadcasting and publishing, you will surely find solutions to your every need.

The tool is also available on mobile devices. To access your presentations remotely on your smartphone, simply download the app and log in.

It also lets you import your existing PPTX, PPT, ODP, PPSX, and PPS files and edit them without any formatting issues.

Gamma offers three pricing plans. Upon signing up, you get 400 credits to test the Free plan with various features and create a few documents.

The Plus plan starts at $8/month, and you get to gain access to additional features like PDF export.

The Pro plan starts at $16/month, and you receive unlimited AI creation and advanced AI models.

Gamma takes just one prompt and a bit of refining to produce a beautiful presentation.

It uses the chatbot to improve existing slides, and you can incorporate live websites and applications into your presentations. It’s a great way to demonstrate your ideas in real time.

This is an opportunity to monitor how your creations perform and if they have the ability to engage your audience.

Gamma is an AI-powered tool that lets you create impressive and engaging presentations for anyone.

Besides creating your presentations, it also offers a great editing experience where you can improve your work simply by interacting with an AI chatbot.

There is a free trial available. The Personal plan for teams of up to 15 people starts at $14.99 USD/month, and the Enterprise plan for teams of 16 people and over requires you to contact Ludus directly for a quote.

Other than being incredibly easy to use, this tool is very intuitive, and presentations can be customized as you play around with unique fonts, drawings, code, interesting transitions, and much more.

Ludus combines creativity with simplicity. Ludus is more than a presentation tool; it is also a tool for communicating, collaborating, learning, and playing.

The presentation software has many features that designers are already familiar with. You can create anything without limitations, from fonts and graphics to blending modes.

It also allows you to integrate with Unsplash, GIPHY, Dropbox, Google Drive, etc., so you can add anything you want.

Ludus is a tool that allows you to create presentations with unlimited creative possibilities.

This presentation software will solve your problems regarding sharing, compatibility, collaboration, creativity, and more.

It is recommended for everyone to use, especially for creatives and designers. Everyone can use it, too, but it has a bit of a learning curve that is worth the time if you want to use it properly.

This app might be the solution to the problems that our presentation tools have nowadays. It is not restrictive, so you can let your imagination run wild and express your creativity.

This presentation tool is affordable, especially for big teams. With remote work on the rise, Ludus is a great presentation assistant to have nearby.

Still Looking for the Best Presentation Software?

And there you have it. The 13+ best presentation software that you should bear in mind if you’re thinking of trying something a little bit different to the software you’re used to hearing about all the time – PowerPoint.

Each software has its benefits, but if you’re aiming for presentation software that offers a blend of creativity, versatility, and user-friendly features, Renderforest stands out as your go-to choice.

With a vast library of templates and the ability to add GIFs, stickers, icons, and even your own images, Renderforest empowers users to create visually stunning and uniquely personalized presentations.

Renderforest also provides different pricing plans, including a free option, making it accessible regardless of your need and budget.

So, stop wasting hours of your life trying to create your presentations manually and with predictable designs, and start taking your presentations to the next level with Renderforest, your ultimate presentation companion that goes beyond the ordinary!

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The 11 Best Presentation Software to Use in 2024

The ability to effectively share ideas, illustrate a concept, and convince an audience is invaluable whether you’re a student or a C-level executive. These days, the presentation software you use to create presentations is just as important as your public-speaking skills.

On top of that, most companies have transitioned to remote work recently due to the current coronavirus situation, and now need to share their stories online through a virtual conference room with their distributed teams and external audience members.

That’s why we’ve come up with a list of some of the best presentation software available right now, so you can choose a compatible and innovative presentation maker that includes the best presentation tools to suit your specific needs.

Choose the best presentation software by weighing the pros and cons

You’ll see some of the most popular presentation apps: from free to paid subscription platforms, and slideshow applications to full-blown visual design presentation software with interactive features and more.

Each presentation software has its pros and cons, so it’s up to you to figure out which suits your needs best; consider the software learning curve, whether your company is made up of Mac users or Windows users and the software compatibility, if you need an enterprise account or free account, etc.

Let’s dive in!

1. Piktochart

Piktochart is a presentation software that can create a variety of design visuals, from infographics to social media stories.

An area in which Piktochart shines is crafting unique presentations. 

On Piktochart, users can choose from a wide range of professionally-designed presentation templates .

These custom templates include everything from monthly marketing reports to employee onboarding templates.

This broad selection of customizable templates is especially useful for those who don’t have much design experience or know-how but need to create a visually stunning unique presentation in a pinch. 

Piktochart’s presentation maker also makes it easy to edit presentations and include design elements such as lists, timelines, comparisons, graphs, and different types of charts through drag-and-drop tools.

You can even make visual maps and interactive charts to keep your audience engaged throughout your presentation. 

And if your company uses a Piktochart TEAM plan , you can enjoy the platform’s ability to store brand assets , color schemes, and bespoke templates. Here, replicating company-branded visuals is a breeze. 

Piktochart comes with a free version but with certain limitations. Active visuals are capped at five per month and published visuals have a Piktochart watermark.

If you want features such as team template collaboration, project sharing, and annotated commenting, you’ll have to get a Team account. To sum it up:

• Lots of professionally-designed templates 
• Good for both design professionals and non-professionals 
• Easy to store brand assets and bespoke templates for future presentations
• Access presentation tools from anywhere via a web browser
• Free presentation app version available
• Might take some getting used to if you’re used to PowerPoint presentations

2. Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is often the first presentation software that comes to mind.

Once considered the “O.G.” and best presentation software available, it is still widely used and has a familiar interface—which means most users are comfortable with it. 

This presentation app has everything you need to create a presentation: from animated transitions for interactive presentations to pre-installed fonts and graphic elements.

Users can also upload their own fonts, graphics, and images into their finished presentation.

Lastly, it’s available as part of the Microsoft Office software package; and you can work on your presentations via the web and mobile devices, for offline viewing as well as online. 

However, PowerPoint is no longer considered the best presentation software, as it has very few templates to choose from, and these tend to fall quite flat compared to modern apps and software.

It’s easy to fall back into boring slideshow PowerPoint files if you don’t know what you’re doing.

And because most people use PowerPoint, you’re likely using the same template as the next guy. 

As standalone presentation software, PowerPoint is pricey at US$139.99—and accessible through only one device unless you upgrade your package.

And while PowerPoint is primarily a slideshow application and presentation maker, its strengths are limited to this category. 

So if you’re looking for the best presentation software, and bang for your buck for a robust presentation tool, you might want to look elsewhere. 

• Market leader in slideshow applications to create slides
• Widely used and familiar interface for the presentation process
• Reliable and usable on most devices as well as being a desktop app
• Flat templates
• Limitations with its standalone-presentation software price

3. Google Slides

Google Slides is a slideshow application that is very similar to PowerPoint.  But there are three main differences: it’s fully online (while also allowing for offline viewing), collaborative, and free. 

The great thing about Google Slides (besides the fact that it’s completely free for anyone with a Google account) is that you can log on via your browser or through its official app. 

You can access all Google Slides presentations from any device (mobile, tablet, and desktop), and share them with other people so you can collaborate in real-time. 

Google Drive allows all your presentations to live on the cloud, accessible to all marketing and sales teams, with unparalleled ease of use.

And there’s no need to worry about disruptions as all changes are saved as they happen, as long as you have an active internet connection. 

Additionally, anyone familiar with PowerPoint will be comfortable using Google’s iteration and likely be delighted by Google Drive and the slide library available. 

It’s also a lot simpler, so even those new to presentation-making will find it easy to navigate. 

However, some might find Google Slides too simple as it lacks the wealth of features available on PowerPoint. 

These include embedding videos from sources other than YouTube, plus adding audio tracks and sound effects, limiting the ability to create unique interactive presentations. 

Some users also encounter issues with downloading and exporting to different formats, including PowerPoint. 

Some slides may even turn out completely different from the original version. 

All in all, Google Slides is a great option for those who are looking for a free application and only need to create simple presentations. 

• The free plan supports professional presentations
• Web-based and collaborative to create presentations
• Simple and familiar interface for an online presentation software
• Too simple for advanced presentation making
• Difficult to export to other formats
• Limited templates and customization options for interactive content

You could say Keynote is Apple’s version of PowerPoint. It’s also a slideshow application—but in typical Apple fashion, it comes with a sleek, minimalist interface and is considered one of the best presentation apps on the market. 

There are 30 different themes to choose from, which serve as templates for those who need a quick fix. And it can do most of what PowerPoint can. 

Keynote’s main perk is that it’s part of the Apple ecosystem. 

That means it has built-in iCloud and Apple Watch support so users can control their presentation from their mobile device or even their wrists with just a click. 

This presentation app comes pre-installed on most Mac devices. Otherwise, you can purchase it from the Apple store for just US$9.99 for mobile and US$19.99 for OS X. 

The big downside is that Keynote is exclusive to Mac OS. 

Non-Apple users can create, upload, and sync their own Keynote presentations through their iCloud Drive, but this presentation app is only truly helpful only for those who use multiple Apple devices. 

And if you’re used to working on PowerPoint, you might find Keynote a bit confusing in the beginning, especially when editing presentations. 

• Sleek, minimalist interface 
• Free with most Apple devices
• No access for PC and Android devices except through iCloud

5. SlideDog

Sliding away from straightforward slideshow applications and other presentation apps, SlideDog is a web-based multimedia presentation tool that lets users combine different types of media to create and edit presentations. 

This includes everything from PowerPoint decks to videos and even PDFs that can all be played side by side without any awkward transitions. 

It’s also extremely easy to customize a SlideDog presentation. 

You just need to upload the files into the SlideDog web browser application, and then drag and drop them according to the order in which you want them to play. 

You can control your presentations and playlists from another device, and audience members can view your slideshow on their devices by clicking a link. 

SlideDog has a free presentation app version that provides all of the basic features. 

However, live sharing and premium support are only available with a Pro account that costs US$99 per year, and not via the free version alone.

While SlideDog is technically considered presentation software, you can’t actually create presentations on it. 

You can simply stitch together different pre-made presentations in various formats into what is essentially a playlist. 

Lastly, SlideDog supports only Windows devices, so Apple and Linux users can’t use it. 

• Supports a lot of different media
• Provides live-sharing
• More dynamic compared to the usual slideshow presentation
• Only collates media; doesn’t create them

6. Haiku Deck 

Ever come across presentations with size-eight fonts and blocks of indecipherable paragraphs on each slide? 

You can avoid such an unfortunate scenario with Haiku Deck. 

HaikuDeck is a web and mobile application that favors images over text. 

It works by limiting the number of words users can put on each slide, and allowing them to search for images on their platform related to the slide’s main idea. 

This makes it ideal for those who want to simplify their thoughts and let the images do all the talking. 

Users have over 40 million royalty-free photos to choose from, plus dozens of simple slide layouts on the platform itself. 

While this certainly simplifies the process of creating a visually rich presentation, it can be limiting for those who need to include more information into their slides. 

It’s a great option for someone giving a TED Talk, for example.

But for others who need to pass on more facts and figures, having a built-in word limit might be too restrictive.  

• Simple and easy to use 
• Access to millions of royalty-free stock images
• May be too simple for some
• No Android support
• Limited features

7. Prezi Business

Among the other presentation software on this list, Prezi Business might be one of the most unique presentation tools. 

Rather than offering a regular slideshow format, Prezi looks more like a 3D interactive mind map where viewers jump dynamically from one idea to the next. 

You can zoom in on one “slide” and then zoom out for the next. 

Prezi has over 100 templates to choose from and comes with a very simple interface and a drag-and-drop style of editing. 

It’s compatible with both Mac and PC desktops as well as smartphones. 

It’s also similar to a regular PowerPoint deck in that you can jump back and forth from one “slide” to the next. 

And like SlideDog, you can send viewers the link to the presentation as you’re presenting. 

Also, up to 10 people can work on a Prezi presentation at the same time, one of its main selling points. 

This is great for collaboration, but having so many hands-on deck at once can get messy. 

• Dynamic and immersive presentations
• Highly visual
• Easy to use
• May not be appropriate for all types of presentations

In a world of slides and presentations, standing out is the key. Ludus brings the flair of graphic design into the world of presentations.

At its core, Ludus is the bridge between presentation tools and design software. It enables users to infuse their slides with the kind of design elements you’d typically find in advanced design platforms.

Not only can you import assets from design giants like Adobe, but its seamless integration with tools like Unsplash and Giphy makes sourcing visuals a breeze.

It’s a fairly affordable tool for all its features compared to the other paid options in this list, as users pay 12.49 euros monthly (if billed annually).

However, while Ludus’ robust design capabilities can elevate the look of your presentation, those unfamiliar with design tools might find there’s a learning curve.

• Merges presentation creation with advanced design tools.
• Seamless integration with popular design platforms and visual databases.
• Offers a unique edge in presentation aesthetics.
• Might be a tad overwhelming for non-designers
• Can have a steeper learning curve for those used to more straightforward platforms

9. Slidebean

Crafting a compelling presentation demands not only compelling content but also a design that can captivate your audience. Enter Slidebean.

