SlideBot Review: Saves quite a lot of time.
When a colleague of mine first told me about SlideBot and its promise to ‘create beautiful slides, instantly’, it made me think about how long I actually spend creating a presentation and thus, whether this is something that needed shortening. I have to admit that I’ve never really paid that much attention to how much time I spend on Powerpoint, but irrespective of this, it definitely takes me longer than the ‘couple of seconds’ that SlideBot promises, so I thought I’d give it a try.
This intrigue led me to getting in touch with the founder, Ned Jamieson and request access. He came back to me within a couple of hours with a link to a page where I could start a 10-day free-trial. Free trials are always welcome in my books. Also, timely responses!
NOTE. The free trial requires a credit card, which made me question whether to move forward with this. Nonetheless, I was satisfied by the reassurances that I would not be billed until the end of the free-trial and I could cancel at any time without charge, so I moved forward with the signup.
Within 15 seconds of signing up, I found myself on the same ‘upload’ page that I saw moments earlier in the promotional video — below. At this point I was feeling quite intrigued (which is not something I usually would say about trying a product, but I really wanted for this product/ tool/service to live up to the expectations they have given me… time would tell!)
EXPECTATIONS VS REALITY
A lot of products tend to promise the world and not deliver on those promises, so I like to break my reviews up into expectations and realities. In this case, my expectations were drawn almost entirely from what they promise in their signup page:
EXPECTATION #1: MY PRESENTATION WOULD BE CREATED QUICKLY
I decided to try typing in some content that I had presented only a week earlier.
NOTE. There doesn’t appear to be a huge box to place text in, but you can just keep typing in the text box if you’re interesting in putting in more text. My slides, however, are never really that dense anyway, so that did not pose any issues for me, but could possibly be an issue for people that create content-dense presentations.
After clicking the button, SlideBot did actually manage to create my presentation in around 20 seconds — As I mentioned earlier, I’m not sure how long it takes me to usually create a presentation (1.5 hours? 2 hours?), but in any case, 20 seconds is a vast improvement!
Whilst NOT ALL of the images were exactly what I was after, I found the ease at which I could change them to be simple and user-friendly. By clicking on a different image, it would be redesigned to match the content I already had on there. Nice stuff! I tried the process of creating different slides multiple times and have concluded that SlideBot definitely has the capacity to save a lot of time finding images (and referencing them) as well as laying out the text.
EXPECTATION #2: I CAN EDIT ALL FACETS OF MY PRESENTATION ONLINE WITHIN SLIDEBOT
When it comes to editing online, SlideBot gave me the ability to edit pretty much all aspects of the text (fonts, spacing, alignment, etc), as well as the objects and symbols. However, it was not immediately obvious that I could add my own images. So, I used their Live Chat support, which was answered relatively quickly (within 10 minutes) by a gentleman by the name of Daniel who informed me that it can be accomplished by dragging and dropping the image onto the slide or using some other button that was not immediately apparent. I value customer support a lot in a product so was happy to see they were responsive. This is a big positive. So what about the negatives…
Whilst SlideBot has the ability to add symbols as bullet-points, there is no way to automatically insert bullet-points into the textboxes themselves (which I am still very used to being able to do in Powerpoint). Further to this, there are no transitions available (which means that most likely you are going to export this to Powerpoint instead of presenting online).
So overall, there is the basic editing that you can expect in SlideBot, but the more detailed editing will still need to be done in Powerpoint (which makes this tool ideal if you are integrating it into your existing workflow, but not ideal if you want to do the whole presentation in one place).
EXPECTATION #3: I CAN EXPORT A FULLY EDITABLE VERSION OF MY PRESENTATION TO POWERPOINT
I have not used a tool online before that gives the ability to export a fully editable version to Powerpoint, so I really wanted this to live up to expectations. Upon clicking the ‘Powerpoint Export’ button, it took around 30 seconds for my Powerpoint to be downloaded — very acceptable! When I opened it, I found a presentation that was EXACTLY as it looked in SlideBot AND every aspect was completely editable… Great work guys! This was a huge draw-card for me, so I couldn’t have been happier that it worked exactly as described.
IS IT WORTH THE MONEY?
At US$19/month, it’s very reasonably priced. NOTE. There is also an option for an annual subscription for US$179/year, which may also be appealing (especially at the end of financial year). But for me, the sheer amount of time I can save by not trawling through google images to source backgrounds for my slides makes the $19/month an easy financial decision.
THINGS THAT ANNOYED ME
Whilst they make it pretty clear the Powerpoint Upload functionality is still in Beta-mode, I obviously tried it with my own PPT preso and it didn’t work. So, that annoyed me. But, if they can get that working I’ll be seriously impressed.
WOULD I RECOMMEND?
At the surface, it might seem like SlideBot is just another presentation software such as Powerpoint or Keynote, but having gone through the process, it feels more than that. It makes you feel like this is the start of the end for templates. Whilst SlideBot still has some additional functionality that should be included (bullet-points, for example), there is a lot to be said for individually-tailored presentations, and after trying SlideBot I am confident that this is where the presentation-sphere is heading.
RATINGS
Ease of use: 8.5/10
Price: 8/10
Quality of output: 9/10
Support: 9/10
Best Feature: Image Library and Export capabilities.
FINAL REMARKS
I have been pleasantly surprised by SlideBot’s ability to save me time. I, like most people, am quite often time-poor, so saving a couple of hours every couple of weeks is entirely worth it for me. I guess it’s about putting your money where your mouth is and for me, I will be continuing my monthly subscription. Congratulations SlideBot, you have a convert.
