5 PowerPoint Alternatives for Making Presentations with More Fun

Microsoft’s PowerPoint is almost a must-have for Windows based computers. Making PowerPoint presentations is quite a usual and common task for students and white-collar workers. But do you sometimes feel tired of using this program? If you don't have Microsoft’s PowerPoint on your computer, do you know any alternative presentation tools? Today let’s find some paid and free PowerPoint alternatives.

No.1 Keynote (Mac)

Microsoft has launched PowerPoint 2011 for Mac, but it seems apple’s native Keynote is more popular on this platform. With strong PowerPoint compatibility, Keynote has an easy to use interface and lots of templates. That is to say, you can make good-looking presentations with Keynote’s built-in templates without spending too much time. The program has great graphic tools to edit pictures and supports video playing in the slides as well. Moreover, Keynote allows you remotely control your presentation with your iPhone or iPod touch.

No.2 Prezi

This impressive presentation tool is very different from PowerPoint. As what it introduces itself on the official page, Prezi is a presentation tool to help you organize and share your ideas. Each presentation you create with Prezi is a flowing and motion-based depiction with your creativity, other than a traditional side-by-slide presentation. Prezi is now available for Web, Windows, Mac, Linux and iOS platforms.

No.3 Google Docs

Google Docs is a web-based office suite for users cloud storage, collaborative editing and file sharing on presentations and other files. The service provides lots of templates, animations, slide transitions and presentation creation tools for users, which is similar to PowerPoint. However, some features are unavailable on Google Docs, for instance, you can't embed local videos in the slides (embedding YouTube and other videos are OK). In one word, Google Docs is a free and fast online tool for making good-looking presentations.

No.4 OpenOffice/LibreOffice Impress

To tell you the truth, I’m not interested in the history of OpenOffice.org and the reasons why it was divided into two. As an open sourced tool, Impress supports PowerPoint presentations and provides easy-to-use interface for making new presentations. As a matter of fact, it’s the most similar tool to PowerPoint, with drawing and graphics capabilities extenuations. You can also save the presentations as SWF format in the suite.

No.5 SlideRocket

SlideRocket is a high-end web-based presentation suite for cloud sharing and collaborative editing. The tool has a beautiful interface and lots of great features, like adding themes, tables, pictures, audio, video, Flash animations, etc. It allows you import files from PowerPoint and export files to PDF format. Another unique feature is the content integration of Flickr, twitter and other sources.