iRadar: The 4 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft PowerPoint

Sunday, December 12, 2010

The 4 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft PowerPoint

The 4 Best Free Alternatives To Microsoft PowerPoint: "

alternatives to powerpoint Do you create a lot of presentations? If you do, you’re probably a master at PowerPoint, or Keynote if you own a Mac. Microsoft PowerPoint is the standard for slide presentation software and lays the blueprint from which all other applications are created. But what if you’re looking for something new or different?

In this article, I’m going to show you the 4 best, free alternatives to PowerPoint. If you’re looking for a new way to present your material without getting too far away from PowerPoint’s concept, you’ll find these apps useful. If you want to escape PowerPoint’s grasp once and for all, we can help you with that as well.

1. Google Docs Presentation

alternatives to powerpoint

My favorite alternative when it comes to replacing Microsoft applications is usually Google. You may already be familiar with Google Docs, but did you know you can create presentations with the web-based app? Just click on the Create new drop down menu and select Presentation to get started.

free powerpoint alternative

As you might imagine, this online application is very simple to use. You can change the theme and background of your presentation, insert text boxes, images, and videos, import slides, and all that good stuff. And since you’re using Google Docs, you can share your presentation with others and work on it collaboratively.

2. SlideRocket

like powerpoint but free

SlideRocket is a higher end model of a collaborative, web-based presentation application. While this is a premium app, they do offer a nice free option, which gives you 250 MB of storage (15 MB file size), up to 5 multi-seat accounts, shared folders, items, and libraries, and the ability to import from Powerpoint and export to PDF.

We covered SlideRocket in an article 2 years ago and it has only got better since then. It has a beautiful user interface and a lot of great features, including the ability to add themes, layouts, shapes, charts, tables, pictures, audio, video, and Flash animations. You can also integrate content from sites like Flickr and YouTube, as well as utilize plug-ins.

To get a glimpse of SlideRocket, check out this short video:

3. 280 Slides

like powerpoint but free

280 Slides is another very easy to use presentation creation app. Last covered back in March of ’09, 280 Slides offers a host of great features, like the ability to upload your existing PowerPoint presentations and import them into 280 Slides, preventing you from having to start over.

like powerpoint but free

Other great features include autosave and recovery, storing presentations online, downloading them in the PowerPoint 2007 format, adding photos and movies from Flickr and YouTube, posting to SlideShare and embedding, and running them straight from your browser.

4. Prezi

alternatives to powerpoint

Prezi, if you haven’t heard of it by now, is one of those really cool presentation applications that is very different from how PowerPoint and the rest function. What makes it significantly different is the fact that it doesn’t invoke the traditional slide-by-slide rules of a normal presentation. Rather, each presentation you create is a flowing, motion-based depiction filled with your creativity.

I’m not going to spend much time going over Prezi’s features because Simon did a fantastic job of that already in his article on Prezi back in February of this year. If you would like to view the official Prezi introduction video, however, have at it:

Conclusion

Are you over PowerPoint yet? I wasn’t lying when I said there were some good alternative apps out there. Explore these and you will find a bunch of great features and ways of presenting your material to others. The sharing abilities and integration with other services and file types give you a diverse set of options when deciding which tool would be best for the job.

Another cool app that might be worth investigating from our directory is Spresent.

What do you think of these presentation apps? What apps are you using?

Image Credit: archerix

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