Google slides and Microsoft PowerPoint are classic effective tools for making presentations.
Here are other tools that can be integrated into slide presentations to improve the quality of your slides. While some are alternative slide preparation and presentation platforms, others are tools to accentuate your slides, either aesthetically, or to increase interaction with your audience.
Pitch is a collaborative platform for making presentations. It has really great designs, effective for working in teams on pitch decks, presentations, with tons of templates to work with.
Visme is an online platform with amazing templates for data visualization, presentation, videos, infographics, documents, etc. I sometimes create my slides on Visme, and export as a document to Powerpoint.
Canva is the one stop centre for creatives. Really great for graphics design across all competence. For beginners or novices like me, I find Canva very handy for creating about anything visual/infographic. Beyond producing graphics for slide presentations, Canva is also great for collaboration with peers or colleagues.
Unsplash is a platform where creatives upload high quality photographs for other users to download for free. In fact, I do have my Unsplash account where I share high quality images I have captured over the year. You can download free high quatlity images to spice up your slides.
While Vzy is an online platform for creatives and business owners to create and showcase their products, Vzy has a subsidiary product called VZY icons. VZY icons is the place to download unique icons to make your presentation remarkable. The best part? VZY Icons can be edited and tweaked to your desire.
Flaticon is another platform with downloadable free icons and stickers. The icons can be downloaded in various formats including png, jpeg and pdf. You can also create logos on Flaticon.
Some people find using GIFS in presentations to be quite engaging/entertaining. If that is you, then you might want to check out GIPHY
Want to add a link to your slides but the link is too long and cumbersome? Here's a tool to help you create sweet and short link. Switchy is also useful for creating custom links.
I have recently come across barcodes at conference presentations. I have seen Barcodes used for various purposes. Some presenters use it to share versions of their presentations in different languages, personal websites, projects, downloadable documents, etc. It is much more handy and effective for sharing any bit of information you'd like your audience to have quick access to.
Download templates to use in Powerpoint and Google slides on SlidesCarnival. It is free to use and download the templates. It has themed templates from birthday presentations, to the academic and business stuffs.
Extra tip: the first page of your slide can be designed to be shareable and converted into pdf or jpeg. You can then share this on your professional accounts including Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to increase your research visibility.
If you find this useful, please share with your network(s).