Slidebean offers an intelligent design solution, using AI to transform raw content into professionally styled presentations. This platform streamlines the design process, allowing you to focus on the message rather than fretting over aesthetics.

The basic plan is free and allows you to create a presentation. But if you want to share or download your presentations, as well as unlock the full suite of features, you’ll need to sign up for the All-Access plan priced at $199 per year.

While it provides a quick and efficient method to produce polished slides, it also offers features for sharing, collaboration, and viewer analytics, adding an edge to your presentation strategy.

However, for professionals who prioritize granular design control, the automated design might feel limiting at times.

• AI-driven design ensures visually appealing presentations.
• Features for collaboration and viewer insights.
• Efficient design process reduces time and effort.
• Might not offer the detailed design customization some users desire.
• Automated choices may not always align with specific branding or style preferences.

10. ClearSlide

Having great visuals to drive your point home can be the difference between getting a sale across the line or customers walking away. ClearSlide stands out in this area as a presentation tool for businesses laser-focused on boosting their sales and marketing game.

At its core, ClearSlide is all about leveling up business presentations. Whether you’re marketing a new product or tracking client engagement, it’s got tools that cater to every need.

Whether it’s a PowerPoint, a PDF, or something from Google Drive or Dropbox, ClearSlide makes it simple to upload and work with these files.

The unique edge? ClearSlide’s virtual meeting space pops open with just a click. It’s all about seamless, professional presentations without the hassle.

Beyond just slides, the platform dives deep into metrics and analytics, ensuring every presentation is backed by data-driven insights. And the tool is available for $35 per month, which isn’t too pricey for medium-sized businesses.

However, its complexity isn’t for everyone. For some, the variety of features might seem a tad overwhelming, and its focus on metrics might be a bit much for those just wanting a basic presentation tool.

• Seamless virtual meetings and presentations
• Integrates with popular platforms
• Offers insightful analytics for sales and marketing
• Might feel complex for some users
• Limited transition and design effects
• Mobile experience could be better

Stepping into the world of animation, Vyond, once known as GoAnimate, allows users to turn their narratives into professional animated videos. For those looking to elevate their content without diving deep into animation complexities, Vyond can be the go-to tool.

This platform is more than just drag-and-drop animations. It integrates AI capabilities with Vyond Go, which transforms text prompts into rough-cut videos.

Fancy a quick draft for your upcoming project? This AI assistant is up for the task. And if perfection is your game, take it to Vyond Studio, filled with an array of characters, templates, and backgrounds.

The Essential Plan at $25 per month is suitable for individuals on a budget. However, if you want to export videos at 1080p and above, have collaboration tools, or different export options, you’ll need to sign up for the Professional Plan at $92 per month.

As robust as the tool is, there are still some kinks to iron out. AI voiceovers might still need some tweaks, and detailed color customizations can be a bit tricky, but the tool’s strengths, especially for businesses, are undeniable.

• Hassle-free video creation for beginners to experts
• Generous library of pre-made assets
• AI-powered video and script creation with Vyond Go
• AI voiceovers might feel a bit robotic
• Some customization limitations for specific props and scenes

The best presentation software is…

 …completely up to you! 

When it comes to presentation software, the world is your oyster. 

Each of these tools either has a free or trial version for you to check out, so you don’t have to commit just yet. 

When it’s time to choose, consider the following aspects to find the right presentation software for you: 

• Ease of use. Is it easy for you to understand or will it require lots of training before you can start creating presentations? 
• Accessibility. Can you access your presentation software from any device or are you limited to carrying your laptop to every presentation? 
• Real-time collaboration. Can multiple people work on the same project or do you have to keep downloading and emailing drafts? 
• Create design tools. Can you create presentations with dynamic design elements or are you stuck with the same kind of slide each time? 
• Template availability. Is this tool only accessible to a design professional or can anyone create stunning presentations through pre-designed and updated templates? 

Piktochart , for example, would be a fantastic presentation software choice among the long list of PowerPoint alternatives for teams looking for a variety of eye-catching designs without requiring much technical know-how. Meanwhile, Microsoft PowerPoint might be the best presentation software for those who are just looking to play it safe. 

Hopefully, this best presentation software list sheds some light on the tools at your disposal. Choose wisely! 

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Best presentation software of 2024

Make perfect slides for speeches and talks

Best overall

Best for branding, best for marketing, best for themes, best for media, best unique.

• How we test

The best presentation software makes it simple and easy to create, manage, and share slideshow presentations.

1. Best overall 2. Best for branding 3. Best for marketing 4. Best for themes 5. Best for media 6. Best unique 7. FAQs 8. How we test

Presentation software runs at the heart of business sales, management, and development, so it's important to ensure you have the best presentation software for your needs. This is especially when looking to share ideas, concepts, and workflows, and the ability to present these in a simple and understandable way is essential.

However, while presentation software has been traditionally limited to text and images, it has widened its ability to work with different media such as video and audio. 

Therefore it's important for the best presentation software to not simply be easy and simple to use, but also be able to support additional media so that presentations can be more engaging, lively, and ultimately serve their purpose in educating and updating their intended audience.

Below we've listed the best presentation software currently on the market.

We've also listed the best free presentation software .

The best office software in the world is: Microsoft 365 There are many different office software suites out there, but Microsoft Office remains the original and best, offering an unsurpassed range of features and functionality that rivals just can't match.

Even better, Microsoft 365 - previously branded as Office 365 - is a cloud-based solution which means you can use it on any computer, mobile device, or smartphone, without having to worry about compatibility. All your files are saved in the cloud and synced between devices, so you can begin work on a document at home or in the office, then continue working on it on the go.

You can sign up to Microsoft 365 here .

The best presentation software of 2024 in full:

Why you can trust TechRadar We spend hours testing every product or service we review, so you can be sure you’re buying the best. Find out more about how we test.

1. PowerPoint

Our expert review:

Reasons to buy

For most people, Microsoft 's PowerPoint remains the original and best of all the presentation software platforms out there. While other companies have managed to catch up and offer rival products worthy of consideration, the fact is that PowerPoint's familiar interface and ubiquitous availability means it remains a favorite for the majority of people.

On the one hand, it's long been a staple of the hugely popular Microsoft Office suite, meaning that for most users this is going to be the first - and last - presentation software they are going to need to use.

Additionally, Microsoft has made PowerPoint, along with their other office products, available as free apps (with limited functionality) on both iOS and Android for mobile use, meaning it's even harder to avoid them. And this is before we even consider the inclusion of PowerPoint in Microsoft's cloud-based Microsoft 365.

It does everything necessary that you'd expect of presentation software, allowing you to add text and media to a series of slides, to accompany a talk and other presentations. There are easy-to-use templates included to help spice things up a little, but even a general user with little experience of it is likely to find themselves able to use PowerPoint without much trouble at all.

Overall, it's hard to go wrong with PowerPoint, and although Microsoft 365 has a nominal cost, the apps are free to use even if they do have more limited functionality.

Read our full Microsoft PowerPoint review .

Our Microsoft discount codes can help you save on your next purchase.

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2. CustomShow

Reasons to avoid.

Branding says a lot about a business, and it’s something firms need to get right from day one – from a good logo to a suitable font. CustomShow is business presentation software that puts all these elements of branding first.

Using the system, you can design and present customized, branded presentations that reflect your company and the products you offer, featuring the aforementioned logo and custom fonts. As well as this, you get a slide library and analytics to ensure your presentations are a success.

What’s more, you can import presentations into the software, and use it to tweak them further. There’s also integration with SalesForce , and because the platform is cloud-based, you can access your presentations on computers, tablets, and smartphones. 

Considering the focus on branding, this offering could be good for marketing and sales teams, and it's used by major companies such as HBO and CBS Interactive.

3. ClearSlide

Just like CustomShow, ClearSlide has a niche focus for companies. The platform is targeted at firms looking to generate successful marketing campaigns, pushing sales via presentations (and more), not least through a range of analytics and metrics to work for sales and marketing.

With the product, you can upload a range of files, including PowerPoint, Keynote, PDF, and Excel. ClearSlide is integrated with other platforms, including Google Drive, Dropbox, and Salesforce.

This system is pretty complex and may offer too many irrelevant features for some businesses, but you can create customized content that reflects your company and the message you’re trying to get out to customers. There are also some good metrics and analysis features, and you can sign up for a free trial before making any decisions.

The real strength of ClearSlide comes from its focus on sales and marketing data, not least being able to track user engagement alongside other metrics.

4. Haiku Deck

Any presentation app will allow you to personalize your slides to at least some extent, but Haiku Deck goes one step further than the competition. It comes with a wide range of themes suited to different needs, and you also get access to 40 million free images from the Creative Commons collection.

When it comes to creating a presentation, you have the option to do so on the web, which means your presentation is accessible across a range of mobile devices as well as desktops. Regardless of the device used, you’re able to select from a variety of different fonts, layouts, and filters to make the perfect presentation.

The great thing about these various customization options is that they’re categorized into different industries and use cases. For instance, you’ll find themes for teaching, cooking, real estate, and startups. Most of the features require you to be online, but hopefully, you’ll have a sturdy net connection wherever you go.

5. SlideDog

It’s all too easy to end up creating a presentation that’s unappealing, and the last thing you want to do is make the audience fall asleep. SlideDog lets you combine almost any type of media to create a rich presentation that’s sure to keep the viewers’ peepers open, avoiding the ‘cookie cutter’ look that makes presentations seem dull.

Marketed as a web-based multimedia presentation tool, it gives you the ability to combine PowerPoint presentations, graphics, PDF files, Prezi presentations, web pages, pictures, videos, and movie clips. You can drag these into custom playlists and display them to your audience with ease.

You’re able to remotely control your presentations and playlists from your smartphone, the web, or a secondary computer, and there’s also the option to share slides in real-time. Audience members can even view your slide from their own devices by clicking a link. That’s a handy feature if you’re looking to create an immersive presentation experience.

SlideDog is probably the cheapest of the presentation software featured, with a free account that will cover the essential features. However, for live sharing and premium support, you need to upgrade.

Read our full SlideDog review .

Prezi is one of the more unique presentation tools. Instead of presenting your graphics and text in a slide-to-slide format, you can create highly visual and interactive presentation canvases with the goal of “emphasizing the relationship between the ideas”.

Presentations can also be tailored to the specific audience, as this is a flexible platform that’s capable of skipping ahead, or veering off into a side topic, without having to flip through all the slides to get to a particular bit.

For business users, there are a variety of handy tools available. By downloading Prezi , you can build and edit presentations with your colleagues in real-time, which is perfect for companies with teams based around the globe.

When you have created a presentation you’re happy with, you can present it live (in HD) and send a direct link to viewers. There are some analysis tools here, too – you can see who’s accessed your presentation, which parts of it, and for how long. The app is available for Mac and Windows devices.

Read our full Prezi review .

Other presentation software to consider

Google Slides  is part of the Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) office platform intended as an online alternative to Microsoft Office. It may seem a little limited by comparison to PowerPoint, but as it's browser-based that means cross-platform compatibility. Additionally, it allows for collaborative work, and Google Slides really works well here. On top of the fact that it integrates with the rest of the Google Workspace apps, not least Google Drive, and you have a contender. 

Zoho Show  is another of the many, many tools and apps that Zoho has made available for business use. It also operates in the cloud so it's accessible to any device with a browser, and it also allows for collaborative work. You can also easily share the link for users to download, or provide a live presentation online. The updated version has a simpler and easier to use interface and comes with a free version and a paid-for one with expanded features.

Evernote  is normally thought of as just note-taking software, but it does provide the option to create a presentation you can share online or with an audience. In that regard, it's a little more limited than the other options in not being dedicated presentation software. However, as an easy and handy way to pull together a presentation quickly, it could serve as a backup or last-minute option, especially if Evernote is already being commonly used by you.

LibreOffice Impress  is part of the open-source suite offered as a free alternative to Microsoft Office, and comes with a powerful array of tools and editing options for your presentation, not least working with 3D images. It's supported by a large community, so it's easy to find an array of additional templates. If there is a limitation it's that it's software you download and install rather than web-based, but any presentations created should be easily portable to the web if needed.

Adobe Spark  does things a bit differently, as rather than just use images it's geared toward video as well. This makes for potentially more powerful multimedia presentations, especially as Adobe also has a big selection of photos and images available for its users. There is a free tier for core features but requires a subscription for custom branding, personalized themes, and support.

Slides  comes with a lot of features in an easy-to-use interface, and involves setting up presentations using drag and drop into an existing grid. It's also internet-based so there's no software to download, and it only requires a browser to use and access. 

Presentation software FAQs

Which presentation software is best for you.

When deciding which presentation software to download and use, first consider what your actual needs are, as sometimes free platforms may only provide basic options, so if you need to use advanced tools you may find a paid platform is much more worthwhile. Additionally, free and budget software options can sometimes prove limited when it comes to the variety of tools available, while higher-end software can really cater for every need, so do ensure you have a good idea of which features you think you may require for your presentation needs.

