3 Amazing Apps to Make Your Next Presentation Awesome
Looking for a shortcut to less pain and more profit from your next presentation or pitch? These three apps are the ticket.
As someone who specializes in helping entrepreneurs and professionals create and deliver awesome presentations, I’m always on the look out for tools to make presentation design easier and more enjoyable. Today, I’m sharing three must-have apps that will save you loads of time and make your next presentation a hell of a lot better.
In my online course, Ace the Pitch, I teach people the simple, powerful method I’ve used to create some of the most successful presentations ever, including What the F**k is Social Media, What Would Steve Do, and Ace the Pitch.
And the very first step my students learn is this: STORY BEFORE POWERPOINT.
In other words, don’t even think about touching PowerPoint until you’ve nailed down your core objective, your key message, and all of the content that will help your audience understand, feel, and remember the key message.
(For more on this, check out last week’s post, The 3 Most Important Questions to Ask Before Starting A Presentation.)
The best, simplest way to outline your presentation story is with post-it notes.
And with Post-It Plus, storyboarding becomes 1000x easier.
Post-It Plus lets you capture all your ideas using your smartphone camera (up to 50 post-its at a time!), then arrange, refine, add to and organize them any way you see fit.
You can create individual boards for each section of your presentation, change the colors to indicate data slides, case studies, product features, etc., and then share your boards with your team or to your favorite application.
The app is free and supports PowerPoint, Exel, Dropbox, PDF and more.
I love how easy this app makes it to capture every note from a brainstorming or work session and have access to them on-the-go, right in my pocket.
2. Slidebean
PowerPoint may be the ubiquitous choice for presentations, but it’s hardly the best — particularly if your goal is to create beautiful slides easily.
Slidebean is nothing short of miraculous in this regard. It lets you create stunning slides in seconds, thanks to their user-friendly, web-based app that combines elegant, pre-built design templates, gorgeous color palettes and a premium selection of fonts.
Slidebean offers a free trial (you’ll be able to create just ONE presentation for free), then offers a monthly or annual subscription that ranges from $16 — $36/month — well worth it in time-and-headache-savings alone.
There are lots of ways to capture the talking points for your presentation — notecards, teleprompters, the notes function in Presenter’s View, or the good-old-fashioned “put everything on your slides, and read them.”
(Just kidding about that last one. That’s a definite no-no.)
PromptSmart Pro trumps all of these.
At $14.99, this app well worth the investment. Not only does it let you capture talking points using the handy voice command feature available on most smartphones, it also uses the smartphone microphone to allow your voice to control the scrolling of text.
It’s like having a high-end teleprompter in your back pocket!
If you’d like even more awesome apps and tools that will cut your presentation-design time in half and help your slides look even more beautiful, download a free copy of my 10 Killer Tools resource guide (PDF) by clicking here >>
Or better yet, check out my YouTube channel where I share lots more tips, tricks, and how-to’s all aimed at helping you create and deliver exceptionally effective presentations that GET RESULTS!
