Final 4 Cloud Presentation Tools

Four free ways to move your presentations to the clouds.

“Why would I want to do that,” you ask? Well there are four primary reasons:

  1. Cost: Most folks have only an occasional need to create and display presentations. Purchasing a full office suit just to compose periodic slideshows doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. With the applications I recommend in this post, high quality presentations can be easily created for little or no cost.
  2. Collaboration: Creating a solid business presentation in isolation often produces less than stunning results. Cloud apps provide the ability to work collaboratively on content, share the final document, and present the slides to a remote audience.
  3. Horsepower: More and more people are turning to inexpensive Netbooks as their primary computer. Although the portability is tremendous with these devices, power for presentations and graphics is lacking. Application and data storage can also be an issue. Moving the slide creation to the cloud alleviates these issues. Most cloud environments provide several gigabytes of storage.  Additionally, much of the processing is done on remote servers.
  4. Data retention. Let the cloud service handle the backups. Storing information on a Netbook, or laptop without performing regular backups is risky; eventually you will loose data. With cloud computing, forget about it.. All of the reputable cloud services run their own backups so you don’t have to.

There are four primary players in the on-line presentation authoring niche: Adobe- with Acrobat Labs, Google Docs Presentation, Zoho Presentation, and Sliderocket. Which one is best for you depends on how complex your presentations are, whether you need to import and export PowerPoint files, and how much storage space you require.

For creating complex presentations using a glitzy interface and advanced tools, Sliderocket wins hands down. Sliderocket also imports and exports data to PowerPoint. Zoho, on the other hand, is a great work horse with plenty of free storage space. Zoho apps tend to follow MS Office in UI design and features. Despite the lack of interface innovation, Zoho Show is a great tool.

Acrobat Presentation shows real potential—nice interface, slick tools, but doesn’t allow users to import or export to PowerPoint. If you are only planning to share in PDF format, then this may be a minor issue.

That leaves us with Google Presentation. As with the other apps in Google Doc, it’s serviceable, easy to use, but not what I would call feature rich.

You can take a look at each of these applications more closely by clicking on the save it! button below.

Final 4 Cloud Presentation Tools

Sliderocket

Zoho Show

Acrobat Pesentation

Google Docs Presentation

nnassal

Editor: @malitchick

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