How we tested the best presentation software

To test for the best presentation software we first set up an account with the relevant software platform, whether as a download or as an online service. We then tested the service to see how the software could be used for different purposes and in different situations. The aim was to push each software platform to see how useful its basic tools were and also how easy it was to get to grips with any more advanced tools.

Read how we test, rate, and review products on TechRadar .

We've also featured the best alternatives to Microsoft Office .

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Nicholas Fearn is a freelance technology journalist and copywriter from the Welsh valleys. His work has appeared in publications such as the FT, the Independent, the Daily Telegraph, The Next Web, T3, Android Central, Computer Weekly, and many others. He also happens to be a diehard Mariah Carey fan!

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15 Best Presentation Software for 2021

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On average a presentation takes up to 20 minutes and experts say we make an impression within the first 30 seconds. That is why it’s important to “dress” our great product/idea with an equally exciting design. Most often, presentations are cooked up by non-designers, which creates a specific need – for powerful presentation software, which can help communicate a message beautifully, effectively, and to suit any user’s skill level. We hand-picked 15 of the best presentation software for 2021 , which will help you create presentations online, share them, while shining in your best light. In the meanwhile, check out some useful ideas tips to spice up your presentations .

A web-based presentation tool, which means you can access your presentations wherever you are, with an internet connection. It is known for its animations, cartoons, and infographics, which help the user to create more interactive presentations and explainer-style videos.

Example by Focusky

Best Features:  Very interactive; you can create a unique to your story by combining different “frames” (slides); create your own animations within the presentation Price:  Free, but heavily subscription-based Learning curve:  Very intuitive, nicely organized by categories, but it would require some time to learn the animation controls Available for:  Online Perfect for: Marketing and education

To summarize, this presentation tool is best for marketers and education, where the creator can get the most out of the cool animation and cartoons available. In the last years, there is an increased interest in Powtoon and RenderForest and we expect that more and more people will use them in 2021. No surprise – if you look at our article about Graphic Design Trends in 2022 , everything is moving towards animation, cool 3D-s, cartoons, and illustrations – and these are all things that this software can offer for your presentation.

Prezi is an online presentation software, which resembles a mind map. In comparison, PowerPoint offers a linear way of presenting, whereas Prezi allows you to better show relationships between different elements of your presentation, show details, zoom in and zoom out and show an overall view of your topic. Compared to PowerPoint is more interactive, but with fewer functionalities and a choice of templates.

Example by PreziBase

Best Features:  Interactive presentations and interesting transitions, zoom in/out details Price:  The very basic features are free, but most of the interesting ones are paid, starting from $3/month and reaching up to $59/month. They offer a free trial. Learning curve:  it requires learning and going through a lot of menus and functionalities, similar to PowerPoint Available for:  Online / Limited use for iOS and Android (only viewing, not creating and editing) Perfect for: teachers, businesses, more experienced designers, and specific presentations needs, but not recommended for newbies

Prezi is best in showing relationships between different parts of your presentations. There are some challenges in editing, and viewing across devices and its best features are paid for. We recommend it for quick, mind-map-like presentations without the need for ultra-special design.

3. RenderForest Presentation Maker

RenderForest is an online presentation tool, which is famous for its explainer style and whiteboard animations. The presentation templates often offer various motion/video backgrounds, which helps to grab your audience’s attention. Currently, the company is working on releasing its Graphic Design Software, which will allow users to create printables and beautiful designs for social media. This shows that RenderForest’s team knows the market well and does its best to cater to its needs!

Example by Renderforest

Best Features:  Video holders with text on shapes, cool transitions Price:  There is a free version, the paid ones start at $20.34 per user/month Learning curve:  Relatively easy to use, the simple interface helps the user Available for:  Online / iOS / Android Perfect for:  Education and business

Although not one of the cheapest solutions, it allows you to create engaging and interactive presentations with lots of cool animations. That makes RenderForest a great choice for more educational and marketing explainer-type videos/presentations.

4. Mentimeter

Mentimeter is a very interesting online presentation software. It allows your audience to engage with your presentation in real-time and you can create polls, ask questions, which are then displayed to your presentation. The answers from the audience remain anonymous so people are even more encouraged to participate.

Example by Mentimeter

Best Features:  Launch live, interactive polls, surveys, quizzes and create things like word clouds in real-time Price:  It has a free version, but the paid plans offer most of the attractive features – the basic plan costs $9.99 per user/month and the more advanced plan is $24.99 per user/month Learning curve:  Easy to use; might need to explain to a less tech-savvy audience how to connect to your presentation Available for:  Online / Android / iOS Perfect for:  Educators, speakers, business and competitions

An excellent choice for educators, speakers, and businesses who want to engage the audience in real-time and display the results immediately. Clean, simple designs, that help you focus on the content.

5. Libre Office Impress

Libre Office is free presentation software, an open-source alternative to PowerPoint. As you can expect from a free product, it offers only the main features of its “big brother”, but it’s a good solution for people used to Microsoft’s productivity suite. The interface is very similar to PowerPoint, which again makes it comfortable to use for a certain audience. Users who need collaboration on presentations, clean interface, and more creative design solutions should steer away from this free presentation software because it will simply not cover their needs.

Example by Theodoros Bousios

Best Features:  Free, compatible with older versions (Windows XP for example) Price:  Free Learning curve:  It will take some time to go through all the options and to get familiar with the interface; Available for:  Windows / macOS / Linux / Android / iOS. Perfect for:  people who want to use a free product and people with older operation systems

To summarize, Libre is free, compatible with older versions, it can cover your basic needs for a presentation, but the options are too many and available templates too little.

6. Zoho Show

Zoho Show is also an online presentation software, which has a very friendly user interface and great collaboration features. There are many functionalities, which help you create a beautiful design, but require some time and design knowledge to get it right. The premade templates are limited and this presentation software needs an internet connection to be able to edit and present.

Image by Zoho

Best Features:  Live broadcasting a presentation with live chat and commenting Price:  Zoho Show is free for personal use. For business users, Zoho Show is included in the Zoho Docs enterprise pricing packages – €5 or €8 per user/month Learning curve: Available for:  Online / Android / iOS Perfect for:  non-profits, start-ups, personal use, teachers

To summarize, Zoho offers great collaboration features, but you need a connection to edit and present. It is suitable for quick, non-pretentious presentations, where you need some kind of collaboration.

7. ClearSlide Presenter

ClearSlide is a sales engagement platform, including an online presentation tool. Another online tool – SlideRocket, was acquired by ClearSlide and one of the differences is that ClearSlide is more costly and targeted at larger businesses. It’s a great platform for very specific needs – collaborating between sales and marketing teams, to achieve the company’s goals. It’s clear even by the interface:

Image by ClearSlide

Best Features: Analytics for costumers’ engagement, video conferencing, screen sharing Price:  They offer a free trial and you can see more about the payment plans here. Learning curve:  Clear and simple interface, but it requires some time to get used to the tools Available for:  Online Perfect for: Sales/business, managers (for coaching); not suitable for newbies, teachers, students

To summarize, ClearSide is perfect for presenting sales pitch , graphics, collaborate in larger teams. It is somehow restrictive for a non-designer because the templates are specific.

8. Piktochart

Piktochart allows you to make infographics, presentations, and printables quickly. Primarily known for its easy customizable infographics, Piktochart also has simple presentation templates and the company is constantly trying to update its library.

Example by Piktochart Knowledge Base

Best Features:  Turning data-heavy content into simple visuals; nice transitions between slides Price:  There is a free version and a paid one, starting at $29 per user/month. They offer a free trial. Learning curve:  It requires time to get used to the options available and to navigate through Available for:  Online Perfect for:  Designers, teachers; it does not offer collaboration options, which might be needed by teams, students, etc.

Compared to other online presentation software is a bit costly and we could still ask a bit more from the presentation templates. We’d recommend it to someone who often uses infographics and wants to use a single platform to combine the infographics with a presentation. But why not check our free infographics as well?

Slides is online presentation software, initially aimed at developers and covering their presentation needs. Thus said, it does not offer offline editing, but you can present offline, after exporting your presentation.

Best Features:  It allows you to use your phone as a remote control; Live Present Mode allows you to control what your audience sees; drop in code, iframes, and SVGs with ease. Price:  Free, with paid plans starting at $7.00/month and $14-$18/month for pro and team packages. They offer a free trial. Learning curve:  friendly interface, but too many functions and options, which might overwhelm the average user and beginner Available for: Online Perfect for:  developers, designers, a little bit too specific for newbies

To summarize, it’s a very cool tool, giving you complete design freedom, but that is also why we do not recommend it to teachers, non-designers, or marketers. Developers and design gurus will love it.

Canva is a web-based solution that started with a mission – to make beautiful designed content available to everyone. The whole platform is organized so that a person without any prior design knowledge can easily create graphs, images, and presentations to impress. Although it is not the best tool for data visualization, it scores high in any other category. Needless to say, it has become a popular choice amongst non-designers.

Image by Iconfinder

Best Features:  Plenty of beautiful templates to choose from and Canva school has plenty of tutorials and tips for free. It offers more free functionalities compared to other competitors. Price:  Free, the offer different subscription plans, starting at $9.95 per user/month Learning curve:  Very easy to use, most of the actions can be performed by drag-and-drop Available for:  Online / iOS / Android Perfect for:  newbies, marketers (who need a unified look across all their social media), non-profits, and teachers

Canva is becoming one of the most popular tools amongst non-designers for creating beautiful unified content. You can create entire presentations, flyers, and other materials with a single drag and drop.

11. Slidebean

Slidebean is the go-to online presentation software for last-minute projects, that look original and professional. Slidebean offers clean and easy-to-use templates and keeps track of your audience’s engagement.

Source Slidebean

Best Features:  It allows you to arrange your content with the help of AI, which saves time creating a beautiful layout. You just pick a template, upload content, and let the AI offer you a nice layout. Premade animations, effects, and alignments are automatically applied to your content and create a cohesive look. Price:  Free, paid versions starting from $8/month Learning curve:  very easy to use since everything is made to fit the premade templates Available for:  Windows / Mac / Android / iOS Perfect for:  financial, academic, pitch, marketing, sales; everything quick with a clear structure

To summarize, if you are in a hurry, Slidebean will offer several layouts for your slides and speed up the process of creation. The platform targets primarily sales, marketing, and financial fields, and the available templates reflect that.

12. Google Slides

Google Slides is part of the G Suite business application. Its popularity has increased in the last years since it’s a web-based platform, allowing you to store, edit, and share your presentation, without the need of installing presentation software on your computer. All you need is a Google account and you are good to go.

Image by G Suite Updates blog

Best Features:  It’s free for personal use, and offers great paid features for business – for example, seamless collaboration and commenting on a presentation, converting other presentations to Google Slides. Some other great features are the wide variety of fonts available (GoogleFonts, not need installing), easy embedding, plus it’s super intuitive and easy to use! Price:   It’s free for individual use. For business use, the price starts at $5/user/month and plans of $10 and $25/user/month, for unlimited cloud storage and extra features Learning curve:  Simple interface, but it will require some time to pick up. Similar to PowerPoint, only a bit lighter. Available for:  Windows / Mac / Online Perfect for:  businesses, freelancers, who need a user-friendly app with elementary features; great for collaborating teams, not so perfect for complex designs and tools, required by big enterprises

Perfect for personal use, well synchronized across different devices, similar to PowerPoint. Maybe you are a teacher and you like GoogleSlides because it is free and easy to use? Well, we’ve gathered some awesome FREE GoogleSlides and PowerPoint templates , specially made for education needs.

If you need something along the lines of PowerPoint but need the option for collaboration – a paid plan for GoogleSlides is your go-to choice.

13. Keynote

Keynote is an Apple product, very similar to Google Slides. All you need to do is create an iCloud account (similar to a Google account) and start using Keynote from there. Running Keynote on Windows also requires an internet connection and a modern browser. The latest version can also import and export PowerPoint formats if needed. All this sends Keynote higher in the list regarding the accessibility and shareability of this presentation software.

Image by Envato tuts+

Best Features:  Simplicity of design, great drag and drop functions, polished transitions and animations, easy image editing/cropping; works great with multimedia; design templates with better aesthetic than an average slide deck; Price:  Free for macOS and iOS Learning curve:  Pretty easy to use for Mac users, a bit of learning curve for users, having experience with other software. Available for:  Mac / Windows / Online Perfect for:  businesses, marketers, people with not much of a design experience

Bottom line, if you are a Mac user, you love the sleek design and you are looking for cool aesthetics – Keynote is simple to use and free, why not use it?

14. Adobe Spark

Adobe Spark is a web and mobile-based media creation application, which helps you create social graphics, short videos, and web pages. What is immediately noticeable is the clean, crisp, simple, and modern designs, which focus you on the content. If you are looking for a funky, ornate design – Adobe Spark is not the right pick for you.

Example by Cikeys

Best Features:  Beautiful templates, user-friendly interface, step-by-step creation, you can add audio to your slides (narrating) Price:  There is a free version, the paid on starts at $9.79. The best templates, as with the competitors, are paid. They do not offer a free trial. Learning curve:  Easy to use Available for:  Online / iOS / Android Perfect for:  quick presentations, teachers, basic presentations without jamming them with too much cool stuff.

