Ask HN: Which software do you use for your presentations?

I use Keynote because it's pretty easy to work with, lightning fast and feels more light weight than say Powerpoint.

Powerpoint's UI is not as intuitive but mostly it's because it's sluggish if you want to iterate fast.

Keynote is great, I've used it for my entire scientific career so far

reveal-md[0]

[0]: https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md

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If you're using Apple, Keynote is the logical choice. It's really fast and easy while still producing something that looks good, since it enforces some important rules by default when it comes to slide design. PowerPoint offers slightly more control and a lot more tools, but in general I would create slides in Keynote and maybe pep them up with graphics designed in PowerPoint. If you want to go indie, you can also try using Latex + e.g Beamer for presentations. It's immensely powerful (including video and animations) and can give you highly professional looking slides, but it's also easy to fall into bad design traps if you don't know what you're doing. It also has the steepest learning curve of all three.

>> target market is software developers

I know nothing about your situation but are you sure glitzy slides are the best medium to communicate with your prospective customers?

Really depends on the audience/situation, but generally I would say don’t worry about transitions and appearance and focus instead on the flow of your presentation. To demo the features, just demo the features and let the software speak for itself. When I do a software demo I either eliminate slides entirely or do a really short slideshow (2 or 3 slides only) and then just jump into the software from there. I have done hundreds of software demos at this point and this is by far the best way I have found.

That said, to your actual questions I have done great presentations using Powerpoint but generally those are rare. I don’t think that Keynote is substantially different tbh so just pick what you have. I haveused them both and they seem much of a muchness. Googles presentation thing is kind of terrible because it just makes it really hard to keep a consistent set of fonts and sizes. I find it constantly just deciding to make text really small for no reason if I cut and paste.

I once had to do a round of multiple deep-dives into a complex model to a mathematical/quantitative audience. For that I used jupyter notebooks and reveal.js. This was great because if I had to field questions I could just jump straight to code, make changes, rerun and show the effect. It also meant showing beautiful code as well as equations just worked and didn’t require the sort of hideous messing around that say Powerpoint would.

I’ve used reveal-md often for internal talks and it’s been very effective with very little effort put into slide appearance - Just one css file to tweak and then write everything in markdown. https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md . It has a nice system for altering the slide ordering (you can go up/down as well as left/right) so it’s good for taking quick detours or going in-depth about a topic if you want to.

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I think that you could check Sozi: https://sozi.baierouge.fr A big rewrite of its documentation is in progress at: http://sozi.guide

I have been developing it since 2009 and I think it has become a nice and fun tool to use, but not always easy.

From the "About" section (http://sozi.guide/en/about-sozi.html):

Sozi is a piece of software for creating animated presentations. It is generally used to make visual aids for lectures or meetings. With Sozi, a presentation is not organized as a sequence of slides, but rather as a succession of viewpoints on a map that you explore. Sozi is quite versatile. Some creators have already used it for other purposes, for example to make animated infographics, websites, or interactive fiction.

Canva is the best solution for higher quality presentations. The templates make everything you do look professional and it's really easy to use.

In the past I used PPT. It wasn't convenient since I had to switch from Linux to Windows for it. OpenOffice/LibreOffice isn't very compatible.

Same problem with Keynote - Mac-only, hard to convert to PDF if you don't have Mac, or you don't want to send a private deck to a conversion service.

Then briefly I used Prezi for public stuff.

I used reveal.js for teaching course with lots of code snippets. There are many similar markdown or other text-based presentation frameworks, some come with associated services, if you don't want to host them by yourself.

Now I use mostly Google Slides - it's the most portable solution (even mobile and iPad). It doesn't work offline, but I make sure to have a builtin 4G modem in my laptop and iPad. For the important presentations I always export slides as a PDF for backup.

For good looking slides with minimal effort: beautiful.ai

https://www.beautiful.ai/

On their site they have a comparison to other solutions:

  PowerPoint
  Google Slides
  Keynote
  Prezi
  Slidebean
  Visme

I've moved away from this style of presentation. Everything on a slide feels like dead content. People fall asleep when you whip out a slide deck.

