THE LATEST TECHNOLOGY IN DIGITAL PRESENTATION

For many of us, digital presentation used to begin and end with Microsoft PowerPoint. It was utterly ubiquitous – it seemed like every board meeting, conference or university presentation saw that familiar combination of slide templates.

The problem is that delivering a presentation will often require you to WOW your audience - something that the familiarity of PowerPoint will always struggle with.

However, with the increased use of app-based technology and tablets, there are now a wealth of alternatives out there. Here are a few that can really inject new life into your presentation…

FlippingBook Publisher (flippingbook.com) is a hugely versatile piece of software that’s compatible with every device out there. You can upload just about any document, report or catalogue into a digital file that can be shared with ease online, across devices or saved to CD for in-house presentation. A powerful, visually impressive option for regular presenters, FlippingBook Publisher creates slick and boasts a very impressive array of digital magazines, photo albums and even book shelves too.

Google Slides (www.google.com/slides/about) offers more direct competition to PowerPoint, and is completely free – all you need is a Google account, which in turn means your presentation is stored to the online drive and is therefore accessible from anywhere. Offering versatility, high compatibility and a fresh look, Google Slides could position itself as the heir to PowerPoint’s throne. If it’s fairly basic presenting software you need, Google Slides is incredibly simple and great-looking – and once again, it’s free!

Prezi (prezi.com) is a more sophisticated affair, offering a highly fluid and interactive presentation experience. Highly acclaimed for its engaging quality, you can sync your presentation over numerous devices and it’ll automatically update across platforms when saving, meaning a team file can be easily created and edited. Emphasising the tiresome ‘Death by PowerPoint’ as their antithesis, Prezi’s ‘zooming’, graphically swish interface looks fantastic. And with 35 million users, they’re clearly doing something right…

Haiku Deck (www.haikudeck.com) offers a visually vivacious, stylish and fun interface that invites a far more ‘visual’ approach to proposal-delivery. Equally user-friendly on a PC or tablet, one review described Haiku Deck as “…promising to do for presentations what Instagram did for photos: make us all look like creative geniuses.” With its pretty, innovative design and gorgeous graphics, this software promises to make even the dullest topic a vibrant and engaging presentation.

So it appears the latest line of digital technology software is seriously threatening the near-monopoly that PowerPoint once held. Naturally, these four products merely scratch the surface – there are many other examples of presentation software, out to slay those dreaded bullet points.