Adobe Spark eliminates the cluster of design options and leads you step-by-step in creating elegant, simple presentations. Ideal for basic presentations, not the best for sales and marketing.

15. PowerPoint

PowerPoint certainly is a “classic” – it’s has been the most popular tool for creating presentations so far. What first started as a component of the Microsoft Office suite, now has improved shareability and accessibility. It can be used on the web (as part of Office on the web), works with Android, and iOS, and there is a Mobile app, as well as presentation software for mac.

Example by Abris DC

Best Features:  Many people are familiar with the software, a wide variety of templates; improved accessibility across platforms; extensive tools and options Price: If you want to enjoy the full features of PowerPoint, you’ll need to subscribe to Microsoft 365 – they have payment plans for personal or business use. The price for personal use starts at $5.99/month or $59.99/year, and business plans start at $12.50 per user/month with an annual commitment. You can find more information here . The mobile applications are completely free to use, of course with some limitations. You can compare the available features across different platforms  here. Learning curve: Due to the variety of options and the complexity of the menus, it might take some time to master all of its features. Something that could take a lot of time is editing the text, arranging the visuals, and picking the right transitions – overall, is time-consuming. Still, the interface remained easy to navigate over time and if you trust your design sense, you can achieve satisfying results. Available for: Windows / Mac / Online Perfect for: business, medical, accounting and students; creating concise presentations; but not so suitable for teachers, educators, start-ups and marketers who want to create more interactive and story-based presentations.

To this date, PowerPoint is keeping the lead as the most popular tool for creating presentations. Some of the downsides are that sometimes it can be time-consuming to come up with a good design and PP doesn’t offer collaboration tools and compared to other platforms. But we have a solution for at least one of your problems – we’ve selected 31 Modern PowerPoint templates to set the right tone for your presentation. 

We made a quick summary for you…

Ok, not that we’ve looked at the 15 best presentation software for 2021, we decided to go one step further and compare them by price and popularity. Let’s have a look first at the new-comers:

As you can see, the leaders from the uprising platforms are Canva and Mentimeter, with relatively low prices and with huge success amongst users . Powtoon, Piktochart, and Renderforest are a bit costly , but they are popular since they offer a lot of animation and interactive elements. Hey, but maybe some of the other tools are right for you? We encourage you to go on their websites, contact their support team, and see what they have to offer.

Then, let’s see how the veterans are ranking:

It’s no surprise that PowerPoint and Google Slides are at the top – people are used to their products, have familiar interfaces, and offer a lot of functionalities at a good price. Although, for quick, unpretentious results, their competitors are a very attractive solution.

Final words

We can conclude that there are many useful tools to help you create beautiful presentations. Some of them are well-known and have been here for a while, while others are uprising… No matter the case, we notice a trend for presentation tools catering not only to the designers’ needs but also to the newbies, marketers, and teachers. That way, enabling everyone to create stunning presentations in no time and share them easily.

We hope this presentation software list shed some light on different options out there and that we helped you evaluate quickly what would work for your situation best.

You may also be interested in these related articles:

• 12 PowerPoint Presentation Tips To Dramatically Boost Your Efficiency
• 35 Free Google Slides Infographic Templates to Grab Now
• 23 Online Collaboration Tools for Your Remote Team

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What is Presentation Software?

Why a great presentation software is crucial to the success of organization

Any experienced salesperson knows that words can only get you so far. You can articulate the features and benefits of your product or service to perfection. But eventually, the prospect will want to see it for themselves.

This is especially true in the world of software. Where users spend hours navigating apps, sites, and programs as part of their daily responsibilities.

According to research gathered by 3M (known for their invention of the Post-It Note) visuals are processed by the human brain 60,000 times faster than text.

Presentations can truly make or break a prospect’s experience with your brand. A great presentation is engaging and conveys value through visuals. And it helps prospects visualize themselves as beneficiaries of your product or service.

What is presentation software?

A presentation software (sometimes called a presentation program) is a digital tool. It utilizes sequences of graphics, text, audio, and video to accompany a spoken presentation. These sequences, often called slides, are consolidated in virtual files called “slide decks.”

Presentation software across the web vary greatly in their capabilities, but they must offer at least three essential features:

• A text editor with custom formatting
• A means of inserting, editing, and resizing digital graphic
• A slideshow system for displaying these visuals sequentially

Some presentation programs, like Microsoft PowerPoint, must be downloaded onto a computer’s hard drive before they can be used. Others, like Google Slides and Prezi, can be accessed from an internet browser.

Why is a Good Presentation Software Important?

Oftentimes, if a prospect agrees to view a presentation, you’ve at least piqued their interest.

You’ve likely spent some time on the phone or exchanged a few emails. Perhaps the prospect has visited your website a couple times. They’re likely not sold on you and actively forming their opinion of your brand.

This is why it’s imperative that your first presentation is a slam dunk. When a prospect sees you, your brand, and your product on display, you want them to leave excited for the benefits you can offer them.

A great presentation software gives you the tools and functionality you need to create a winning presentation. And create it quickly and easily.

In addition to usability, below are more benefits a good presentation software can bring to your organization.

Consolidation of information

A great slide deck combined with quality content is often one of the best single sources of sales information in your company.

Most sales decks contain a complete pitch all the way from pain point identification to feature/benefit pairings. Testimonials, best practices, and case studies are often scattered throughout.

This means you have a single file you can hand off to new sales reps for training. Or, if you need to pull a testimonial from a happy customer, you can find it in the slide deck. This one-stop shop for valuable sales information is made possible by a good presentation software.

Mobility for reps on the go

If your sales reps are doing a lot of physical site visits, having a mobile sales presentation that they can carry around in their pockets is a whole lot easier than lugging around a laptop. Almost every modern presentation software offers robust mobile functionality.

Having the consolidated information mentioned in the last point available at all times is a powerful asset for the rep doing on-site visits or demos.

For an example of how impactful a mobile presentation can be, check The Real Problem of Humanity as it pertains to technology by Tristan Harris.

Consistency across the team

Most presentation solutions allow for the creation of custom templates. This, combined with a “master slide deck” means that you can ensure greater alignment across your sales reps. This, with a content management platform , means your content is version-controlled and up-to-date. Which is important as its being presented to prospects.

Rapid content personalization

Let’s say you’re about to hop on a presentation call with a prospect. Right before the call, you receive an email from him letting you know his boss will be on the call as well. As it turns out, she’s particularly interested in one specific feature of your product.

With a great presentation tool, you can edit slides immediately (often from your mobile device, if needed). You can also delete, append, or customize information. This allows you to quickly tailor your messaging and visuals to fit the needs of a particular prospect or market segment.

Firsthand feedback from prospects

There are a lot of advantages of making sales presentations a two-way conversation as opposed to a monologue. Even if you can’t meet in person, real-time verbal feedback from prospects is incredibly valuable information.

A good sales rep will listen closely for clues that certain slides are holding the attention of the audience. These are moments that likely deserve to be highlighted or more deeply articulated.

A great presentation software will allow you to add slides, write copy, and format visuals immediately after the prospect hangs up. All while the information is fresh in the presenter’s mind. That way you can elevate their points of interest.

Thus, an easy-to-use presentation software is key to a sales team’s ability to quickly iterate on and improve effective content.

Getting the Most Out of Your Presentation Software

Vastly more important than your tool of choice is how you use it. Modern presentation software can produce razor-sharp, engaging presentations that convert prospects to sales. But they’re also capable of producing abominations that no prospect should ever see.

Abide by the following guidelines and you’ll be on the right track. Not only to avoid common presentation pitfalls, but also to help your message stick.

Utilize your Notes section

While a more conversational tone is obviously the goal, hitting all the important beats of a sales presentation from memory can be tough. This is where presentation notes come in handy.

Whether it’s a word-for-word script or bullet points, every presentation software offers the ability to write formatted notes associated with your slide decks.

When you present, these notes will be visible to you alone. This is especially useful when delivering presentations remotely over the web. If you’re going to read a word-for-word script, be sure to add some inflection and natural pauses to avoid sounding robotic.

Utilize grids when formatting visuals

Pixelated graphics and misaligned visuals in slide decks can make you look like an amateur. Which is not the message you want to send to your audience.

It’s safe to say that most sales reps are not also trained graphic designers. It’s all the more important that we rely on grids to line up our images in an aesthetically-pleasing way.

All modern presentation tools offer some sort of grid for optimal image placement. Cross-referencing your visuals against the grid takes mere minutes. But it could potentially save you embarrassment and help build credibility with your prospect.

Tell a story

Real-life stories are what captivate and unite humans. It’s been neurologically proven that stories engage more areas of the brain than the parts that store and recall facts. In fact, science shows us that our brains don’t distinguish between hearing a story and actually experiencing it.

That means your prospect will tune out if you’re reciting a laundry list of features and benefits. They’re more likely to stay engaged if you tell a real story of how your product helped a real person.

This also means that when you describe a real-life pain point of someone in a similar position, the odds are high that your prospect will feel that pain. It follows that they’ll also feel a greater urgency for whatever you’re offering.

The Hero’s Journey is a popular storytelling framework that’s been used ever since humans could communicate with drawings on cave walls. Using this template is one of the most effective ways to integrate storytelling into your presentations. So, try making them the hero, not your product.

Keep it simple

Keep the amount of information you give the prospect down to a few important things. Don’t burry the resources they need to see with lots of little insignificant things. Don’t get bogged down in feature explanations. Keep things brief and high-level. If you have to ask yourself if you should cut a section, the answer is yes.

Avoid animations (unless they’re custom)

As a general rule, when animations in presentations are good, they’re really good. When they’re bad, though, they’re really bad. I have seen some beautiful animations done in PowerPoint for large-scale conference presentations. Important note: they were created by a trained graphic designer with weeks of prep time and years of experience.

If you don’t have time or expertise to make your animations great, keep them simple and minimal. Or avoid them altogether. The animation presets in modern presentation tools are guaranteed to make your content look cheap.

The occasional fade-in can be tasteful. But beyond that, it’s probably wise to stay away from any distracting spins, swipes, or bounces.

Rehearse on your target machine

This tip is more about technology than technique. I can’t count how many times I’ve been in the audience of a presentation where the presenter advances to a broken or unformatted slide. “Whoa,” they say. “That’s so weird. That worked on my computer.”

Perhaps you’ve experienced the same thing. It’s definitely not something you want your prospect experiencing as they’re forming their opinion of your brand.

So, if you’re building a presentation on your home PC to transfer to your work laptop, make sure you test it on your work laptop before unveiling to the world. It seems obvious, but it takes mere minutes to troubleshoot and could save you a sale and a stressful situation.

Start with a template

A great way to ensure aesthetic consistency and alignment is a custom template. One that’s designed with your organization’s branding. If you don’t have an in-house designer, there will be an initial investment. But it’s well worth it considering it may be the first impression a prospect gets of your brand. As well as, how many eyeballs will be on your slides over time.

This will help you avoid the distraction of mismatched fonts and colors. But this will also help you ensure that every prospect gets a consistent experience, regardless of the presenter. Nothing is left up to chance.

Almost every modern presentation software has a “New from Template” or equivalent option. These save time during the start of each slide deck as well. Branded templates mean you’re never left wondering if your team has the right content.

Speaking of saving time, Accent Connect keeps all of your presentation decks neatly organized and updated. Your sales reps can access them from any device, anywhere, at any time.

To learn more about how we can help you optimize your presentation workflow and sell more effectively, reach out to our team today for a live demo .

By Accent Technologies

12th june 2020.

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5 Key Features of Presentation Software and Top Products That Offer Them

1. content import/export, 2. text editing, 3. customizable templates, 4. drag-and-drop, 5. content management.

Juggling text, images, and slides while creating presentations? Presentation software can help you organize content and create visually appealing presentations that are easy for viewers to comprehend. 

However, not all presentation software solutions are created equal. To reap the most of the software, businesses must identify and understand key features of presentation software that align with their specific requirements.

This article highlights five key features of presentation software based on the ratings given by verified software users. We also include the highest-rated presentation solutions for each feature. Read more .

The content import/export feature enables users to incorporate data, images, and slides from external files, such as documents and spreadsheets, into their presentation. It also facilitates media and multimedia inclusion, providing versatility in content creation. Users can further leverage this feature to save their presentations in various formats, such as PDF and PowerPoint for easy sharing and collaboration.

What business problem does content import/export solve?

Businesses often have branding guidelines that need to be followed to ensure consistency across presentations. The content import/export feature allows users to import branding elements, such as brand logos and images into their presentations, ensuring adherence to business standards and facilitating brand consistency. Additionally, it enables presenters to share their presentations across different platforms and devices, including desktop computers and smartphones, ensuring ease of collaboration.

Ideal users of the content import/export feature

Professionals looking to add data, images, and multimedia files to their presentations can benefit the most from the content import/export feature in a presentation tool. For example, sales and marketing executives can use this feature to add product information and customer data to create pitches. Likewise, graphic designers and illustrators can leverage this to import images from various sources and create visually appealing presentations. 

