Free al­tern­at­ives to Microsoft Power­Point

One of the best-known al­tern­at­ives to Microsoft Power­Point is the online tool Prezi. Since its entry into the market back in 2009, this web-based present­a­tion tool has earned a large fan base in re­l­at­ively little time. Prezi is a great al­tern­at­ive for anyone who wants to make their present­a­tions more active and ex­per­i­ment with less con­ven­tion­al designs. The latter is because the tool doesn’t offer the classic design approach that you’ll recognise from Power­Point, with slides presented in­di­vidu­ally – instead, it offers a dynamic approach to content creation. Using a sort of digital screen, you arrange your content in the way you want it presented and then later zoom in and out through­out the present­a­tion to enlarge the relevant fields. Despite the homepage’s promise of an ef­fort­less trans­ition and ease-of-use, it’s important to note that the first time you work on Prezi, you’ll notice a dif­fer­ence. It functions in an entirely different way to Power­Point, meaning you’ll have to pay more attention to your design and focus on the way you navigate your present­a­tion. The challenge here is to make sensible con­nec­tions between the in­di­vidu­al content segments on the screen. It’s only by doing this that you can make sure your audience keeps the overview of the slideshow in mind and can follow the present­a­tion’s own logic or train of thought properly. This means Prezi is often less effective for com­plic­ated and long present­a­tions, as it can be easy for listeners to get lost in these. There’s also the danger that you could overuse the exciting range of effects on offer. For this reason, it’s important to keep per­spect­ive when using Prezi and remember that a present­a­tion is designed to highlight key content and emphasise important aspects, not con­stantly attract the viewer’s attention with thousands of snazzy effects. The golden rule with Prezi is that less is often more. But if you follow this advice and use Prezi as it is intended, the program offers you all the tools you need to create a truly vivid, engaging, and unique present­a­tion. This is where you need to think about your en­vir­on­ment: Depending on the audience and the occasion, a tra­di­tion­al Power­Point present­a­tion may be more ap­pro­pri­ate. Power­Point has the benefit of being the flagship ap­plic­a­tion for present­a­tions, meaning that its simple structure and tra­di­tion­al layout is familiar to es­sen­tially everybody. But if you’ve had enough of this static and dy­nam­ic­ally limited present­a­tion software, then Prezi rep­res­ents an excellent Power­Point al­tern­at­ive.

Most people have their content roughly in mind when they set about making a present­a­tion. But visu­al­ising that content with the addition of suitable images and graphics is much more of a challenge and can often take con­sid­er­ably more time and effort. This is where Haiku comes into its own as a very good al­tern­at­ive to Microsoft Power­Point – the Haiku Deck program supports its users in the visual design phase. Haiku Deck offers users an in­teg­rated database of photos that can be used freely by anybody. In fact, to make things even easier for users who are lacking the creative spark to find the perfect graphics and images, this free present­a­tion software offers a clever scanning tool that scans a present­a­tion for keywords and suggests suitable images that would fit. Haiku Deck is available as a web solution in the browser and also as an app on the iOS app store. Finished present­a­tions can be shared on other channels upon com­ple­tion, or imported into Apple Keynote or Microsoft Power­Point. But there are some downsides to the programme: There’s no option for animated trans­itions between slides, for example, and many other types of animation are also un­avail­able. Lastly, there’s no option for sound to be added to present­a­tions and text can’t just be placed freely in any part of the screen.

Naturally, Google also offers its own range of quick and un­com­plic­ated online office tools. Google Slides is available to Google account holders com­pletely free of charge. It comes with around 20 different templates that can be used to create present­a­tions quickly and easily. And you can even upload Power­Point documents to edit and use in Google Slides. The special thing about Google Slides is that, like all of the Google web apps range, it’s designed for col­lab­or­at­ive team work from remote locations. Various project man­age­ment functions make this possible, meaning that you can have different team members working on the same slideshow at once. There are also in­di­vidu­al roles and access rights available that can be set be­fore­hand, meaning that team members can only read and/or edit certain pages. This makes Google Slides an in­cred­ibly practical tool for col­lab­or­at­ive efforts – and it updates in real time too, meaning all users can view the most current version of the present­a­tion.

Warning: Do not get confused! Slides may share the name with the afore­men­tioned Google Slides, but besides that it has nothing to do with Google’s al­tern­at­ive to Microsoft Power­Point. Slides is actually an in­de­pend­ently operated online tool for slideshow creation. It works directly in your internet browser and allows you to create quick and straight­for­ward present­a­tions – for both private and pro­fes­sion­al use. Thanks to its intuitive usability, you’ll find that you can receive pro­fes­sion­al looking results on Slides with just a few clicks, largely due to the great selection or pre-made layouts and elements. One of the main focuses for Slides is on sci­entif­ic present­a­tions, which is why the program offers an extra editor for formulas, among other spe­cial­ised features. Slides is also optimised for present­a­tions on mobile devices and can be viewed and edited on these too. You can also export your file in all popular formats.

The web present­a­tion software Sway offers you an al­tern­at­ive to Microsoft Power­Point from the house of Microsoft itself. Sway is basically a sim­pli­fied version of Power­Point, designed to speed up the creation of present­a­tions. This ‘digital storytelling app’ is available via your browser or as an app for iOS and Windows 10. Sway is less focused on Power­Point’s classic, linear present­a­tion style; the software is designed to help you create much more in­ter­act­ive slideshows, personal profiles, and other present­a­tions that feature many graphics and images. Sway comes in a web layout style, meaning that present­a­tions aren’t slide-ori­ent­ated. Instead, they appear more like an internet page or a digital magazine. In­teg­rat­ing content from sources like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter is also easy to do. The tool makes sure that all content auto­mat­ic­ally adapts to different display formats, like mobile devices for example. But users have to possess a Microsoft account, and Sway is also only available for Windows 10 – if you try to download Sway on an older version of Windows, the operating system will be unable to run it. Another downside to Sway is that all present­a­tions created with it are stored auto­mat­ic­ally on the Microsoft servers, which means you can’t guarantee data pro­tec­tion.