Through my life, I've mostly been able to avoid making presentations, at least until grad school when I was finally forced to get the hang of PowerPoint. So I was less than enthusiastic to see this topic on the agenda. I chose Deck Slideshow Presentations simply because it was the first app listed (I have such high-falutin' selection criteria).
Okay, this was lots easier than wrestling PowerPoint. There was an outline for five slides or so, and all I had to do was type in a little bit of text. Really, it was like making five related tweets in a row (indeed, like Twitter, Deck will cut you off if your text goes on too long on any one slide). I added a quick chart, just to see what that was like, and again, it was surprisingly easy. I tried my presentation with a few themes. I think the limited number would be a problem if I were using Deck with any frequency, but for just a test presentation, the free themes were fine. The animations were certainly more interesting than anything I've done with PowerPoint, and they didn't give me vertigo the way Prezi sometimes can. Even though my text was within Deck's limits on each slide, I noticed that I lost the last word or two on my longer slides with some animations: hopefully the Deck people will fix this in later releases.
Personal or professional use? Not much, which is too bad given how easy this app was to use. I don't make presentations in my personal life and don't need to at this point in my professional life. Since we have Microsoft Office and an abundance of desktop computers at work, I think anyone who needs to make a presentation will use PowerPoint (except for the coworker who likes Prezi—how do you think I learned it makes me dizzy?). But should I ever need to make a presentation on the go, with only a tablet to work with, I would be quite likely to choose this app first.
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