Top 3 products with the highest ratings for content import/export

Analysis performed February 2024 *

VistaCreate

4.61 out of 5 stars

Content import/export feature rating : 4.77/5

4.72 out of 5 stars

Content import/export feature rating : 4.67/5

4.9 out of 5 stars

Content import/export feature rating : 4.61/5

The text editing feature in a presentation app enables users to add, edit, and format text within slides. Presenters can leverage this feature to add text to slides by selecting a text box and typing directly into it. This allows them to input titles, bullet points, and other textual content in their presentations. Users can also edit their text or format it by making changes to the font size, colors, styles, and indentation. Text editing feature also includes commenting and version control capabilities to ensure that everyone is on the same page.

What business problem does text editing solve?

Clear and well-formatted text is necessary for effective communication in presentations. The text editing feature enables professionals to format text for optimal readability. It also lets users customize the content to suit the preferences and interests of their audience to make it more engaging for a particular audience. In a collaborative work environment where multiple team members need to contribute to or review presentations, the feature enables users to edit and review content, track changes, and communicate feedback effectively. 

Ideal users of the text editing feature

Professionals, such as researchers and educators, who rely heavily on text can use this feature to format their text for readability and create impactful presentations. Additionally, professionals with advanced formatting and collaboration requirements can leverage this feature to present complex data and iterate on presentations while maintaining a clear overview of revisions.

Top 3 products with the highest ratings for text editing

4.45 out of 5 stars

Text editing feature rating : 4.85/5

4.84 out of 5 stars

Text editing feature rating : 4.74/5

4.65 out of 5 stars

Text editing feature rating : 4.68/5

Customizable templates allow users to select from a range of pre-defined templates for creating presentations. These templates often include various designs, layouts, and themes suitable for different types of presentations, such as business pitches and creative portfolios. Users can also customize these templates by changing elements, such as fonts, colors, and backgrounds to match their specific requirements.

What business problem does customizable templates solve?

Businesses often face tight deadlines when creating presentations for client meetings and sales pitches. Customizable templates allow users to quickly create presentations using a professionally designed layout rather than starting from scratch. This saves professionals time and effort in the creation process, allowing them to focus more on refining the content and delivering impactful presentations. The feature also helps ensure consistent branding, reinforcing brand familiarity and professionalism. 

Ideal users of the customizable templates feature

Sales and marketing professionals can use customizable templates in a presentation tool to create presentations that align with their organization’s branding and messaging, ensuring professionalism and consistency. Additionally, professionals lacking design expertise can also benefit from this feature as it allows them to create professional-looking presentations while minimizing the time spent on formatting and layout.

Top 3 products with the highest ratings for customizable templates 

Customizable templates feature rating : 4.87/5

4.75 out of 5 stars

Customizable templates feature rating : 4.75/5

The drag-and-drop feature in a presentation app allows users to move elements, such as text boxes and images within a slide or between slides. Users can leverage this feature to reposition elements within a slide or rearrange the order of slides within a presentation. This flexibility allows for easy customization and adjustment of content flow and slide layouts. Some presentation tools also support multi-selection, allowing users to select and drag multiple interactive elements simultaneously.

What business problem does drag-and-drop solve?

Manipulating elements within slides can be complex due to the non-intuitive interfaces of a tool. Drag-and-drop functionality simplifies this by allowing users to move, resize, and rearrange elements within presentations. It streamlines the editing process, increasing productivity and saving time in completing presentations. Users can leverage this feature to experiment with different layouts and visual arrangements that best convey their message to the audience. 

Ideal users of the drag-and-drop feature

Professionals, such as sales and marketing executives who need to tailor presentations to different audiences can use the drag-and-drop feature for easy inclusion or removal of specific slides, images, or content blocks. Presenters prioritizing visual storytelling in their presentations can also use this feature to create dynamic presentations, enhancing the narrative and conveying information effectively. 

Top 3 products with the highest ratings for drag-and-drop

Analysis performed January 2024 *

4.71 out of 5 stars

Drag-and-drop feature rating : 4.74/5

4.49 out of 5 stars

Drag-and-drop feature rating : 4.64/5

Drag-and-drop feature rating : 4.61/5

Content management feature in presentation software enables users to organize, store, and access presentation content, assets, and resources. Users can organize presentation files and slides in a structured manner by creating folders, subfolders, and categories, and locate these using specific filters as and when required. The feature also facilitates the management of multimedia files, such as images and videos within the software.

What business problem does content management solve?

Businesses often deal with a large volume of presentation files, slides, and assets. Content management features help organize and categorize these resources, making it easier for users to find, access, and manage relevant content. It enhances accessibility for remote professionals and traveling teams, allowing them to access presentation materials anywhere, anytime. Content management features also facilitate streamlined collaboration by providing tools for sharing, editing, and reviewing presentations in real time. 

Ideal users of the content management feature

Professionals, such as project managers and salespersons, who create numerous presentations can leverage the content management feature to organize and reuse elements, such as text snippets and images across different presentations. Remote presenters can also utilize this feature to store and access presentation elements regardless of their location. 

Top 3 products with the highest ratings for content management

4.76 out of 5 stars

Content management feature rating : 4.81/5

Content management feature rating : 4.70/5

Content management feature rating : 4.62/5

Methodology

Key features : To identify the key features of this article, we asked users to rate, on a scale of “low importance” to “critical,” how important different features are for presentation software. The features showcased are those that the highest percentage of reviewers rated as “highly important” or “critical” over the past two years (as of Feb. 13, 2024).

Feature eligibility : To be included in the set of features considered, a given feature had to have at least 200 user ratings within the past two years (as of Feb. 13, 2024), of which at least 20% must indicate the feature is “critical.” Eligible features were determined from two sources: 

Our research team’s review of public information about presentation software usage, definitions, and associated features.

Reviewers’ indication of the features they use for presentation.

Product selection : To identify the top-rated products per feature, we evaluated user ratings for products that offer each feature. For a given product, reviewers rate each feature on a scale of one to five stars. A given product had to have at least 20 user ratings (between February 2022-24) for the feature in question to be considered.

*We selected products for this article based on their average ratings between February 2022 - February 2024, which may differ from their current overall average ratings.

Different Types of Presentation Software & Use Cases

Historically, presentation software has been pretty straightforward. People used apps like PowerPoint in the office or the classroom to provide slide-based reinforcements to their speech, lecture, or business presentation.

But over time, technology became more and more capable, enabling more intricate uses for presentation software. New software companies and developers joined the fray, some targeting highly specific use cases or offering new levels of professional features .

As more and more professional users saw the benefits outside the office, the market expanded and the variety of softwares continued to grow with it.

Fast forward to today – presentation softwares are everywhere, from your smartwatch to massive billboards in Times Square, to smart screens in restaurants.

In this post, we’ll walk through the most common types or use cases for presentation software in the modern era — and show you why many of them benefit from a tool that surpasses what PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides can do.

What Are the Most Common Use Cases or Types of Presentation Software?

There are hundreds of use cases: anyone who needs to manually display visuals will likely use a presentation software. We’ve narrowed our list down to five of the most common and significant use cases, which we’ll outline below.

One quick note: we’re defining presentation software as any software solution (whether a cloud-based presentation solution or a desktop app) that can be used as a tool for creating slide presentations and can use those slides to enhance the live presentation itself. All worthwhile presentation apps will include slide templates and have the ability to drag and drop content and share presentations with others.

This is where the presentation software game started, and it’s an absolutely massive market. It’s standard for office spaces to have a presentation solution in the boardroom, with PowerPoint being very well-known in this space for a reason. 

Most office scenarios involve shooting a presentation up on a projector, or sharing one over a video conferencing meeting. So a presentation mode is ideal, but it tends to be a simple setup, with a single screen for the audience, and one for the presenter’s notes. Nothing complex for inputs or outputs.

This is also why office-style tools rarely support multiple outputs, they’re not needed when it’s a single screen in the board room.

The office market is saturated with free and low-cost options, and most businesses are already paying for Microsoft 365 , which includes PowerPoint. These tools are generally sufficient for the meeting room, and work okay in a Zoom call. But as office AV setups expanded, these tools didn’t grow with them, became limited, and are progressively being replaced by better options. For instance, Google Slides and it’s Google Suite integration are a significant attractant, which Microsoft hasn’t been able to compete with.

Houses of Worship

Religious institutions are one of the largest non-business markets for presentation software, and one that was never considered when building software for the board room.

Houses of worship have unique needs that simply don’t exist in the typical business or in business presentations. There’s also significant variety in the House of Worship sector, from small gatherings of 20 people to multisite megachurches streaming presenting across campuses.

Most Houses of Worship use presentation software to project song lyrics for the congregation to, passages of Scripture, live video from remote speakers, announcement videos, and images to accompany the sermon. Since Covid, even in smaller churches it’s become more common to live stream to congregants at home, or add extra screens in-house to overflow rooms or nurseries.

For larger ministries, sending different visual feeds to different screens or areas of the facility is now a staple in design. These ministries need presentation tools that allow for high levels of customization, and support multiple outputs in multiple formats.

A common scenario for many larger houses of worship could be something like:

• A main presentation feed for the auditorium or sanctuary.
• Image magnification (IMAG) of the speaker for the audience.
• A secondary “main” feed for other locations and live stream that includes video of the stage or speaker
• A lobby feed that rotates Announcements or the live video of the service.
• A stage screen with presentation notes, clocks, and other information.
• Various behind-the-scenes views for the production crew or worship team.

There are also specific features needed in Houses of Worship, like access to lyrics for quick import, multiple versions of Scripture for easy access, copyright information with songs, and automation options if the band is using tracks.

Live Events

Live events share many of the complexities as Houses of Worship – church services are a kind of live event, after all.

In live event environments, reliability is a higher priority. You only have one shot with any given audience, and you can’t have a show failing due to underpowered or unreliable software.

You’re also often dealing with higher level, pro-grade hardware in live event venues, and traveling shows may have to adapt to different hardware combinations in every new location. Solutions here need to support SDI and NDI as well as the more common HDMI, DisplayPort, DVI, and possibly old-school VGA.

Visuals for live events tend to be professionally produced, relying on graphic designers rather than DIY content. So the right presentation solutions for live events are those that support every conceivable media type, including professional formats.

Last, presentations at live events are often extremely visually heavy, relying on video and animated content much more extensively. Both hardware and software must be robust enough to handle everything that’s needed—without screen tearing, visual artifacts, and with minimal latency.

Live Production & Broadcasting

Live production and broadcast environments are some of the most strenuous and high-stakes of all. They take the “gotta get it right” nature of live events and turn up the pressure even higher.

Users are looking for features around video production as well as a slide deck. The visual content needs to look good, there might be requirements around HDR, 4K, or higher numbers of  audio channels than just stereo playback, and they need presentation tools that can output multiple formats for audiences.

Of all the categories we’ve considered thus far, production and broadcasting teams need professional tools way beyond what’s used in the office. They need solutions that can broadcast main content simultaneously with lower thirds, overlays, chyrons, bugs, while powering multiple screens for the audience. Having redundant presentation machines is often a requirement, and needs expert Support that specializes in the software and uses it in the field.

Alpha/linear keying, variety of outputs, variety of formats, and various layers of upstream and downstream keys are all needed for a broadcast environment. Even if it’s the simplest use case, of a speaker with a slide deck of images, you’ll still need a software that plays nicely with your broadcast gear.

Academics & Education

The field of education has its own set of presentation needs . Of the categories included here, the education market is the most similar to the office/business market, but there are still plenty of distinctives worth noting.

In this environment, users create much of their own content, and need easy-to-use tools with easy-to-learn interfaces. They want to be able to do a lot with their presentations but don’t want to be overwhelmed with too many choices.

Academic customers may also be looking for tools that offer free and paid plans, especially if the free tier allows students to use the tool without cost, or paid plans with support for faculty. Prezi is one example: teachers may need paid plans (and business customers certainly will), but the free tier is enough to get students creating.

Academic environments also tend to gravitate toward visually rich, engaging templates and content, with less charts and more media content. Fair Use laws are generally favorable towards showing copyrighted videos in classrooms, so you need a software that you can load a full 90 minute movie into, with the ability to play, pause, and skip around in it.

Office-oriented tools can come up short here, and it’s increasingly common to see presentation spaces like auditoriums and large lecture halls, using higher powered software like ProPresenter. This allows them to throw in any presentation assets, be they video, audio, slides, images, or full-length videos and have a high degree of control over what’s shown. As recording lectures is increasingly a thing, the ability to send content both to the projector and the recording is becoming more valuable too.

Wrapping Up

We hope this guide to the different types of presentation software has helped you learn what’s out there and what would be best for your needs. And if you’re looking for more capabilities than you can get from your typical office presentation product, then consider ProPresenter.

Across all the use cases we covered, ProPresenter can handle every advanced feature or function we mentioned — and plenty more.

But you don’t just have to take our word for it. You can see for yourself! Download the trial now to see how ProPresenter can transform your presentations.

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Blog Beginner Guides How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

How To Make a Good Presentation [A Complete Guide]

Written by: Krystle Wong Jul 20, 2023

A top-notch presentation possesses the power to drive action. From winning stakeholders over and conveying a powerful message to securing funding — your secret weapon lies within the realm of creating an effective presentation .  

