Tools Overview

(upbeat music) - There are a variety of tools you can use to make a presentation. Every computer comes with at least one of 'em installed by default. You can use any tool that you want to create your project for this course. I thought it would be helpful to overview some of the popular choices or choices that might work for this project for you. If you're unsure which tool to use, I think two strategies that you could use for picking a tool is one, just picking the one that you're super comfortable with already.

That can always be a good choice. If you already know how to use it, then the tool's not gonna get in the way of creating your presentation. The other option would be to use a tool that you've been wanting to try to use and haven't had a chance yet, haven't had a project to learn it on yet. That can always be a really good way to learn a tool is by creating a project. And if you don't have the ability to in your current job, use that tool for whatever reason, this could be a fun opportunity to try out something you've never used before.

So again, any presentation tool that you wanna use for this project is, it's totally fine. I'm going to use Pitch, but let's overview some of the popular choices and the pros and cons. So we're looking at Keynote here. Keynote is a Mac only or a Apple product only presentation tool. There is an iOS and an iPad OS version. They have a little bit more of a limited feature set. I would say Keynote is very full featured. I really cut my teeth as a presentation designer using Keynote.

I would only recommend this if, so some of the pros of Keynote are, it has got a ton of really great type tools. Pretty much anything you wanna do with design, there are the features that you're looking for here. There's everything from character spacing to doing some more intense like layout and columns within each text frame. Like I said, it's very full featured. The cons here are collaboration. One, if you ever work with anyone that doesn't have a Mac, then Keynote's not a good option.

And two, even if you are working with only people that have Macs, the only way to use the collaborative features of Keynote are through the iCloud sharing. And so now you're talking about people's personal information or your presentation on someone's personal account. Most companies would not allow that if you're doing a work presentation. So really limited choice here with Keynote if you ever intend to work with somebody in it.

It is a great design tool, but that's the key disadvantage for me there. We have PowerPoint. This is PowerPoint for the web, but there's PowerPoint for Mac and Windows as well, the desktop app. The desktop app is more full featured than the web version, but lacks some character spacing and type settings that I would really desire to see. So I think that PowerPoint can be really useful if you're already collaborating with people that are using PowerPoint.

It being the oldest presentation tool still around, I would say there are probably the most users, especially people that are non-designers, are going to probably have more experience with PowerPoint than the other tools. So collaboration PowerPoint can be good. However, if you wanna collaborate with someone else, you're gonna have to use either SharePoint, which has to be set up at an organizational level, which can be a little frustrating, especially if your Microsoft account is managed by someone else and it's not set up the way that you need it to collaborate.

You can also use third party tools to collaborate. Some tools, like I believe Box and Dropbox, you can upload a PowerPoint file and multiple people can edit if they're also working out of the same file. Google Slides is a very popular choice. I think the majority of people, at least in tech, are using Google Slides because they're organizations already paying for Google Workspace. So it seems like a free option.

It's web-based and collaborative. So I think compared to PowerPoint and Keynote, you're gonna have a lot more collaboration features that the real time collaborative multiplayer editing is great. Some disadvantages with Google Slides are the same with PowerPoint is some of the type options. If you wanna do character spacing, you can't, which for me, you know, for my work I end up using Google Slides a lot because that's what our clients need. But if I'm gonna make a presentation for myself, I definitely want a tool that's gonna give me more options to customize my text.

The other disadvantage with Google Slides is its animations. I would say they're so bad when presenting over like a video chat that I would avoid using them entirely. So if you're looking to do something animated, you are gonna be more limited with Google Slides. But on the flip side, it's collaborative, it's cloud-based and most people are already using it. Then there's Pitch. Pitch is what I'm going to be using for this project. Pitch is a newer presentation tool.

They are web-based and collaborative. It also has some fun collaboration features. You can also leave recordings on files. There's a workflow manager that's really fun for collaboration. There are some more basic animation options with Pitch as of this recording. But for this project, I don't know that I need a ton of animation, so it's gonna work for me. But if you need more animation, I totally understand that.

