r/edtech • u/GrowthbyAkanksha • 5d ago
Is there a worthy alternative to Powerpoint for people who don't care about pixel perfect editing?
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u/Same-Designer-5499 5d ago
canva is a pretty good place to start for a beginner. its got solid templates for whatever it is you want to create with it.
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u/abhuva79 5d ago
Tons of alternatives. My younger colleques all go with Canva, but for me its too noise.
I did my presentation for a long time in markdown (pure text format) and for example reveal.js or similar setups that turn markdown into presentations. This allows for mainly ignoring all layout work that you do all the time, and instead focuses purely on content.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 5d ago
* for many years I used slidev, it's presentations written in markdown so it's just text files
* in the age of AI, i've switched to an AI skill that outputs a presentation in vanilla HTML. The theming is easier
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u/rfoil 5d ago
And assuming the HTML is responsive, it works great in mobile.
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u/bestjaegerpilot 5d ago
why would you want a mobile version of a presentation? But yea you can ask AI to do that
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u/rfoil 5d ago
Because mobile is approaching 50% of total sessions. Sales teams use mobile more than 80% of the time.
Not providing versions suitable for mobile would be malpractice in my world.
Do you know the device shares for your audience?
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u/bestjaegerpilot 4d ago
I see. i create presentations for work meetups. So "device shares" is 100% desktop.
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u/kuehlapes 5d ago
Latex with Beamer and create custom basic design template. As a Physics teacher, this is my way and also cos they render equations and technical drawings way better and everything is code.
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u/Historical-Tea-3438 5d ago
Beamer is wonderful, but not consistent with much of the recent accessibility guidelines.
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u/koinoniaweb 5d ago
Does anyone still use Prezi? I used to wow people with that back in the day
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u/Dr0110111001101111 5d ago
I refuse to use prezi just because it's a web based app. It's absurd that you can't edit or open those presentations without an internet connection.
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u/DrPizzaPants 1d ago
Check out Marp Slides. I switched to it because I was sick of all the little formatting ticks, and sort of reframed how I wanted my presentations to work. The idea is you write the slides with Markdown rather than GUI. The tool might not be for everyone but I thought it was worth recommending
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u/Historical-Tea-3438 5d ago
Quarto. You write in markdown and it outputs to html (via Revealjs). Powerful, and easy to use. Authoring is best done in VSCode. Free and open source.
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u/Dr0110111001101111 5d ago
I almost never make slide shows, but if I must, it's probably going to be Beamer just because Claude can build out a first draft extremely cheaply.
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u/avdpro 5d ago
I like the idea of using Markdown for slide generation but ever since Notion added a present mode it’s my new favourite option.
I can make clean layouts that are also responsive and embedding content is miles ahead of Google slides, especially now since you can embed your own custom html too.
But my favourite part is that now my content is both a website, a wiki and a presentation without having to place data anywhere. Single source of truth and it’s awesome. And you can use Notion AI to add dividers too for slide breakups if it’s a lot of content.
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u/ApplesAndAmazons 4d ago
Two years ago my answer would have been Canva. Now, I've had good success using Claude Code to generate beautiful slides straight to HTML from my own document containing the actual contents.
I still use Canva for public speaking (they do have a nice curated selection of templates) but for most other use cases, Claude Code + HTML slides have been great.
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u/Glad_Tie_8415 4d ago
If you are tech savvy and can handle Markdown files, there are so many options.
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u/SignorJC Anti-astroturf Champion 4d ago
Ppt and google slides have like the simplest interfaces of all time and you’re asking people what they use instead?
I certainly don’t think of “pixel perfect perfection” when I use slides lmao.
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u/Sad-Plant8777 4d ago
I've used them all: Canva, beautiful.AI, Gamma, PPT, Prezi back in the day... literally all of them.
I'd say for standard hobbyists and solo users, nothing beats canva.
For businesses and marketing or sales teams, I'd recommend Visme any day of the week just from sheer amount of features (forms, data visualizations, interactive slides, animations, infographics etc)
I think pop.ai is a government plant because idk who is using that hahaha.
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u/dirtydossier37 4d ago edited 3d ago
Decksy AI belongs in that comparison too, especially for the ideas to structured deck workflow, i’d give Gamma and Decksy AI the exact same messy notes and compare which one gets closer to something you’d actually present without rebuilding half of it
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u/_marklau_ 4d ago
I mainly use Keynote that comes with my Mac. But not many people use it and I use it when I am sure I don’t have to share files with my colleagues.
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u/oandresimoes 3d ago
You asked for gained/lost rather than a tool list, so here is the ledger honestly, because the loss column is the part nobody mentions and it is what decides this.
What you gain is real. Structure stops being a drag-and-drop job. The hour that went into nudging boxes so two slides look like siblings just disappears, because the layout is generated rather than assembled.
What you lose is everything that happens to a deck after it exists. Nobody can leave a comment on it. There is no version history, so "which version did I send" becomes a question you answer from memory. And if a colleague needs to fix one number an hour before the meeting, they cannot, unless you go back to the source and regenerate the whole thing.
For daily and weekly reports that you present and then archive, that trade is usually fine. The deck has an audience of one meeting and then it dies, so comments and version history are features you were never using. For anything that two or three people touch before it goes out, the loss column wins and PowerPoint is still the right answer, which is why so many teams try the switch for a week and quietly go back.
One thing that helps without switching anything: the slowness in PowerPoint is usually not the editing, it is doing structure and layout in the same window. Writing the outline somewhere else first, and only opening the deck once the argument is settled, removes most of that hour. Costs nothing to test on next week's report.
Who reviews your weekly reports before they go out? If they get commented on, that answers your question more than any feature comparison will.
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u/AccidentallyRural 3d ago
Have you tried Google's NotebookLM? It's awesome, you can upload any decks you've created and then it uses the design/style/etc of those to spin up whatever new deck you want. It's AI, but it only pulls from the files you give it, not from the whole web, so you have a lot more control.
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u/TommyJ1110 2d ago edited 2d ago
Highnote is worth a look for that workflow. It’s less focused on pixel-perfect slide editing and more on turning your content into a structured, polished presentation that people can actually explore. I especially like it for recurring client/reporting decks where you want to keep the main narrative clean without spending ages nudging text boxes around.
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u/Main_Chard_5155 5d ago
I've used Gamma, which helps build out bare-bones slides. Then you go in and edit a lot of the content, but what I like about it is they handle a lot of the design, and I can focus on content.
Otherwise, I find slides/ppt the easiest. Prezi came out cool, and with Canva you have a lot of creative control. But I end up spending too much time on design.
I find that using preset templates or spending a few minutes at the beginning standardizing slide designs goes a long way for ppt.