Being an excellent presenter isn’t confined to the boardroom. Whether you’re delivering a presentation at work, pursuing an academic career, involved in a non-profit organization or even a student, nailing the presentation game is a game-changer.

In this article, I’ll cover the top qualities of compelling presentations and walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to give a good presentation. Here’s a little tip to kick things off: for a headstart, check out Venngage’s collection of free presentation templates . They are fully customizable, and the best part is you don’t need professional design skills to make them shine!

These valuable presentation tips cater to individuals from diverse professional backgrounds, encompassing business professionals, sales and marketing teams, educators, trainers, students, researchers, non-profit organizations, public speakers and presenters. 

No matter your field or role, these tips for presenting will equip you with the skills to deliver effective presentations that leave a lasting impression on any audience.

Click to jump ahead:

What are the 10 qualities of a good presentation?

Step-by-step guide on how to prepare an effective presentation, 9 effective techniques to deliver a memorable presentation, faqs on making a good presentation, how to create a presentation with venngage in 5 steps.

When it comes to giving an engaging presentation that leaves a lasting impression, it’s not just about the content — it’s also about how you deliver it. Wondering what makes a good presentation? Well, the best presentations I’ve seen consistently exhibit these 10 qualities:

1. Clear structure

No one likes to get lost in a maze of information. Organize your thoughts into a logical flow, complete with an introduction, main points and a solid conclusion. A structured presentation helps your audience follow along effortlessly, leaving them with a sense of satisfaction at the end.

Regardless of your presentation style , a quality presentation starts with a clear roadmap. Browse through Venngage’s template library and select a presentation template that aligns with your content and presentation goals. Here’s a good presentation example template with a logical layout that includes sections for the introduction, main points, supporting information and a conclusion: 

2. Engaging opening

Hook your audience right from the start with an attention-grabbing statement, a fascinating question or maybe even a captivating anecdote. Set the stage for a killer presentation!

The opening moments of your presentation hold immense power – check out these 15 ways to start a presentation to set the stage and captivate your audience.

3. Relevant content

Make sure your content aligns with their interests and needs. Your audience is there for a reason, and that’s to get valuable insights. Avoid fluff and get straight to the point, your audience will be genuinely excited.

4. Effective visual aids

Picture this: a slide with walls of text and tiny charts, yawn! Visual aids should be just that—aiding your presentation. Opt for clear and visually appealing slides, engaging images and informative charts that add value and help reinforce your message.

With Venngage, visualizing data takes no effort at all. You can import data from CSV or Google Sheets seamlessly and create stunning charts, graphs and icon stories effortlessly to showcase your data in a captivating and impactful way.

5. Clear and concise communication

Keep your language simple, and avoid jargon or complicated terms. Communicate your ideas clearly, so your audience can easily grasp and retain the information being conveyed. This can prevent confusion and enhance the overall effectiveness of the message. 

6. Engaging delivery

Spice up your presentation with a sprinkle of enthusiasm! Maintain eye contact, use expressive gestures and vary your tone of voice to keep your audience glued to the edge of their seats. A touch of charisma goes a long way!

7. Interaction and audience engagement

Turn your presentation into an interactive experience — encourage questions, foster discussions and maybe even throw in a fun activity. Engaged audiences are more likely to remember and embrace your message.

Transform your slides into an interactive presentation with Venngage’s dynamic features like pop-ups, clickable icons and animated elements. Engage your audience with interactive content that lets them explore and interact with your presentation for a truly immersive experience.

8. Effective storytelling

Who doesn’t love a good story? Weaving relevant anecdotes, case studies or even a personal story into your presentation can captivate your audience and create a lasting impact. Stories build connections and make your message memorable.

A great presentation background is also essential as it sets the tone, creates visual interest and reinforces your message. Enhance the overall aesthetics of your presentation with these 15 presentation background examples and captivate your audience’s attention.

9. Well-timed pacing

Pace your presentation thoughtfully with well-designed presentation slides, neither rushing through nor dragging it out. Respect your audience’s time and ensure you cover all the essential points without losing their interest.

10. Strong conclusion

Last impressions linger! Summarize your main points and leave your audience with a clear takeaway. End your presentation with a bang , a call to action or an inspiring thought that resonates long after the conclusion.

In-person presentations aside, acing a virtual presentation is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. Check out this guide to learn how you can adapt your in-person presentations into virtual presentations . 

Preparing an effective presentation starts with laying a strong foundation that goes beyond just creating slides and notes. One of the quickest and best ways to make a presentation would be with the help of a good presentation software . 

Otherwise, let me walk you to how to prepare for a presentation step by step and unlock the secrets of crafting a professional presentation that sets you apart.

1. Understand the audience and their needs

Before you dive into preparing your masterpiece, take a moment to get to know your target audience. Tailor your presentation to meet their needs and expectations , and you’ll have them hooked from the start!

2. Conduct thorough research on the topic

Time to hit the books (or the internet)! Don’t skimp on the research with your presentation materials — dive deep into the subject matter and gather valuable insights . The more you know, the more confident you’ll feel in delivering your presentation.

3. Organize the content with a clear structure

No one wants to stumble through a chaotic mess of information. Outline your presentation with a clear and logical flow. Start with a captivating introduction, follow up with main points that build on each other and wrap it up with a powerful conclusion that leaves a lasting impression.

Delivering an effective business presentation hinges on captivating your audience, and Venngage’s professionally designed business presentation templates are tailor-made for this purpose. With thoughtfully structured layouts, these templates enhance your message’s clarity and coherence, ensuring a memorable and engaging experience for your audience members.

Don’t want to build your presentation layout from scratch? pick from these 5 foolproof presentation layout ideas that won’t go wrong. 

4. Develop visually appealing and supportive visual aids

Spice up your presentation with eye-catching visuals! Create slides that complement your message, not overshadow it. Remember, a picture is worth a thousand words, but that doesn’t mean you need to overload your slides with text.

Well-chosen designs create a cohesive and professional look, capturing your audience’s attention and enhancing the overall effectiveness of your message. Here’s a list of carefully curated PowerPoint presentation templates and great background graphics that will significantly influence the visual appeal and engagement of your presentation.

5. Practice, practice and practice

Practice makes perfect — rehearse your presentation and arrive early to your presentation to help overcome stage fright. Familiarity with your material will boost your presentation skills and help you handle curveballs with ease.

6. Seek feedback and make necessary adjustments

Don’t be afraid to ask for help and seek feedback from friends and colleagues. Constructive criticism can help you identify blind spots and fine-tune your presentation to perfection.

With Venngage’s real-time collaboration feature , receiving feedback and editing your presentation is a seamless process. Group members can access and work on the presentation simultaneously and edit content side by side in real-time. Changes will be reflected immediately to the entire team, promoting seamless teamwork.

7. Prepare for potential technical or logistical issues

Prepare for the unexpected by checking your equipment, internet connection and any other potential hiccups. If you’re worried that you’ll miss out on any important points, you could always have note cards prepared. Remember to remain focused and rehearse potential answers to anticipated questions.

8. Fine-tune and polish your presentation

As the big day approaches, give your presentation one last shine. Review your talking points, practice how to present a presentation and make any final tweaks. Deep breaths — you’re on the brink of delivering a successful presentation!

In competitive environments, persuasive presentations set individuals and organizations apart. To brush up on your presentation skills, read these guides on how to make a persuasive presentation and tips to presenting effectively . 

Whether you’re an experienced presenter or a novice, the right techniques will let your presentation skills soar to new heights!

From public speaking hacks to interactive elements and storytelling prowess, these 9 effective presentation techniques will empower you to leave a lasting impression on your audience and make your presentations unforgettable.

1. Confidence and positive body language

Positive body language instantly captivates your audience, making them believe in your message as much as you do. Strengthen your stage presence and own that stage like it’s your second home! Stand tall, shoulders back and exude confidence. 

2. Eye contact with the audience

Break down that invisible barrier and connect with your audience through their eyes. Maintaining eye contact when giving a presentation builds trust and shows that you’re present and engaged with them.

3. Effective use of hand gestures and movement

A little movement goes a long way! Emphasize key points with purposeful gestures and don’t be afraid to walk around the stage. Your energy will be contagious!

4. Utilize storytelling techniques

Weave the magic of storytelling into your presentation. Share relatable anecdotes, inspiring success stories or even personal experiences that tug at the heartstrings of your audience. Adjust your pitch, pace and volume to match the emotions and intensity of the story. Varying your speaking voice adds depth and enhances your stage presence.

5. Incorporate multimedia elements

Spice up your presentation with a dash of visual pizzazz! Use slides, images and video clips to add depth and clarity to your message. Just remember, less is more—don’t overwhelm them with information overload. 

Turn your presentations into an interactive party! Involve your audience with questions, polls or group activities. When they actively participate, they become invested in your presentation’s success. Bring your design to life with animated elements. Venngage allows you to apply animations to icons, images and text to create dynamic and engaging visual content.

6. Utilize humor strategically

Laughter is the best medicine—and a fantastic presentation enhancer! A well-placed joke or lighthearted moment can break the ice and create a warm atmosphere , making your audience more receptive to your message.

7. Practice active listening and respond to feedback

Be attentive to your audience’s reactions and feedback. If they have questions or concerns, address them with genuine interest and respect. Your responsiveness builds rapport and shows that you genuinely care about their experience.

8. Apply the 10-20-30 rule

Apply the 10-20-30 presentation rule and keep it short, sweet and impactful! Stick to ten slides, deliver your presentation within 20 minutes and use a 30-point font to ensure clarity and focus. Less is more, and your audience will thank you for it!

9. Implement the 5-5-5 rule

Simplicity is key. Limit each slide to five bullet points, with only five words per bullet point and allow each slide to remain visible for about five seconds. This rule keeps your presentation concise and prevents information overload.

Simple presentations are more engaging because they are easier to follow. Summarize your presentations and keep them simple with Venngage’s gallery of simple presentation templates and ensure that your message is delivered effectively across your audience.

1. How to start a presentation?

To kick off your presentation effectively, begin with an attention-grabbing statement or a powerful quote. Introduce yourself, establish credibility and clearly state the purpose and relevance of your presentation.

2. How to end a presentation?

For a strong conclusion, summarize your talking points and key takeaways. End with a compelling call to action or a thought-provoking question and remember to thank your audience and invite any final questions or interactions.

3. How to make a presentation interactive?

To make your presentation interactive, encourage questions and discussion throughout your talk. Utilize multimedia elements like videos or images and consider including polls, quizzes or group activities to actively involve your audience.

In need of inspiration for your next presentation? I’ve got your back! Pick from these 120+ presentation ideas, topics and examples to get started. 

Creating a stunning presentation with Venngage is a breeze with our user-friendly drag-and-drop editor and professionally designed templates for all your communication needs. 

Here’s how to make a presentation in just 5 simple steps with the help of Venngage:

Step 1: Sign up for Venngage for free using your email, Gmail or Facebook account or simply log in to access your account. 

Step 2: Pick a design from our selection of free presentation templates (they’re all created by our expert in-house designers).

Step 3: Make the template your own by customizing it to fit your content and branding. With Venngage’s intuitive drag-and-drop editor, you can easily modify text, change colors and adjust the layout to create a unique and eye-catching design.

Step 4: Elevate your presentation by incorporating captivating visuals. You can upload your images or choose from Venngage’s vast library of high-quality photos, icons and illustrations. 

Step 5: Upgrade to a premium or business account to export your presentation in PDF and print it for in-person presentations or share it digitally for free!

By following these five simple steps, you’ll have a professionally designed and visually engaging presentation ready in no time. With Venngage’s user-friendly platform, your presentation is sure to make a lasting impression. So, let your creativity flow and get ready to shine in your next presentation!

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What is Presentation Software?- Features of Presentation Software

Presentation software is a type of application software that uses graphics, animation, sound, and data or information to make a visual presentation. These presentations can be used directly on the screen of computer

The presentations can also be viewed as slides on a screen or projection screen. The user can also print them for different uses.

Some examples of presentation software are MS PowerPoint, Keynote, and Presentations.

Table of Contents

Features of Presentation Software

Some important features of presentation software are as follows:

Presentation software has many formatting facilities. We can change the color of text, background color, style of your text, and size.

Presentation software provides a printing facility. The user can print slides to get a hard copy Printing can be of the whole presentation or of any range of

Predefined Formats

Presentation software provides many predefined presentations formats with different background colors, text styles, and graphics for the presentation

Slide Layout

Presentation software provides different slide layouts. The user can select any layout for your presentation. Presentation software provides the facility to add sounds and

Audio and Video

Presentation software provides the facility to add sounds and videos in the presentation. It enhances the effects of the presentation.

Auto Shapes

Presentation software allows the user to draw different geometrical shapes, arrows, flowchart symbols, stars, and banners on the slide.

Clipart gallery

Presentation software includes a clipart gallery that contains images, photos, video clips, and audio clips for the presentations.

Spelling and Grammar

Spelling and Grammar features are used to detect and correct the spelling and grammatical mistakes in the presentation.