These days if I want to show you code, I'll open up my IDE and show it to you, right there in my code window. I don't really understand why this is different from screenshotting the code and putting it in a slide, but it is. The audience feels differently about code in your IDE. They ask more questions about it, and you can explore other parts of the code than what is on screen. If I want to show what the code does, I'll open the app or website and show it in its "live" context. A demo is more interesting than a set of screenshots, even if the content itself is identical.

And as for diagrams and title slides and things, I like to draw them by hand on my ipad. Sometimes I do that live, and sometimes I prepare a bunch of drawings beforehand and flip through them. (But while I'm presenting I'll often add more lines while I explain something). I use GoodNotes for ipad for that. People get really engaged by hand drawn slides, and I always get good feedback on them. I think novelty is the only reason. Everyone is bored to death of Powerpoint and hand drawn stuff catches the eye.

If you want your presentations to look like everyone else's, then sure - use keynote or whatever. But if you want your presentations to be interesting and engaging, don't go where everyone else is going. Find another way to tell your story.

Latex with beamer. Is there a better solution out there?

Microsoft Powerpoint

If you are on macOS, I can recommend Deckset[0]. I've been using it for years and noticed that I can piece together a great-looking presentation in a rather short time.

Since I only write Markdown, I can focus on the content of my presentation. I don't need to make micro-decisions about the layout all the time.

It also allows you to easily add code highlighting with the features you require.

It does NOT support fancy transitions or motions, though.

[0]: https://www.deckset.com/

HedgeDoc. Which you can self-host to have all your notes online as markdown docs. Comes with collaborative editing if needed. And there's a Presentation mode with which you can markup rich slide decks.

https://hedgedoc.org

I've seen a few others mention it, but another shoutout to reveal.js[0] I can make a simple presentation in basically no time at all with markdown, or I can customize as much as I'd like, even embed a video or throw another site in an iframe. There are tons of plugins that do different things if you have a specific use case not being met.

[0]: https://revealjs.com/

I use PowerPoint. My presentations are brief, and PowerPoint is the easiest to use.

> Total noob here when it comes to making good presentations.

No software in the world will make your presentation interesting if you don't know how to make a good presentation. A good place to start, IMHO, are the "Death by Powerpoint" guidelines [1].

As for the software itself: I use LibreOffice and that's fine - if it can generate presentations that would allow Steve Jobs to introduce the iPhone [2], it is good enough for me. I've also used Powerpoint and Keynote, and other than Keynote having slightly prettier defaults I couldn't give a strong reason for choosing one over the other.

I would encourage you to be very careful with animations - you don't want your audience to lose focus because you took them on a Hollywood-like trip across the universe every three minutes (looking at you, Prezi). I think your slides should be there only to show content that you cannot explain with words alone - if I can read everything I need from your slides, then why are you here?

Note: you would be surprised at the fierce oposition in big companies against slides that contain anything less than the content of the entire presentation. Always know your audience beforehand!

[1] https://www.slideshare.net/thecroaker/death-by-powerpoint

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnrJzXM7a6o

You could try https://github.com/IncredibleDevHQ/Incredible

I would go full text-mode (Markdown), Keynote or Ludus[1]

[1]: https://ludus.one/

I'm a computational scientist, and essentially I just use libreoffice impress. It could be much better but it works. If anything like videos will mess it up, I just change to another workspace and show the video, ditto for like "interactive displays." Generally, the hope is presentations are self-contained enough to be exported and emailed as a pdf anyway.

For a developer audience, I have seen people use plain old browser tabs to successfully run engaging workshops. That way, all of your slides can be any web pages.

You can use Ctrl+Tab (Shift+Ctrl+Tab) to cycle between the "slides". You can store the whole presentation in a dedicated bookmarks folder. Then, use "Open all in a new window" from the context menu of the bookmarks folder to run your presentation.

Maybe in a business-oriented setting that would be labelled as "lazy", but for me it feels bold.

> 1. Nice motions/transitions

Why is this a must have?

The key problem, I would think, is: what are some great ways to help the audience get engaged with your presentation? The particulars of motions or visual transitions are only one way to hope to achieve engagement -- and an approach with very limited success.

Are you familiar with the XY Problem? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

Check this one, powered by markdown

https://motyar.github.io/markshow/