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.

reveal-md[0]

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

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.

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.

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.