5 Reasons I Use SlideRocket Over Powerpoint

May 27, 2009 Filed in: technology | review
sr
Given that I am in technology sales, I spend a lot of time giving presentations. Conventional wisdom would say that Microsoft Powerpoint is a big part of my job. The problem is that I loathe Powerpoint. Of all the Microsoft office applications, Powerpoint has seemingly stood still amidst the other office applications with respect to innovation and features. My other pet peeve with Powerpoint tends to be on the receiving end of presentations which is not only bad slide-ware, but bad delivery from people who know very little about their presentation tool (content for a different post).

Having serious dissatisfaction with Powerpoint, I set out to find an alternative. Of course, being a Mac guy, using Keynote was a refreshing change but given that I have to use a PC for work and that converting presentations back and forth between Powerpoint and Keynote is problematic at best, I needed a cross-platform alternative that would play nicely in the business world. Enter SlideRocket. SlideRocket is an online alternative to Powerpoint for giving presentations. Here are my top five reasons I prefer SlideRocket over Powerpoint:

1. SlideRocket is not Powerpoint -

Every sales professional looks for ways to set them apart from the competition. As soon as I start a presentation with SlideRocket, the audience almost immediately recognizes something different: “hey, that’s not Powerpoint!”. Right away, simply by using a different technology, my audience is more engaged because I am using SlideRocket rather than Powerpoint. Different transitions, build effects and a cleaner overall style sets SlideRocket apart visually.

2. Collaboration made easier -

One of the pains of presentation preparation is shuttling it back and forth for content editing. “Which version of the presentation are you using?”. “I emailed you my change last night.” Being able to share the presentation online creates a much easier mechanism to collaborate on presentations.

3. Asset Library -

This is one of the under-appreciated aspects of SlideRocket and something that really comes in handy. With SlideRocket, every graphic that gets uploaded to a presentation becomes available in the asset library for reuse in other presentations. How many times did you search a given presentation on your laptop (or worse yet, scour through your corporate intranet) looking for that graphic to include in your presentation. SlideRocket makes it easier to track and manage all of your graphic images used between presentations.

4. Presentation Sharing -

Just as easy as it is to collaborate on presentations, it’s easy to share presentations with employees, customers and prospects without having to email them that 14MB presentation.

5. Metrics -

After you have shared your presentation, you can see just how many people are viewing it and how long they spend on each slide. Much like website traffic metrics, SlideRocket gives you the ability to track usage and the given effectiveness of individual slides. This feature does require a business account however (Currently, I am using the personal version since my company does not pay for it).

Of course, there are more reasons why SlideRocket kicks Powerpoint to the curb, but do you need more reasons?


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