10 of the best PowerPoint alternatives and presentation software tools in 2016

Presentations are a key part of education and business. Explaining an idea to a group, and increasingly gathering their feedback and viewpoints, is a crucial part of communication.

Here are 10 presentation software tools to help you in 2016…

#1:Haiku Deck

Although we definitely fall on the side of PowerPoint fans rather than haters, this is one of our favourite PowerPoint alternatives – especially for very visual slides with limited text. Very easy to use, making beautiful slides even if your own design skills are fairly limited. Plus, you can save the result as a PowerPoint file meaning it works with Glisser of course!



#2:Canva

Seriously challenging (if not superseding) Haiku Deck for the quality of the visuals you can produce is Canva. With perhaps one of the easiest registration and get-started processes out there, this is a great piece of software to deliver high-quality presentation content at warp speed. You’ve the option to download your content as a PDF which means, you’ve guessed it, you can drop it straight into Glisser and make it interactive as well.



#3:Google Slides

Google Slides is now the granddaddy of collaborative presentation creation tools – the simplest way to get lots of team members contributing to and accessing slides as they are developed and refined. Whilst it still feels a bit limited in features compared to the colossus that PowerPoint has become, all the basics are there and the tools and layout will be most familiar to those used to the Microsoft suite. Saves as PDF or PPT – say no more.



#4:Slideshare

Not a PowerPoint alternative, but a useful way of getting your existing presentation content online – especially if you want to share it with your LinkedIn audience. There’s also a huge number of other people’s presentations on the site to give you inspiration for designs, fonts, layouts and content. It’s always worth taking a look before you start your slides to get a few new ideas.



#5:Glisser

You didn’t think we’d get through this list without mentioning ourselves did you? We like to think of ourselves as an interactive presentation software option that complements many of the other solutions out there – from PowerPoint and beyond. Take your existing content, and integrate live polls, audience Q&A and Twitter feeds – then share each slide live to your audience’s smartphones so they can get your content and interact. Plus you can embed ‘Glissered’ interactive slides on your website, to collect data as well as present your content.



#6:PicHit.Me

This is an awesome plug-in for PowerPoint that makes the process of finding images for your slides much easier. I don’t know about you, but once I’ve created a presentation plan and basic storyboard, it’s hunting down useful (and free) images that takes all the time. It’s a laborious task, but PicHit makes it easy to do from within PowerPoint.



#7:Oomfo

Another PowerPoint plug-in. This one’s for presenters who create a lot of charts, giving you a far wider range of designs than PowerPoint has as standard – waterfalls, funnels, etc. As someone that has previously been delivering presentation content in the financial services industry for many years, I wish this had been available back then. Would have saved me building everything from scratch using shapes!



#8:Office Timeline

Another cool plug-in for corporate users or start-ups creating pitch decks. Office Timeline provides a quick and easy way for you to add schedules, Gantt charts or project/product management timelines. They looks great, and take away another time-sapping task for slides that appear in a lot of presentations – whether presented or simply used to manage internal teams.



#9:PowerPoint Labs

This plug-in lets you highlight certain sections of a slide – so effectively becomes a more sophisticated pointer, where you can hide and reveal things you are focusing on. It’s a quick way to add emphasis to slides without resorting to loads of crazy and distracting animation. It also has loads of cool tools that allow you to do things like crop around images in photos. Very useful.



#10:Expert Help

Not software, but we wanted to give a shout out to all the great presentation professionals we’ve worked with in 2015, no doubt delivering even more in 2016. Presentation designers like Eyeful and BrightCarbon, PowerPoint experts like NutsandBolts training, or Wow Factor presentations that can help improve your presentation skills and confidence in front of a crowd. All useful additions to a presenter’s contact book. If we’ve missed anyone off, get in touch!



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