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Ask HN: Which software do you use for your presentations?
17 points by KrishnaShripad on Sept 6, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 49 comments
In need of a software that will generate slick presentations for demoing product features (target market is software developers). Total noob here when it comes to making good presentations.

Must have:

1. Nice motions/transitions (rules out Pitch who have been taking forever to implement it)

2. Embed videos

3. Must be really easy/fun to use

Apart from this, do you use any specific software to animate code blocks? I really like the Cypress documentation videos where certain parts of the code blocks are highlighted, with rest dimmed out, while explaining specific functions/methods (An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1rHmOYyGDo).

Any tools that you use to make your presentations stand out can also be included.

P.S. I am really averse to Powerpoint. Haven't explored Keynote enough except for some basic presentations. Is Keynote good enough? Please let me know.

P.S.S. Prefer indie tools which I can support (if they are good enough). If you have developed one please don't hesitate to link here.

Thanks!




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.


Thanks for your points. Very valid when you are demoing/presenting to a live audience. However, I think I should have clarified in my post that I am not presenting to a live audience. Rather, I just want to use a Presentation software to export a video (or I might just screen record the presentation itself if an export to video feature is not available) and then add a voice over on top of it.

Also, I am not going to screenshot code. Rather will record videos (using Loom) and speed it up as I feel even coding live can get boring pretty quickly if there is a lot to code anyways. Voice over would work really well in this case as well.

These videos would be part of the documentation that I'll be providing my customers with. For those who prefer watching videos over reading lengthy documentation. That's the idea.


For YT-alike presentation than you better use your desktop, not a specific software, recording the desktop (partially automated as needed, with eventual post-production as needed) instead.


Nice. I find keynote is very easy to use and has lots of transitions and animations. It’s very easy to get nice, consistent looking presentations.


> 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


Not software, but a presentation on how to make presentations: https://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/

It's 20 year old, therefore completely timeless advice.


I had an excellent talk about talks a couple years ago, and have actively been looking for other _fantastic_ ways to achieve the same, "sticky talk" goals.

In particular, it is interesting to see the same point (don't overload on content), but approached very differently (don't recap vs. recap a _lot_).


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.


A good presentation is not a matter of software. You can make outstanding presentation without embedded videos and fancy transitions. And you can make them on PowerPoint, Keynotes, Libreoffice, or translucent sheets. Focus on a clear storyline, and key messages of each slide, keep it simple, use some visuals instead of a wall of text, use bullet-points wisely... People spend months on a project and then 1-2 days on the final presentation and wonder why the audience does not understand / is bored. Management consultants (whose main output are presentations) start working on the final deck from the first weeks / days of the project.


Should have clarified better in my original post. It is for accompanying video with documentation for my software. For those devs who prefer to watch a video over reading a wall of text (plenty have ADHD who prefer video over text).

The presentation is only for bullet points + embedded video (which will showcase the product + code) as well as highlighting specific parts of code where necessary. Micro transitions to keep them engaged.

Got some really good suggestions here. So will try them out and settle on one soon. Liked reveal-md/reveal.js so far as it fits my requirements quite well.


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.


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.


Best way I found to keep peoples attention in presentations is to make obviously shitty slides in mspaint or some other basic painting program, then just use a image viewer in fullscreen mode.

I think people have been so desensitised by all the "beautiful" presentations that when you put on something contrasting that, people can't help to pay more attention.

Obviously doesn't work in all contexts, like if you represent a enterprise and doing a presentation for a client. But if you try it in internal presentations, I'm sure you'll be surprised by the good reactions to it.


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


Ditto. Looking through my files, I started doing lectures using Keynote in 2007. It is a robust piece of kit, and it makes it easy to record and export lectures afterward. Compared to Powerpoint, I find that Keynote's UI gets less in your way.

Prior, I used the markup/SVG based Slidy, which was pretty neat for its time, but made sharing and combining presentations with other people much harder.


