Presentation Tools

By John MacLeod

    Presentation tools are very important to create a presentation that engages the audience, so picking the right tools is essential. We’ve all created a presentation whether it be for a class, for children, or for your boss, the goal of presentations is to inform. Some examples of presentation tools are Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides, Prezi, Canva, and I have even used Figma to create a presentation before. There are other presentation tools that have niches like Visme, Haiku Deck, and Powtoon, but the other tools have a wider range of uses than these tools. Figma is a unique tool that is generally used for user interface designing instead of presentations but offers the most customizable slides of the presentation tools. 

    Something that many people focus on when creating presentations with presentation tools is the visual aesthetics of the slides. According to Meinald Thielsch and Isabel Perado in the article “Use and Evaluation of Presentation Software,” users spend “A remarkably large proportion of time is spent on design or animation issues, even by non-designers, while there is a desire for creativity within presentations and better speakers.” It’s interesting to see that no matter the topic a lot of time is spent focusing on aesthetics as opposed to research about the topic. What I was able to deduce from this information is that people are more comfortable trying to engage their audience via the presentation's design than relying on their communication and presentation skills to engage the audience.

Presentation tool	Highlights	Drawbacks
PowerPoint	Industry standard presentation software.	Requires Microsoft office subscription
Google Slides	Free with any Gmail account. Offers most features Powerpoint offers.	Limited templates
Prezi	Interactive presentations with support for videos	Presentations are reliant on animations
Canva	Many professional templates and graphics that make designing faster	Can look generic
Figma	Highly customizable tool that can make presentations for any screen size.	Not optimized for presentations, only basic animations

Work Cited

Thielsch, Meinald T., and Isabel Perabo. “Use and Evaluation of Presentation Software.” Technical Communication, vol. 59, no. 2, 2012, pp. 112–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43094424. Accessed 17 May 2023.