Business presentations always have some monetary value tied to them. Be it a presentation for your boss where you might require explaining about the progress of an ongoing project or a pitch deck designed to attract angel investors; your slides are likely to be tied to a monetary value. However, making effective presentations isn’t all that easy.
To help you get a head start in making a killer business deck, we have compiled a list of 6 Awesome Resources For Making Outstanding Business Presentations.
Office Sway
The latest member of the Microsoft Office family doesn’t require users to buy an expensive Office suite. You don’t even need an Office 365 subscription. Office Sway is a free presentation tool by Microsoft which can be accessed by simply logging in with a Microsoft account. What makes Sway a killer business presentation tool is the availability of rich features that ‘arguably’ make Sway more powerful than PowerPoint.
You can get started by creating a ‘Sway’ from scratch or import a Microsoft Word, PowerPoint or PDF file to create your presentation. That’s not all! You can even import content from OneDrive, OneNote, Facebook, YouTube, Bing, Twitter, Flickr, PicHit and via numerous other websites using embed code. You can also upload your own files, customize your slides using various handy design features and present your slides right from the cloud.
To Share a Sway, you can use social services, direct link, embed code or post it to Microsoft’s Docs.com service.
So, if you are looking to make an impact with your business presentation, Sway is a great option to Sway your audience.
Office Mix
Office Mix is another fine addition to the Microsoft Office family. This free PowerPoint add-in serves as an amazing plugin for making video tutorials and interactive presentations. Moreover, it serves as a free alternative to expensive tools like Camtasia Studio and Lectora.
Office Mix provides options for creating screencasts with a voice over and cam input. This means that you can create professional looking video presentations and tutorials by supercharging PowerPoint. Furthermore, you can also annotate your slides during live presentations using the Pen tools, as well as edit your recorded content, upload to the Office Mix website. Your ‘Mixes’ can also be saved as an MP4 video in HD format or exported to SCORM and published via Office 365.
With extensive video capture, editing and sharing features that can convert ordinary PowerPoint slides to interactive presentations and video tutorials, Office Mix can be rated as one of the most outstanding free business presentation tools.
Adobe Captivate
Among all the resources in this list, Adobe Captivate is probably the most expensive. While it has a hefty price tag of around $30 a month to a full license of over $1000, Adobe Captivate is only worth your money if you can use it effectively to captivate your audience! While it is primarily marketed as an e-learning tool which can be used for creating storyboards and responsive e-learning courses, there is no reason why you can’t use it for making business presentations.
The storyboarding features of Adobe Captivate make it ideal for making marketing demos, sales pitches and video presentations for your potential investors. Like most Adobe suits, Captivate has no shortage of elaborate features.
Once you launch Captivate it gives options for making a Responsive Project, Software Simulation, Video Demo, Adobe Captivate Draft, Blank Project or a project from a PowerPoint. You can pick and choose themes to get a head start with your design tasks, record voice over, create screencasts and generate audio from text using the automatic voice over functionality.
You can begin by making simple slides, just like you would in PowerPoint. Needless to say, you can insert all kinds of content like images, videos and text, moreover, you can even insert a quiz and email your content for review to your colleagues for collaboration. Other amazing features include; moth paths, support for making drafts using an iOS device, elearning templates and the option to publish content to Captivate Prime, which is basically the Adobe LMS.
Adobe Captivate supports many common file types like PPTX, PDF and Docx, as well as packages from SCORM and AICC. Furthermore, you can enhance productivity using gesture control. For instance, you can use a simple gesture (e.g. X) to images files from, say an iPad device.
While Adobe Captivate is a paid app, you can use it on a 30-day trial basis to see if it’s good enough to enable you to captivate your audience.
SlideModel
I once thought about making a presentation with a demand and supply diagram using a PowerPoint template that can help me edit readymade diagrams. The only problem was, I couldn’t find any! The problem with most PowerPoint templates is that they are too rigid to edit. Even if you find a template with a business diagram, it’s hard to customize it because each slide object isn’t usually editable.
