Presentation software

- We are so luck these days. My first ever slide presentations, at the risk of dating myself even more, were exactly that, 35 millimeter slides that were incredibly expensive to produce and deploy. But fortunately for all of us, those days are a distant memory, and although the sleepless nights to meet deadlines will probably never go away, we have some great packages that we can now employ to get the job done. Now, while there are quite a few softwares or services around, there are still three major players in the world of presentation. And the first of those is PowerPoint. With a name that is almost synonymous with presentation, the number of times I've been asked to create a PowerPoint for so and so, even though people working with me know that my preference is Apple Keynote, but there you go. It's been around the longest of all of them, I think around 1987 when it was first introduced, and it's perhaps considered largely as the industry standard. The next of which is my own personal preference, which is Keynote from Apple. Been around since about 2003, and it is very, very popular in the tech world, especially with startups, and it's trusted for big arena presentations, as well. And finally, out of these three, Google Slides, which is completely free, very popular in the education market for exactly that reason, and it's very, very capable, so worth looking at. And there are, of course, a whole bunch of other applications and services, some of which are available online only, some of which work on phones, some of which work on desktops, that you can explore, but the great news for you, as far as this course goes, is it doesn't matter what you choose to work with as what we'll be investigating is more about the why of designing a presentation than the how. So you can adapt what you learn to whatever software you decide to work with.