Presentation software provides the facility to animate the contents of presentations. Different types of movements can be applied to different components of the presentation. It makes the presentation more attractive.

Slide transition:

Presentation software can be used to apply special effects to the transition between slides. Slide transitions are the visual movements as one slide changes to another. By default, one slide simply replaces the previous screen.

Slide Timing

Slide timing is used to set the timing of slides. The presentation automatically displays the next slide after a preset delay. The user can rehearse the presentation to know the time required to complete the presentation.

Speaker Notes

Presentation software provides the facility to add speaker notes to a presentation. The notes can be used to remember important points during a presentation or to give to the audience.

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Welcome to Turnitin’s new website for guidance!

In 2024, we migrated our comprehensive library of guidance from https://help.turnitin.com to this site, guides.turnitin.com. During this process we have taken the opportunity to take a holistic look at our content and how we structure our guides.

This page is here to help you orientate yourself with these changes and update your resources

What's new?

We have restructured the content to help you navigate it more efficiently.

We are consolidating numerous pages to make our individual guides more valuable as well as removing duplicated content.

For example, our Similarity Report guidance on help.turnitin is repeated in numerous places to cater for each individual integration and license type. On guides.turnitin this content will exist in a single place to allow for users of all integrations and licenses to find it easily. We have made slight modifications to these guides to help you understand which guides are pertinent to you and your institution.

Our guidance search has greatly improved

As a result of our content restructure, the search functionality for guides.turnitin has improved. Use the search bar at the top of any page to locate the guidance you’re searching for.

Dedicated student and administrator guidance hubs

Visit the Student hub area to locate student guidance. For students who access Turnitin via an LMS or VLE, check out the subsection Submitting to Turnitin .

Visiting the Administrator hub area to locate administrator guidance and release notes. 

iThenticate and Crossref Similarity Check guidance is now located on a separate site

To improve the experience for our iThenticate and Crossref Similiarity Check customers we have move their help content onto a separate help site, guides.ithenticate.com . This will improve the search for all users.

We have also created an orientation page for this site to help users become acclimatised.

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Some guidance which was previously provided under each LMS has been moved to sections that reflect those workflows’ outcomes. Use the table below as a cheatsheet to quickly locate guidance.

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Here's what we know about CrowdStrike, the company potentially to blame for a global tech outage

A technical issue related to a US-based cybersecurity firm named CrowdStrike caused computers running Microsoft software across Australia and abroad to glitch on Friday.

The global outage impacted a raft of Australian companies and government agencies, causing many computers to attempt to restart and display a blue-screen error message.

Here's what we know so far.

What is CrowdStrike?

CrowdStrike is a US-based cybersecurity firm that helps companies manage their security in "IT environments" — that is, everything they use an internet connection to access.

Its primary function is to protect companies and stop data breaches, ransomware and cyber attacks.

It includes among its main customers global investment banks, universities and even the Australian betting agency TAB Corp.

The cybersecurity environment has changed rapidly in recent years due to the increased presence of threat actors targeting big business, including Ticketmaster, Medibank and Optus.

As a result, more and more companies are turning towards firms like CrowdStrike to protect their customers' information.

What is CrowdStrike used for?

One of the company's main products is CrowdStrike Falcon, which is described on its website as "providing real-time indicators of attack, hyper-accurate detection and automated protection" from possible cybersecurity threats.

CrowdStrike Falcon is used by thousands of companies across the world to protect data, and a software update released on Friday caused a global outage of Microsoft products.

Earlier this week, CrowdStrike announced an update of its Falcon product, saying it would provide "unprecedented speed and precision" to detect security breaches.

In a statement posted to its website following the outage, a CrowdStrike spokesperson said it was likely an issue with the Falcon product that caused the incident.

Who owns CrowdStrike?

The company was founded by former McAfee employee George Kurtz in 2012.

Its ownership structure is a mix of individual investors, institutions and retail.

The company's stock is broken down into two large investor categories. About 40 per cent is owned by institutional investors, and about 57 per cent is owned by public companies and individual investors.

The investor with the largest share is The Vanguard Group, a US investment fund, with about 6.79 per cent of the company.

The question of who owns CrowdStrike was part of a discredited conspiracy theory after the company investigated Russia's role in the 2016 US elections.

Former US president Donald Trump made reference to the conspiracy theory in a call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019.

"I would like to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. I guess you have one of your wealthy people," he said.

"The server, they say Ukraine has it … you or your people, and I would like you to get to the bottom of it."

What's next for the company?

Developer websites have already begun posting workarounds for the issue, and CrowdStrike the company offered a solution on its members-only platform until the incident resolves.

CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz released a statement on X on Friday evening, saying the outage was caused by a "defect" in a content update for Microsoft users.

He stressed it was not caused by a cyber attack.

Earlier, Reuters said those who phoned the company were met with a pre-recorded message.

"Thanks for contacting CrowdStrike support. CrowdStrike is aware of reports of crashes on Windows … related to the Falcon sensor."

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Watch CBS News

See full RNC roll call of states vote results for the 2024 Republican nomination

By Melissa Quinn

Updated on: July 15, 2024 / 5:23 PM EDT / CBS News

Washington — Republican governors, lawmakers and nearly 2,500 delegates are convening in Milwaukee, Wisconsin , for the Republican National Convention , with former President Donald Trump formally receiving the party's 2024 nomination for president during a roll call vote of the state delegations Monday.

The roll call brings to an end the GOP presidential primary, though it's been known for months that Trump would be the party's choice to take on President Biden in November. The former president clinched the nomination in March, after he secured the 1,215 Republican delegates needed to become the presumptive GOP presidential nominee.

Trump announced Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance as his vice presidential running mate as the roll call was underway. Trump will also deliver a speech formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination to close out the convention Thursday.

With the announcement of Florida's 125 votes for Trump, delivered by his son, Eric Trump, the GOP officially nominated him for president. Eric Trump was accompanied by Donald Trump Jr., the former president's eldest son, and Tiffany Trump, his daughter.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is chair of the convention, announced at the conclusion of the roll call that 2,387 votes were cast for Trump.

"Let's make it official," he said. "Accordingly, the chair announces the President Donald J. Trump, having received a majority of the votes entitled to be cast at the convention, has been selected as the Republican Party nominee for president of the United States."

Results of the RNC roll call of states for 2024

State delegations announced their votes for the presidential nomination. Here is the breakdown of votes from each state and territory:

• Iowa: 40 votes for Trump
• Nevada: 26 votes for Trump
• Oklahoma: 43 votes for Trump
• West Virginia: 32 votes for Trump
• New Hampshire: 22 votes for Trump
• Nebraska: 36 votes for Trump
• California: 169 votes for Trump
• Tennessee: 58 votes for Trump
• Washington state: 43 votes for Trump
• Alabama: 50 votes for Trump
• Massachusetts: 40 votes for Trump
• Indiana: 58 votes for Trump
• Georgia: 59 votes for Trump
• Utah: 40 votes for Trump
• Maryland: 37 votes for Trump
• Texas: 161 votes for Trump
• Ohio: 79 votes for Trump
• American Samoa: 9 votes for Trump
• Wisconsin: 41 votes for Trump
• New York: 91 votes for Trump
• Florida: 125 votes for Trump
• Puerto Rico: 23 for Trump
• Kentucky: 46 votes for Trump
• Hawaii: 19 votes for Trump
• Kansas: 39 votes for Trump
• Louisiana: 47 votes for Trump
• Delaware: 16 votes for Trump
• Guam: 9 votes for Trump
• Connecticut: 28 votes for Trump
• Alaska: 29 votes for Trump
• Oregon: 31 votes for Trump
• Mississippi: 40 votes for Trump
• Northern Mariana Islands: 9 votes for Trump
• Wyoming: 29 votes for Trump
• Maine: 20 votes for Trump
• Missouri: 54 votes for Trump
• Idaho: 32 votes for Trump
• Illinois: 64 votes for Trump
• North Dakota: 29 votes for Trump
• Arizona: 43 votes for Trump
• New Jersey: 12 votes for Trump
• U.S. Virgin Islands: 4 votes for Trump
• North Carolina: 62 votes for Trump; 12 votes to be cast pursuant to convention rules
• Arkansas: 40 votes for Trump
• Virginia: 42 votes for Trump; 6 votes to be cast pursuant to convention rules
• Michigan: 51 votes for Trump; 4 votes to be cast pursuant to convention rules
• Minnesota: 39 votes for Trump
• Colorado: 37 votes for Trump
• Rhode Island: 19 votes for Trump
• Pennsylvania: 67 votes for Trump
• South Dakota: 29 votes for Trump
• New Mexico: 22 votes for Trump
• Montana: 31 votes for Trump
• South Carolina: 50 votes for Trump
• Vermont: 17 votes for Trump
• Washington, D.C.: 19 votes to be cast pursuant to convention rules

How does the RNC's roll call of states work?

During the roll call, the head of each state's and territory's delegation was called on to announce the votes of their state or territory's respective nomination for president. If a state delegation had passed when its name is called, it will be called again at the conclusion of the roll call.

Delegates are selected to represent their state or area at the convention, and most of those are bound to back Trump, as they're required to vote in accordance with the outcome of their state's primary or caucus. Roughly 150 delegates were unbound heading into the convention, since a small number of delegations, including those from Montana, New Mexico and South Dakota, were not required to vote for their state's chosen candidate.

Trump came into the convention with an estimated 2,243 delegates based on the results of primaries and caucuses held earlier this year, according to the CBS News Delegate Tracker.

What happens to delegates for candidates who have dropped out?

Though Trump cruised to victory during the primary elections, his former rival in the race, Nikki Haley, secured 94 delegates, according to the Delegate Tracker. Haley's campaign said she earned 97 delegates during the primary process.

But Haley announced last week she would be releasing those delegates and encouraged them to vote for Trump at the convention. State party rules dictate whether Haley's delegates are bound to her or whether they're free to vote for a different candidate since she withdrew from the presidential contest .

In Iowa, for example, Trump, Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswaky secured delegates after the caucuses . But under state party rules, since Trump was the only candidate nominated at the convention, the entire 40-person delegation voted for him.

• Republican National Convention

Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.

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Highlights from the 2024 Republican National Convention

Fact check of Trump, others on Day 4 of the Republican National Convention

2024 RNC Day 3 fact check of the Republican National Convention

McKinsey technology trends outlook 2024

Despite challenging overall market conditions in 2023, continuing investments in frontier technologies promise substantial future growth in enterprise adoption. Generative AI (gen AI) has been a standout trend since 2022, with the extraordinary uptick in interest and investment in this technology unlocking innovative possibilities across interconnected trends such as robotics and immersive reality. While the macroeconomic environment with elevated interest rates has affected equity capital investment and hiring, underlying indicators—including optimism, innovation, and longer-term talent needs—reflect a positive long-term trajectory in the 15 technology trends we analyzed.

What’s new in this year’s analysis

This year, we reflected the shifts in the technology landscape with two changes on the list of trends: digital trust and cybersecurity (integrating what we had previously described as Web3 and trust architectures) and the future of robotics. Robotics technologies’ synergy with AI is paving the way for groundbreaking innovations and operational shifts across the economic and workforce landscapes. We also deployed a survey to measure adoption levels across trends.

These are among the findings in the latest McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook, in which the McKinsey Technology Council  identified the most significant technology trends unfolding today. This research is intended to help executives plan ahead by developing an understanding of potential use cases, sources of value, adoption drivers, and the critical skills needed to bring these opportunities to fruition.

Our analysis examines quantitative measures of interest, innovation, investment, and talent to gauge the momentum of each trend. Recognizing the long-term nature and interdependence of these trends, we also delve into the underlying technologies, uncertainties, and questions surrounding each trend. (For more about new developments in our research, please see the sidebar “What’s new in this year’s analysis”; for more about the research itself, please see the sidebar “Research methodology.”)

New and notable

The two trends that stood out in 2023 were gen AI and electrification and renewables. Gen AI has seen a spike of almost 700 percent in Google searches from 2022 to 2023, along with a notable jump in job postings and investments. The pace of technology innovation has been remarkable. Over the course of 2023 and 2024, the size of the prompts that large language models (LLMs) can process, known as “context windows,” spiked from 100,000 to two million tokens. This is roughly the difference between adding one research paper to a model prompt and adding about 20 novels to it. And the modalities that gen AI can process have continued to increase, from text summarization and image generation to advanced capabilities in video, images, audio, and text. This has catalyzed a surge in investments and innovation aimed at advancing more powerful and efficient computing systems. The large foundation models that power generative AI, such as LLMs, are being integrated into various enterprise software tools and are also being employed for diverse purposes such as powering customer-facing chatbots, generating ad campaigns, accelerating drug discovery, and more. We expect this expansion to continue, pushing the boundaries of AI capabilities. Senior leaders’ awareness of gen AI innovation has increased interest, investment, and innovation in AI technologies, such as robotics, which is a new addition to our trends analysis this year. Advancements in AI are ushering in a new era of more capable robots, spurring greater innovation and a wider range of deployments.

