- The best When it comes to presenting and making presentations, Powtoon succeeded in creating a whole new category of presentations. Forget bullet points, templates, and files on your computer. Powtoon is an online tool that allows users (PC or Mac) to easily create animated stories for presentations or explainer videos.
Slides are only used to manage content while creating the presentation which, when on screen, provides an easy to grasp narrative. If you are a Google Drive user get excited because Powtoon integrates really well with it. Powtoon is great with voice overs, and allows you to integrate a great script with fantastic animated characters. 2. – The Simple PowerPoint alternative Google Drive Presentations: one of the best free PowerPoint alternative We work a lot with Google applications and they are great alternatives to some Microsoft applications.
You may already be familiar with Google Drive, and if not then we highly recommend checking it out. Google allows users to get started with presentations super quickly and efficiently. It looks just like PowerPoint but is much easier to use. What can we say, the software was built by geeks and it shows! While the aesthetics of the presentations are quite lacking, and the templates are too basic, it is, however, very strong on collaborative work. Creating PowerPoint like slides has never been easier.
Google Drive Presentations: one of the best free PowerPoint alternative Many people use Google Docs presentations to start their creation process and then switch over to more robust programs. 3. 280 Slides – The Aesthetic PowerPoint Alternative 280 Slides: one of the best free PowerPoint alternatives 280 Slides is one of those unknown, “no one has heard of”, slideshow apps that surprisingly has quite a large user base. That’s because presentations made with this program look just like Microsoft PowerPoint fancy edition! It’s easy to use and many users often create slides in Google Docs or PowerPoint and then import them into 280 Slides to get that fancy, fun feel.
A quick search online shows that many of the presentations created with 280 Presentations end up on SlideShare, and other great features include auto save and recovery (also available on Powtoon and Google Docs). You can also export your slideshow back into PowerPoint if you want to share your presentations or have a collaborative aspect.
You can find this application in the AppleScript folder located in the Applications folder on your computer’s main hard drive. Navigate to this folder now and double-click the Script Editor icon to launch the application. NOTE: The following description and illustrations are for the Script Editor application included in Mac OSX 10.5.
4. – The Professional PowerPoint Alternative SlideRocket is an expensive web-based presentation application. SlideRocket offers a limited free option with the ability to import from PowerPoint and export to PDF. The higher price comes with many features including sales team collaboration and more, which is quite unique. The slide transition effects look great on the screen and resemble Flash more so than PowerPoint. You can also integrate content from sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as utilize plug-ins in each one of your presentations. If you want great graphics and lots of templates, and are willing to pay up when the time comes, this may be a really good option for you. It’s still a slideshow, but a really, really good looking one. 5. – No Slides PowerPoint Alternative Prezi became very popular because it was the first to offer a real alternative to the typical slideshow format of presentations. It’s still the best option for what we call “non-linear presentations”.
If you need to hop around a lot this is a good option because Prezi allows the presenter to skip to any part of the presentation with ease (unlike PowerPoitnt where users need to move back or forth one slide at a time). Conclusion Are you over PowerPoint yet? Clearly it has lost the title of the Best Presentation Software.
Here is what we have to say about the various options:. Powtoon – Best free presentation software, best. Google Docs: Best Simplified PowerPoint Clone. 280 Slides: Best for good looking simple Bullet point presentations. Sliderocket: Best Collaborative slideshow software. Prezi: Best non-linear presentation software.
As I use, the word that keeps popping into my head is pleasant. Nearly everything about the massive visual overhaul from the previous version seems clearer, friendlier, and more modern. It feels more like Apple’s, which I mean as a compliment. The feature changes are mostly minor and subtle yet useful. Even so, PowerPoint 2016 for Mac still lags behind its Windows counterpart—and it also lost a few interesting features that were present in PowerPoint 2011. New and improved The most obvious change is a nicely redesigned ribbon, which is now nearly identical to the ones in PowerPoint for Windows and PowerPoint Online.
If you knew where everything was in PowerPoint 2011, prepare for a bit of relearning. Almost every ribbon control is still there, but many have been moved, renamed, and given new icons.
