prezi

I hate Powerpoint

No, let me correct that, I loath Powerpoint. Clunky, cumbersome, god awful, typographic inept child of a programme. There I now feel so much better. Actually type 'I hate powerpoint' into Google and see what happens!

Being a Mac fan boy does mean I can wallow in smugness and use Keynote MOST of the time. But when sharing a document amongst many or editing a third party set of slides I am forced into the nightmare that is Powerpoint.

Yup there are a bunch of online solutions, but none that have the slick interface tools of Keynote (or its creative abilities) 

 http://280slides.com is a neat hybrid of PPT and Keynote from a bunch of ex-Apple bods, works on & off-line so you can share a doc amongst chums during its creation and then export to PPT or pdf or Slideshare. Lacks the full creative capability of Keynote but as a user experiance it's still way better than Powerpoint.

On a completely different level is http://prezi.com which is frankly brilliant. There is a free version which automatically shares your slides with the web or a $59 version to keep your stuff secret. Which in itself is a very neat way of selling premium licenses. You do get a 30 day free trial of the enhanced version so its easy to get a feel for it.
Prezi is the kind of thing that would make planning documents really come alive, very visual and appears painfully easy to make a complex pitch understandable. Plus it has a 'Transformation Zebra' function, now how cool is that? 
One word of caution, they appear to have server issues (too many people are suddenly trying it out??) the site kept stopping today, check the blog for updates http://blog.prezi.com
Those awaiting slides from me (yes Sam, soon, soon.) just might be in for a treat if I can get my head around that Zebra thing.

 

 

Power of storytelling on Prezi