I write my presentations in pandoc and convert them to Beamer. This is a simple presentation, from the [pandoc docs](https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html):

% Habits

% John Doe

% March 22, 2005

# In the morning

## Getting up

- Turn off alarm - Get out of bed

## Breakfast

- Eat eggs - Drink coffee

# In the evening

## Dinner

- Eat spaghetti - Drink wine

------------------

![picture of spaghetti](images/spaghetti.jpg)

## Going to sleep

- Get in bed - Count sheep

---

One nice bonus of using plain text for my slideshows is that if I need to translate them (I teach in different languages) it's as easy as putting it through google translate or some similar service, and you get your translated presentation at the other end.


> 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


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.


I HATE slides, so when I need to show something I just use Emacs/org-mode, animations are limited but possible see for instance https://youtu.be/B6jfrrwR10k though I do avoid them. I can "embed" anything since Emacs is my windows manager (EXWM) so any X11 application can be "embedded" as a buffer even if again normally I do not use them. It's VERY easy and fun to use once you've learnt a bit (a not so quick but not so long thing for the outcome) and it's not mere slide but anything. I have essentially anything in Emacs, my home infra (NixOS) included via org-mode tangled from org-babel/org-roam notes. I have my files attached, I access them via Emacs (search&narrow/org-roam-node-find etc), my mails and so on.

When for some reasons I have to provide slides to others I'll simply export them to LaTeX/beamer sharing the resulting pdf.


I stick to Latex Beamer, for an odd reason. I have anxiety giving presentations, so when using other software, I tend to procrastinate by tweaking looks, font sizes, images and so on. With Latex the bar for slipping to procrastination mode is higher.


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/


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.


I threw away all dedicated presentation software during trade school and now use LaTeX with the beamer class for everything:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)

It's simply amazing not to think about layouts anymore. I write what comes to my mind, include figures like I'd do with every other document and get a sleek presentation in minutes.


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/


For talks and quick presentations I use `present` [0]; for more formal settings, its beamer :)

`present` mostly does the job & one can also give a live code-example (Golang) while in the presentation. As per the requirements mentioned above, it does not do 1.

[0]: https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/present


reveal-md[0]

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


I usually run beamer for presentations but I've been looking for a markdown alternative for some time, since it would allow me to transform notes into presentations quickly. This package looks really promising. Thank you for sharing it.


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


Basically reveal.js, but rarely directly. I've my own template and processing that takes Markdown as input, and converts it to HTML for reveal using Pandoc.

https://github.com/w4rh4wk/dogx


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


>> 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?


To address your question specifically: I am not actually presenting the software to a live audience. Not aiming to make it particularly glitzy either as I will be keeping it pretty minimal (should have decent slide transitions though). Will be interleaving with videos (recorded using loom) which demonstrates the software. I definitely do need slides to show bullet points. Will voice over the presentation (which will be recorded too).

These videos will be part of the documentation for the software. Specifically for those who prefer watching videos over reading the documentation itself.

Either ways, will consider any suggestion you might have for an alternate way of communicating to customers.


Check this one, powered by markdown

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


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


I have seen Latex + Beamer and Reveal-MD recommended by many here. Will check it out. Thanks!


I really wouldn't call that "really easy/fun to use". I think it's only a good option if your presentation is full of complicated equations (e.g. giving a lecture course in a maths heavy subject)


In terms of user friendliness, perhaps.

In terms of making beautiful slides, it’s hard to beat.

For math, sure, latex is the top choice.


I find it easier to make beautiful slides in a tool where I have the ability to place things by hand


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


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

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


https://ia.net/presenter -> neat and easy


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


Thanks! Beautiful AI looks amazing!


Prezi.com - have used it every now and then and quite like it


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.


I use Keynote. It is beyond good (for my needs anyway).


Microsoft Powerpoint


Why aren’t you doing live demos?




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