The erstwhile Themes tab is now called Design; Tables, Charts, and SmartArt (among other features) have been subsumed under a new Insert tab, and a number of tabs (such as Picture Format and Table Design) appear only when the appropriate object type is selected. Each built-in theme has several variants; if you want even more control, choose your own color palette, font, or background. The entire toolbar is gone, with only four vestigial icons (for File, Save, Undo, and Repeat) next to the Close, Minimize, and Zoom controls. Although most toolbar icons have been relocated onto one of the ribbon tabs (and also have corresponding menu commands), you can no longer create a customized set of icons for your most common tasks.
A new sidebar (much like Keynote’s Inspector) appears on the right side of the window when you invoke certain features, such as the Animation pane (which lists all the animations on your slide), the Format Pane (for editing the attributes of shapes, graphics, and other objects—including such previously hard-to-reach settings such as 3D Format and 3D Rotation), and Comments. Each pane gets its own tab, and you can tear off any tab to make it a floating palette. I like the way this context-sensitive interface consolidation (along with the streamlined ribbon) reduces screen clutter. When you open PowerPoint 2016, you’re presented with 24 brand-new themes. Although that’s less than half the number of themes in PowerPoint 2011, there’s a new twist: each theme has numerous variants. With one click, you can select a different combination of color palettes, fonts, and background styles for your current theme (but with the same overall design); or you can apply those attributes individually. Although the theme chooser displays no templates (basically fill-in-the-blanks presentations, each with its own theme), you can type a keyword in the Search All Templates field at the top to display matching templates, which you can then download with two clicks.
Another noteworthy improvement is better integration with OneDrive and Office 365. Presentations are now saved to your OneDrive by default, and if you want to use OneDrive for storing and syncing your data, it couldn’t be easier.
Unfortunately, unlike, the Mac version doesn’t have native support for Dropbox, iCloud Drive, or other cloud storage services (although you can manually save a file to any folder on your Mac, including Dropbox and iCloud Drive). Sharing presentations (with or without editing privileges) is much simpler now too, and even someone without a copy of PowerPoint can view and edit your shared presentation in PowerPoint Online. And people collaborating on a presentation will appreciate the new threaded comments feature. Other minor new features include a more flexible presenter view, better conflict resolution (for when multiple people make changes to a slide at the same time), and a dozen or so new transitions (matching those in the Windows version). Panes such as Animations and Format Picture appear, as needed, in a sidebar at the right, giving you easier access to many features. You can tear off any of these (such as Comments) to make it a floating palette. Gone but not forgotten A number of features disappeared, too.
The Help mentions only one of these: you can no longer save a presentation as a movie (you can work around this by using screen-recording software such as ). In addition, you can broadcast your slides live using the PowerPoint Broadcast Service, compare two versions of a presentation, or use the Scrapbook to store and reuse text and graphics snippets. Macworld’s lamented the absence of features found in the Windows version, such as the capability to adjust the starting and ending points of movies, sounds that play in the background across slides, and an advanced timeline for editing a slide’s animations in a graphical format. Those features are still absent in PowerPoint 2016 for Mac.
Other Windows-only features are embedding YouTube videos; trimming, bookmarking, and fading audio; customizable keyboard shortcuts; animation triggers (animating an object when you click it); inserting online pictures from within PowerPoint; and embedding fonts in your presentation (for proper display on computers without the same fonts). Bottom line For Mac users, the more apt question is how PowerPoint stacks up against Apple’s free Keynote app. When I, I complained about features that had been lost in its most recent overhaul; since then (it’s now up to version 6.5.3), some of those features have been restored, and its reliability has improved. I now consider the two apps equivalent in usability, overall power, and likability. However, each has features the other lacks, so your choice will depend on which features are most important to you (and which ecosystem—OneDrive/Office 365 or iCloud/iWork—you feel most comfortable in). For example, PowerPoint has nothing like Keynote’s signature Magic Move transition, its tables lack Keynote’s extensive spreadsheet capabilities, and Keynote (still) lets you trim audio and video and save your presentation as a movie.
On the other hand, PowerPoint offers easier and more flexible path animation, the fabulously useful Arrange Reorder Overlapping Objects command (for a 3D view of all the objects on a slide), and the option to play presentations in a separate window (which is especially useful when giving remote presentations using an app such as Skype). PowerPoint 2016 for Mac is, as I say, pleasant to use, not to mention powerful.
If it had feature parity with the Windows version, Dropbox and iCloud support, and a Magic Move-like transition, it would be nearly perfect—and I’d love to see that happen. Editor's note: Updated one 8/3/15 to correct information about the ability to export presentations as a series of graphics.