Seven tools to help you make good presentations

Gone are the days when the star tool for presentations was PowerPoint. In this article we give you an overview of its successors, as iPads and mobile devices are now also being used for presentations along with traditional computers.

1. Storehouse

If you’re looking for a highly visual tool that helps you deliver a clear, minimalist and intuitive work, Storehouse is particularly noteworthy. This is a tool for iPad which creates stories through pictures, texts and videos. Furthermore, the material can be easily shared with your contacts, as the app syncs with Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Flickr and Instagram. It’s a very visual storyline and it fits perfectly with multiple themes.

2. Keynote

Available for Mac for some time but now completely redesigned for iPad users, Keynote is considered the most powerful application for mobile devices available today. Its secret resides in extremely easy to use visual tools. You can insert photos or videos; add reflections and frames to images, and sort out your data using interactive graphics and even amazing cinematic-style transitions, with up to 30 options. In its latest version it offers another 30 elegant themes and a rich section of graphics (interactive, columns, bars, pies, etc.) Moreover, you can multiply the visual impact with animations.

Another of the strengths of Keynote, as any other app from Apple, is its use in the cloud. iCloud updates all the files across your Apple devices, regardless of where they are created or modified. And as Keynote automatically saves any change, everything stays updated on all your different devices. When it comes to sharing, from its toolbar you can easily send copies even to users of the classic Microsoft PowerPoint, as it is compatible with it.

3. Slideidea

Thirdly, we highlight an application which puts special emphasis in live interaction with the audience (through their mobile phones). It's Slideidea, an app ideal for those seeking simplicity. To begin with, it offers up to 100 templates organised in different categories that can be adjusted to add your own content to the slides and incorporate new graphic elements.

Especially attractive is the ability to interact with the audience through surveys whose results are shown graphically and in real time. The audience can also send private messages via smartphone, allowing to receive instant feedback.

The key feature, as mentioned, are the slides, which can include YouTube videos, links to websites, graphics, diagrams and some visual effects.

4. Haiku Deck

Haiku Deck is especially focused on the educational and business worlds. With its intuitive interface, just as the other apps listed in this article, it stands out for its tools to work with templates. It also offers automatic limits to not include excessive information; statistical graphics, the ability to import directly millions of free pictures from a gallery, and the possibility to extract content from cloud services (such as Flickr, Dropbox and Google Drive). When exporting the project we can choose between PowerPoint and Keynote, as well as PDF. Haiku Deck boasts of telling stories in a simple and fun way helping you to find your creative side.

5. Quickoficce

Simpler and with less options than other apps, but extremely convenient, Quickoficce is a suite acquired by Google in 2012 which facilitates the transition between PowerPoint and managing a presentations tool from a mobile device. Although it hardly makes use of colour, it includes many text control options, such as rotations, fonts, alignments, enumerations, and other elements. It contains a word processor (Quickword), a presentations editor (Quickpoint) and a spreadsheet editor (Quicksheet). These programmes are compatible with Microsoft Office formats, but not with the Open Document standard.

6. Power Presenter

Power Presenter is half way between traditional slides and the latest trends. It’s a platform for corporate streaming that allows broadcasting videos with real-time synchronization of slides, audience questions, polls, downloadable documents and social networks. All this in a highly customisable multi-language and multi-platform environment. The way it works is simple: if you save a PowerPoint presentation as a PDF file, the app will help you make the presentation on a projector.

7. Prezi

Finally we mention another essential tool: Prezi, a multimedia application for creating presentations similar to PowerPoint but in a dynamic and original way. Its high visual impact is notable, so it’s ideal for those presentations where the text is not essential. It easily imports images, maps, and PDF documents, and its cinematic touch is well known, thanks to a zoom function that helps transport the user to the created world.

Prezi is a very visual platform, where we have to follow a path, and not just dump information into a slide. It supports collaborative work, offering the possibility to have parts of the presentation created remotely by others. Up to 10 platform users can collaborate at the same time, and in the case of online presentations, these can be seen by up to 30 users.

As you can see, there are no excuses to continue to be glued to slides and not build a good presentation… so let’s get on with it!