When your business is starting out, you need to present yourself quickly and show what your startup is about as easily as possible. Telling your company’s story for sales, events and investment pitches means you need to look good and have a clear tale to tell. The right app will mean you have the best chance to get your point across. These five helpful presentation apps that will do just that.
Haiku Deck
While you’re starting out, time will be at a premium and you might not have the ability, or inclination, to spend hours tweaking or amending your presentation slides. Haiku Deck is at its best when you need to pull something together quickly and on the move.
Haiku’s interface and style is based on key rules of presentation design so you can feel confident that your slides will look good. There is an emphasis on large visuals to help you tell your story and to make sure you don’t overwhelm the audience with too much information. You can save your presentation for use offline or add it to your website or blog. There’s a limited free version, and pricing starts at $10/month. Haiku Deck works on web and iOS.
Keynote
The big benefit of Apple’s Keynote is the way that it integrates with Apple’s ecosystem so you can create the slides on a Mac and then use it on an iPad or iPhone. The program also takes away a lot of clutter in its layout to make it a user-friendly option. The presentations have a slick look and feel.
While a lot of the animations and transitions in Keynote are eye-catching and work well, if you need something quick and easy, the default themes are good enough and not cheesy. Finally, Keynote can be used as a standalone program on an iPad, which makes a cheap and convenient way to create and tweak your presentations on the move. Keynote is available on Mac and iOS.
PowerPoint
Although PowerPoint may have a bad reputation with some, it’s been around for 25 years, and with good reason. The program has a wealth of options and possibilities meaning that, if you put the time in to use it properly, you can get the best out of it and create something that is genuinely unusual and stands out.
The reason why PowerPoint may be criticized is because most users simply don’t put the effort in to make it work for them. But take the time to learn and apply a little creative skill, and you can create PowerPoint presentations that will leave your audience asking which program you used. PowerPoint is available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android
Prezi
Prezi has become one of the big players as an alternative to PowerPoint. Its biggest selling point is that it presents a large open canvas of information rather than traditional slides. The designer adds the content over the large image and then the presentation pans and zooms from one piece of information to another.
The design means that you can create an impressive presentation, which helps to maintain an audience’s attention. The challenge is to plan the Prezi and overall design in such a way that it makes sense to the viewer while visually telling a story. Overall, though, this is a great way to tell a story in a non-linear fashion. A subscription to Prezi’s “Pro” option (which allows for offline use) is $13.25/month. Prezi is available through iOS and web.
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Microsoft Sway
Microsoft Sway now offers an alternative to PowerPoint, using drag-and-drop to help you build your slides. You can pull the content you want into the editor and the algorithm will suggest layouts, backgrounds, fonts and transitions to make the process as easy as possible.
The appeal for many will be the way that the app doesn’t just pull in content from your device, but looks at social media, the web and your cloud storage. According to Microsoft, Sway is a “digital storytelling app,” meaning that it’s far more than just presentations and can be used for mood boards, reports and website embedding. Plus, it’s free to use. Sway is available through iOS, web and Windows 10.
