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

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.

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/

> 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

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'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.