280Slides Review (still in beta but worth a look anyway)
280Slides has hit the ground running, in a beta version that’s better than most production sites. It’s an online, browser-based application that lets you create PowerPoint slide decks, and save them as PDF to boot. Highlights:
- Create slide shows with a solidly professional interface that feels like the best of PowerPoint and Pages combined
- YouTube-style player with equally similar embed codes
- Instant publishing to SlideShare.net, allowing you to publish your presentation to a high PR-ranked site in seconds
- Attractive themes
- Import feature
- Ability to insert pictures and videos into a presentation
- Speaker’s notes
- Supports the Google Chrome browser
- Saves to PowerPoint, PDF, and OpenDocument
Here’s an embedded show I created in a very few minutes.
280Slides review: Pros
- Intuitive interface both for learning and for repeat use
- Very, very fast to create highly professional-appearing slide shows
- Makes creating text boxes on slides a breeze, far better than any similar product on the Web
- Nice public profile; more fodder for search engines
- Several nice templates
- Though beta, it’s ready for production use
280Slides review: Cons
- Slides don’t look as good viewed in PowerPoint
- Undo occasionally went too far, undoing more than I wanted (but this is a beta app)
- No master slide concept
- No watermark concept
- Themes are good but more is always good
- Limited to a fixed set of text sizes
- Can’t include a hyperlink in a slide