Research methodology

To assess the development of each technology trend, our team collected data on five tangible measures of activity: search engine queries, news publications, patents, research publications, and investment. For each measure, we used a defined set of data sources to find occurrences of keywords associated with each of the 15 trends, screened those occurrences for valid mentions of activity, and indexed the resulting numbers of mentions on a 0–1 scoring scale that is relative to the trends studied. The innovation score combines the patents and research scores; the interest score combines the news and search scores. (While we recognize that an interest score can be inflated by deliberate efforts to stimulate news and search activity, we believe that each score fairly reflects the extent of discussion and debate about a given trend.) Investment measures the flows of funding from the capital markets into companies linked with the trend.

Data sources for the scores include the following:

• Patents. Data on patent filings are sourced from Google Patents, where the data highlight the number of granted patents.
• Research. Data on research publications are sourced from Lens.
• News. Data on news publications are sourced from Factiva.
• Searches. Data on search engine queries are sourced from Google Trends.
• Investment. Data on private-market and public-market capital raises (venture capital and corporate and strategic M&A, including joint ventures), private equity (including buyouts and private investment in public equity), and public investments (including IPOs) are sourced from PitchBook.
• Talent demand. Number of job postings is sourced from McKinsey’s proprietary Organizational Data Platform, which stores licensed, de-identified data on professional profiles and job postings. Data are drawn primarily from English-speaking countries.

In addition, we updated the selection and definition of trends from last year’s report to reflect the evolution of technology trends:

• The future of robotics trend was added since last year’s publication.
• Data sources and keywords were updated. For data on the future of space technologies investments, we used research from McKinsey’s Aerospace & Defense Practice.

Finally, we used survey data to calculate the enterprise-wide adoption scores for each trend:

• Survey scope. The survey included approximately 1,000 respondents from 50 countries.
• Geographical coverage. Survey representation was balanced across Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America.
• Company size. Size categories, based on annual revenue, included small companies ($10 million to $50 million), medium-size companies ($50 million to $1 billion), and large companies (greater than $1 billion).
• Respondent profile. The survey was targeted to senior-level professionals knowledgeable in technology, who reported their perception of the extent to which their organizations were using the technologies.
• Survey method. The survey was conducted online to enhance reach and accessibility.
• Question types. The survey employed multiple-choice and open-ended questions for comprehensive insights.
• 1: Frontier innovation. This technology is still nascent, with few organizations investing in or applying it. It is largely untested and unproven in a business context.
• 2: Experimentation. Organizations are testing the functionality and viability of the technology with a small-scale prototype, typically done without a strong focus on a near-term ROI. Few companies are scaling or have fully scaled the technology.
• 3: Piloting. Organizations are implementing the technology for the first few business use cases. It may be used in pilot projects or limited deployments to test its feasibility and effectiveness.
• 4: Scaling. Organizations are in the process of scaling the deployment and adoption of the technology across the enterprise. The technology is being scaled by a significant number of companies.
• 5: Fully scaled. Organizations have fully deployed and integrated the technology across the enterprise. It has become the standard and is being used at a large scale as companies have recognized the value and benefits of the technology.

Electrification and renewables was the other trend that bucked the economic headwinds, posting the highest investment and interest scores among all the trends we evaluated. Job postings for this sector also showed a modest increase.

Although many trends faced declines in investment and hiring in 2023, the long-term outlook remains positive. This optimism is supported by the continued longer-term growth in job postings for the analyzed trends (up 8 percent from 2021 to 2023) and enterprises’ continued innovation and heightened interest in harnessing these technologies, particularly for future growth.

Future frontiers: Navigating the next wave of tech innovations

Join Lareina Yee and Roger Roberts on Tuesday, July 30, at 12:30 p.m. EDT/6:30 p.m. CET as they discuss the future of these technological trends, the factors that will fuel their growth, and strategies for investing in them through 2024 and beyond.

In 2023, technology equity investments fell by 30 to 40 percent to approximately $570 billion due to rising financing costs and a cautious near-term growth outlook, prompting investors to favor technologies with strong revenue and margin potential. This approach aligns with the strategic perspective leading companies are adopting, in which they recognize that fully adopting and scaling cutting-edge technologies is a long-term endeavor. This recognition is evident when companies diversify their investments across a portfolio of several technologies, selectively intensifying their focus on areas most likely to push technological boundaries forward. While many technologies have maintained cautious investment profiles over the past year, gen AI saw a sevenfold increase in investments, driven by substantial advancements in text, image, and video generation.

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Despite an overall downturn in private equity investment, the pace of innovation has not slowed. Innovation has accelerated in the three trends that are part of the “AI revolution” group: gen AI, applied AI, and industrializing machine learning. Gen AI creates new content from unstructured data (such as text and images), applied AI leverages machine learning models for analytical and predictive tasks, and industrializing machine learning accelerates and derisks the development of machine learning solutions. Applied AI and industrializing machine learning, boosted by the widening interest in gen AI, have seen the most significant uptick in innovation, reflected in the surge in publications and patents from 2022 to 2023. Meanwhile, electrification and renewable-energy technologies continue to capture high interest, reflected in news mentions and web searches. Their popularity is fueled by a surge in global renewable capacity, their crucial roles in global decarbonization efforts, and heightened energy security needs amid geopolitical tensions and energy crises.

The talent environment largely echoed the investment picture in tech trends in 2023. The technology sector faced significant layoffs, particularly among large technology companies, with job postings related to the tech trends we studied declining by 26 percent—a steeper drop than the 17 percent decrease in global job postings overall. The greater decline in demand for tech-trends-related talent may have been fueled by technology companies’ cost reduction efforts amid decreasing revenue growth projections. Despite this reduction, the trends with robust investment and innovation, such as gen AI, not only maintained but also increased their job postings, reflecting a strong demand for new and advanced skills. Electrification and renewables was the other trend that saw positive job growth, partially due to public sector support for infrastructure spending.

Even with the short-term vicissitudes in talent demand, our analysis of 4.3 million job postings across our 15 tech trends underscored a wide skills gap. Compared with the global average, fewer than half the number of potential candidates have the high-demand tech skills specified in job postings. Despite the year-on-year decreases for job postings in many trends from 2022 to 2023, the number of tech-related job postings in 2023 still represented an 8 percent increase from 2021, suggesting the potential for longer-term growth (Exhibit 1).

Enterprise technology adoption momentum

The trajectory of enterprise technology adoption is often described as an S-curve that traces the following pattern: technical innovation and exploration, experimenting with the technology, initial pilots in the business, scaling the impact throughout the business, and eventual fully scaled adoption (Exhibit 2). This pattern is evident in this year’s survey analysis of enterprise adoption conducted across our 15 technologies. Adoption levels vary across different industries and company sizes, as does the perceived progress toward adoption.

Image description:

A graph depicts the adoption curve of technology trends, scored from 1 to 5, where 1 represents frontier innovation, located at the bottom left corner of the curve; 2 is experimenting, located slightly above frontier innovation; 3 is piloting, which follows the upward trajectory of the curve; 4 is scaling, marked by a vertical ascent as adoption increases; and 5 is fully scaled, positioned at the top of the curve, indicating near-complete adoption.

In 2023, the trends are positioned along the adoption curve as follows: future of space technologies and quantum technologies are at the frontier innovation stage; climate technologies beyond electrification and renewables, future of bioengineering, future of mobility, future of robotics, and immersive-reality technologies are at the experimenting stage; digital trust and cybersecurity, electrification and renewables, industrializing machine learning, and next-gen software development are at the piloting stage; and advanced connectivity, applied AI, cloud and edge computing, and generative AI are at the scaling stage.

Footnote: Trend is more relevant to certain industries, resulting in lower overall adoption across industries compared with adoption within relevant industries.

Source: McKinsey technology adoption survey data

End of image description.

We see that the technologies in the S-curve’s early stages of innovation and experimenting are either on the leading edge of progress, such as quantum technologies and robotics, or are more relevant to a specific set of industries, such as bioengineering and space. Factors that could affect the adoption of these technologies include high costs, specialized applications, and balancing the breadth of technology investments against focusing on a select few that may offer substantial first-mover advantages.

As technologies gain traction and move beyond experimenting, adoption rates start accelerating, and companies invest more in piloting and scaling. We see this shift in a number of trends, such as next-generation software development and electrification. Gen AI’s rapid advancement leads among trends analyzed, about a quarter of respondents self-reporting that they are scaling its use. More mature technologies, like cloud and edge computing and advanced connectivity, continued their rapid pace of adoption, serving as enablers for the adoption of other emerging technologies as well (Exhibit 3).

A segmented bar graph shows the adoption levels of tech trends in 2023 as a percentage of respondents. The trends are divided into 5 segments, comprising 100%: fully scaled, scaling, piloting, experimenting, and not investing. The trends are arranged based on the combined percentage sum of fully scaled and scaling shares. Listed from highest to lowest, these combined percentages are as follows:

• cloud and edge computing at 48%
• advanced connectivity at 37%
• generative AI at 36%
• applied AI at 35%
• next-generation software development at 31%
• digital trust and cybersecurity at 30%
• electrification and renewables at 28%
• industrializing machine learning at 27%
• future of mobility at 21%
• climate technologies beyond electrification and renewables at 20%
• immersive-reality technologies at 19%
• future of bioengineering at 18%
• future of robotics at 18%
• quantum technologies at 15%
• future of space technologies at 15%

The process of scaling technology adoption also requires a conducive external ecosystem where user trust and readiness, business model economics, regulatory environments, and talent availability play crucial roles. Since these ecosystem factors vary by geography and industry, we see different adoption scenarios playing out. For instance, while the leading banks in Latin America are on par with their North American counterparts in deploying gen AI use cases, the adoption of robotics in manufacturing sectors varies significantly due to differing labor costs affecting the business case for automation.

As executives navigate these complexities, they should align their long-term technology adoption strategies with both their internal capacities and the external ecosystem conditions to ensure the successful integration of new technologies into their business models. Executives should monitor ecosystem conditions that can affect their prioritized use cases to make decisions about the appropriate investment levels while navigating uncertainties and budgetary constraints on the way to full adoption (see the “Adoption developments across the globe” sections within each trend or particular use cases therein that executives should monitor). Across the board, leaders who take a long-term view—building up their talent, testing and learning where impact can be found, and reimagining the businesses for the future—can potentially break out ahead of the pack.

Lareina Yee is a senior partner in McKinsey’s Bay Area office, where Michael Chui  is a McKinsey Global Institute partner, Roger Roberts  is a partner, and Mena Issler is an associate partner.

The authors wish to thank the following McKinsey colleagues for their contributions to this research: Aakanksha Srinivasan, Ahsan Saeed, Alex Arutyunyants, Alex Singla, Alex Zhang, Alizee Acket-Goemaere, An Yan, Anass Bensrhir, Andrea Del Miglio, Andreas Breiter, Ani Kelkar, Anna Massey, Anna Orthofer, Arjit Mehta, Arjita Bhan, Asaf Somekh, Begum Ortaoglu, Benjamin Braverman, Bharat Bahl, Bharath Aiyer, Bhargs Srivathsan, Brian Constantine, Brooke Stokes, Bryan Richardson, Carlo Giovine, Celine Crenshaw, Daniel Herde, Daniel Wallance, David Harvey, Delphine Zurkiya, Diego Hernandez Diaz, Douglas Merrill, Elisa Becker-Foss, Emma Parry, Eric Hazan, Erika Stanzl, Everett Santana, Giacomo Gatto, Grace W Chen, Hamza Khan, Harshit Jain, Helen Wu, Henning Soller, Ian de Bode, Jackson Pentz, Jeffrey Caso, Jesse Klempner, Jim Boehm, Joshua Katz, Julia Perry, Julian Sevillano, Justin Greis, Kersten Heineke, Kitti Lakner, Kristen Jennings, Liz Grennan, Luke Thomas, Maria Pogosyan, Mark Patel, Martin Harrysson, Martin Wrulich, Martina Gschwendtner, Massimo Mazza, Matej Macak, Matt Higginson, Matt Linderman, Matteo Cutrera, Mellen Masea, Michiel Nivard, Mike Westover, Musa Bilal, Nicolas Bellemans, Noah Furlonge-Walker, Obi Ezekoye, Paolo Spranzi, Pepe Cafferata, Robin Riedel, Ryan Brukardt, Samuel Musmanno, Santiago Comella-Dorda, Sebastian Mayer, Shakeel Kalidas, Sharmila Bhide, Stephen Xu, Tanmay Bhatnagar, Thomas Hundertmark, Tinan Goli, Tom Brennan, Tom Levin-Reid, Tony Hansen, Vinayak HV, Yaron Haviv, Yvonne Ferrier, and Zina Cole.

They also wish to thank the external members of the McKinsey Technology Council for their insights and perspectives, including Ajay Agrawal, Azeem Azhar, Ben Lorica, Benedict Evans, John Martinis, and Jordan Jacobs.

Special thanks to McKinsey Global Publishing colleagues Barr Seitz, Diane Rice, Kanika Punwani, Katie Shearer, LaShon Malone, Mary Gayen, Nayomi Chibana, Richard Johnson, Stephen Landau, and Victor Cuevas for making this interactive come alive.

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