Some other disadvantages of Pitch are just less people are using it. It's a newer tool, so it is not as common. So if you're gonna collaborate with people, they might need to create an account to collaborate. But another pro for Pitch, for me at least, especially being a presentation designer, is their team is continuing to build new features for Pitch and its launch of new features is a lot faster than the other tools.

Microsoft, Apple, Google, they have other stuff they've got going on. Pitch is a team that's just dedicated on presentation building. The other thing with Pitch that could be the pro column or the con column, depending on your preference, is the way that Keynote, PowerPoint and Google Slides have a theme slide. And that's sort of like a deck that influences the style and structure of of the deck that's using that theme. Pitch uses a style guide, it's a little bit different.

Again, that for me, I think that's a pro. For some people it might be a con. You might have to explore that for yourself. There's Figma, Figma is not a presentation tool specifically, but a design tool. The benefit of that is it's designer focused. It's gonna have all those text options that I was looking for earlier. It's gonna be pretty full featured for you as a designer. One benefit is you might already be really comfortable using Figma, so that's great.

It's also online and collaborative. So like Pitch and Google Slides, you're gonna have an easier time collaborating with people. There's probably a lot of Figma users at this point too. So the chance that someone might already have an account that you can just add them to the file, it's pretty fast collaboration. Some disadvantages are, given it's not a presentation tool specifically, it doesn't have all the guardrails of a presentation tool. You have to set your slide shape and maintain it.

And if your frame changes size, your audience may notice that as you're going from slide to slide. It doesn't have presenter's notes as you'll see in this file. When you're presenting, you won't be able to read these at the same time. And then there are some animations in Figma. It's maybe not as easy to put together or full featured as like a Keynote level of animation. But again, if you don't need a ton of animations, it does really have everything that you may need for, you know, a limited set of animations, I should say that differently.

It doesn't have every animation type that you might find in Keynote, but it can meet a lot of your needs if you just want a little bit of animation, which can be nice. And then the other thing to look out for is if you have an element, make sure that it's nested on the frame. If it's not, it may look like it's on the frame, on the slide, and then when you go to present, it will not be there.

So you need to make sure that you're watching for that. That's an important thing. But you don't have to just use these four, five tools. You could also build a website. We're gonna talk a lot about web design and presentation design similarities. Just because we're making a presentation doesn't mean it needs to be 1,920 by 1,080 slides. You could create a webpage and imagine those slides stacked on top of each other are the sections of a website.

Some advantages of that are you're now on the web, it's gonna be easy to share that. The disadvantage is the collaboration. You're gonna either need to share your code files, a framer file if you're using Framer for that, or GitHub, you might need to put your website there for someone else to access it. So collaboration's gonna look a little bit different. But I just wanted to highlight it as an option. We're doing this course in partnership with SuperHi and through SuperHi you could learn how to code.

So maybe you've gotten your basic HTML CSS courses done and you're ready to go and you could totally build your presentation in a site. Don't let the slide itself in its shape constrain you. I'm highlighting Framer because as we were talking about, hey, there's new tools that you may wanna try, but I don't have a project for you yet, Framer comes up a lot lately, and I think you could build slides as a website in either Framer or code. So just another option for you.

I'm going to be working in Pitch for this project. I'll have some other resources for Pitch if this is your first time using it or you really want to uplevel your skills before jumping into the course. But yeah, you've got a variety of options, pros and cons across all of them. And it's okay no matter what you choose, even if it's something outside of this. All of the skills and tips that we're gonna go through for this whole project of creating a persuasive presentation will be applicable.

So please have fun with your tool choice. And also you have a couple lessons to figure out what tool you want to use. The next lesson is on storytelling, and then we're gonna talk about getting the information written down and bulleted. And then we'll talk about importing content onto your slide. So we have a little bit of time to decide and there will be more resources below. (upbeat music)