Presentation deadlines often creep up on you, leaving you scrambling to pull together a coherent, permissible deck. It’s understandable that presentation creation might become the lowest priority. It’s more likely, though, that you’re a busy person whose time is eaten up by meetings, administrative work and brainstorming. PowerPoint Designer aims to push users away from making bad slide decisions: For example, instead of writing a list of dates as bullet points, turn them into an infographic.Ĭreating a dull slide deck might come from laziness. PowerPoint is also leaning into slide design, along with a number of other features to compete with newer presentation startups. It also uses AI to automate elements of the design process, like suggesting image size and layout. Beauitful.ai leans into templates, which are a must-have in any presentation tool nowadays.
It might take someone hours to turn a blank set of slides into an aesthetically pleasing, consistent presentation. His goal is to take away all of the design labor that comes with building slides. We don't want to write a lot of words because we're lazy.” And reading a large chunk of text in slide format sucks for the user, anyway. “We want things to be attractive and look good and present our brand. “It’s still an incredibly highly used document form because it solves that problem of: We want to communicate visually, we want to communicate bite-sized chunks,” Grasso said. Rather than ditch that format, he wants to help people make their slides as pretty as possible. CTO Mitch Grasso said he sees tons of users creating traditional presentations consisting of 20 to 30 slides. The slide deck is alive and well for customers using Beautiful.ai. Beautification of slidesīeautiful.ai offers users templates to choose from. Are you willing to put in the effort to better engage your employees during meetings? A growing number of startups are betting that the answer is yes. It’s so easy to stick with the tools that we know when pulling together last-minute visuals for a talk. The battle for the future of presentations is crowded, and it’s unclear who will win. Brandlive thinks workplace presentations should be as entertaining and polished as TV, like “Netflix for work.” Prezi and mmhmm are focused on video with floating visual aids, letting execs look almost like newscasters. Pitch wants to be your main all-in-one presentation platform, while the folks at Beautiful.ai think they can win the presentation war by making it easier to create elaborate, eye-catching slides. Google Slides is focused on the collaborative presentation-building experience. But they’re all attacking the presentation problem from different angles. But presenting to a largely remote and dispersed workforce whose members might turn cameras off to make lunch? Forget about it.Ī slew of startups and major tech companies are competing to address this conundrum.
It’s hard enough for company leaders to earn employees’ attention during in-person all-hands presentations.
Like meetings, calendars and messaging, the realm of workplace presentation tools is ripe for disruption and improvement. The folks at PowerPoint, as you might guess, see slides as a “core medium.” But it’s true that people have been itching for better ways to present information visually for a while now. Not everyone is as vehemently anti-slide as Libin. “It’s taken us a few decades to wean ourselves off of it, but I think it's finally happening,” Libin, the former CEO of Evernote and current CEO of video product mmhmm, said. Much to Libin’s relief, it’s been months since he’s seen an “earnest PowerPoint pitch deck.” Presenting slides over a one-hour Zoom is such a terrible experience that maybe, finally, we’ll be done with the slide deck for good. As soon as we see a slide deck, our Pavlovian response is to tune out. Slide decks, he said, are for lazy presenters who don’t care about their audience. Phil Libin hates PowerPoint presentations.