PowerPoint is so ubiquitous in the professional world that it’s easy to rely on the legacy software for building presentations even when a host of presentation design competitors are out there. We talk all day long about today’s technology giants and how they use operating systems and/or hardware to dictate the software applications consumers use, but when it comes to the next deck we put together, we forget that’s just what Microsoft did to us with PowerPoint many years ago.
Now, don’t get us wrong: PowerPoint remains the industry leader and there are several good reasons to default to a PowerPoint deck. For one, if you’re collaborating on a presentation with individuals whose technological prowess varies, PowerPoint is most likely to be familiar and available on a variety of computer types regardless of internet connections, operating systems, etc. Another obvious advantage is when it’s pitch time: many presenters don’t know if it’s their computer or some A/V team’s old PC in the back of the room that will be running the presentation. When in doubt, you obviously go for the most common presentation design software.
That said, there’s very little about PowerPoint’s actual presentation design toolset that makes it unique. Keynote, SlideRocket, and even Google Presentations (part of the Google Drive toolkit) all have many of the same design capabilities, though you can expect the interface to take some getting used to. While Keynote is a traditional app downloaded to a physical computer, SlideRocket and Google Presentations are cloud-based and may just offer that extra bit of cloud freedom you didn’t know you were looking for.
The #1 concern anyone is going to have when switching their presentation design application is compatibility. No one wants to show up to their Series A funding pitch and discover that formerly epic prose reduced to Wingdings. Don’t ask us why this happens: the Apple/Microsoft sabotagery has no bounds.
The notion of PowerPoint inter-compatibility is a myth, too. Different versions don’t always work well together, especially with any sort of advanced design, audio/video embeds, or animations going on. Font compatibility is only as good as the font book of the destination computer, and let’s not even get into what happens with a presentation travels from PowerPoint for Mac to PowerPoint for PC. Nightmare.
But when you build your presentation in the cloud, the only compatibility risk you run is the risk of not having an internet connection. These days, that’s a pretty minimal risk—especially if you have a smartphone and could just switch on mobile hotspot in a pinch. In many ways, the cloud-based approach actually takes a lot of risk off the table. You access the presentation through browsers, so regardless of whose computer you use, it always displays as intended. And meanwhile you access all the amazing collaborative benefits of working in the cloud: there’s nothing more thrilling (at least, to us workaholic geeks) than being on a plane 30,000 feet in the air and working on a presentation with a partner in real-time, seeing their notes and changes as they make them and building it out together. It’s the future, man.
So while it might not be time just yet to try and convince your entire office to abandon PowerPoint, it may be a really good time to set up a free Google Drive account (if you haven’t yet) and start fooling around with Google Presentations. When those last minute opportunities come along and you can’t afford a 4-hour flight to slow down the development of a presentation, it’s just the sort of tool you’ll want to use.
Question: Have you toyed around with Google Presentations or SlideRocket before? What were your impressions?