I was pleasantly surprised with the editability of PowerPoint templates at SlideModel which are not only especially designed for business purposes but also enable editing slide elements down to the smallest objects. For example, say you want to edit the map of UK and wish to single out Northern Ireland or Wales. In a normal map template that would be hardly possible. However, the map templates at SlideModel enable dragging out small sub-maps from the main map slide. That’s not all, you can make use of highly editable business diagrams.
Just in case you are curious, there are also demand and supply diagrams to reveal your own custom trends. Moreover, there are business diagram templates for virtually any business concept that comes to mind, ranging from SWOT, Boston Matrix slides to flowchart, process, segmented, stacked and funnel diagram templates (among many more).
SlideModel offers a combination of both paid and free templates. But like all good things in life, the really good stuff requires a paid subscription.
SlideModel is just an example of the kind of PowerPoint templates that can help make killer business presentations. It is likely that there might be other template developer’s offering something similar which you can use. Having editable diagrams and high-quality backgrounds can enable making eye-catching content which is easier to follow and heavily customized for the audience, as this can help make all the difference when you are pitching your ideas.
Google Slides
Not too long ago, I would have never thought about presenting my presentation using Google Drive. PowerPoint files uploaded to Google Drive always ended up looking messy and out of place. All that changed once Google brought their new and improved Google Slides. Accessible via web, Android and iOS, Google Slides serves as a good PowerPoint and Keynote alternative to help end users create outstanding presentations.
Google Slides is not just your average presentation web app. Most users probably don’t even realize that you can even use Google Slides for creating photo albums, portfolios, academic projects, lesson plans, menus, printable certificates and a range of other types of decks. There are even basic templates for all of the aforementioned categories.
So why should you use Google Slides for your business presentation? The answer is simple. You can not only convert your offline PowerPoint files to powerful online presentations but also add content from across the web, collaborate real-time on your slides, share them using anything from direct link, social accounts, to embed code or email, as well as present your slides from all kinds of digital devices using the Internet. Of course, you can also save your presentations offline as a PowerPoint or PDF file or an image.
If the aforementioned is not enough reason for you to use Google Slides and you think the PowerPoint Online web app is a better option, think again! This is because unlike alternative web apps, Google Slides can also be used to convert your files to a plethora of formats on the fly. You can do this by using suggested conversion services via Google Drive such as CloudConvert. To convert your files, simply right-click a file via Google Drive and pick a conversion service. This also means that there are a plethora of third-party apps that you can connect to your Google Drive account to supercharge Google Slides.
Among all the well-known presentation platforms, Google Slides is probably one of the most underrated. One reason is probably because it can be a bit overwhelming to use, which probably deprives many uses from the true knowledge of most of its stellar features. By the way, did you know you can digitally sign documents using Google Slides? Probably not!
Prezi
If you don’t know how to keep your audience awake during a presentation, try a zooming UI! Prezi is so underutilized as a business presentation app that it’s heartbreaking. With a beautiful zooming UI, readymade templates, the option to import PowerPoint presentations and all kinds of awesome features like infinite canvas, image editing and privacy control, it’s hard to think why Prezi has been ignored by so many users. One explanation seems to be the associated price tag for acquiring options like privacy control and universal device access. The other reason can be elaborate interface options which many users might find intimidating.
You can also save and present your Prezis offline, as well as present them online, embed them to a website and even engage your audience to follow your slides via direct link, as you present remotely. If you don’t know much about Prezi, suffice to say it has most of the basic features you would expect in a feature rich presentation app, including the option to add online videos, online collaboration, as well as the utility to add a background score and voice over to your slides.
Prezi has some amazing features and a spectacular zooming UI which can make your slides more attractive and help you keep your audience awake as you zoom in to your ideas.
Did you find our suggested resources useful? Do you know of a tool, app or service that should be in this list? Join the discussion about useful business presentation tools by leaving your comment below.
via Technology & Innovation Articles on Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1RRJP4C