With more long-distance meetings going on due to increasing travel costs and decreasing expense accounts, you need to be able to show your work to clients and co-workers so they can easily see your point. These 12 tools will help you create all of the online presentations you need, set them to music, add links and videos and then embed them or share them as you see fit.
authorSTREAM: authorSTREAM allows you to upload your PowerPoint presentations to unique URLs that can be shared with others. You can also download them as videos that can be placed on YouTube or burned to a DVD, embed your presentations in sites, create channels to showcase your work and more. They offer a free account and two levels of premium accounts that increase the number of presentations you can upload.
BrinkPad: BrinkPad is a Java-based presentation creator that allows you to save your finished work to the Web, save to disk, save as JPGs and more. The interface is a bit simplistic looking, but quite robust in the number of tools it offers.
Empressr: Empressr bills itself as making rich media presentations. You can upload your own content such as video, images and audio to make your presentations, use content from sites such as Photobucket and Flickr and then share the links to your creations or embed them into blogs and social media websites. If you want to use the service for business presentations, they also include tools for charts and tables.
Google Docs Presentation: The Google Docs suite of office products includes a presentation tool that will allow you to collaborate with others just as you do with any of its other products. When completed, you can download the finished projects as PDFs, PowerPoint or text documents.
Imageloop: Upload PPT, ODP, PPS and PDF files to create your online presentations and then share them on sites such as Facebook, Orkut, Blogger, Hi5 and more.
myPlick: With myPlick you can create presentations from uploading PowerPoint, PDF, OpenOffice Documents, Word, Excel, JPEG, GIF, plain text documents, MP3, WAV, WMA and AU formats. Presentations are currently limited to 150 slides, and file uploads are restricted to 50 MB.
PreZentit: You can create as many presentations as you like with PreZentit; your only limitation is 250 MB of image storage. You can download your completed presentations to show any time you want even without an Internet connection. The presentations are created as Web pages, so you can also edit them by hand if the need should ever arise.
SlideRocket: SlideRocket is one of the best known solutions for online presentations, but that isn’t the limit of its capabilities. You can upload your PowerPoint work, download finished presentations so you can show them anywhere, collaborate with team members, measure effectiveness, integrate dynamic data and a lot more.
SlideShare: Directed more at the business market, SlideShare allows for all of the usual file format uploads and then allows you to share the completed work on social networks, blogs and other sites. You can also download the completed files to do with as you please.
Spresent: Spresent allows you to create Flash-based presentations with the ability to import content from Flickr and YouTube, publish to the Web, provide links to the presentation, embed into blogs and more. They also offer a desktop application for $29.95 so you can work on your presentations at any time.
VCASMO: VCASMO will let you upload all of the usual variety of file formats that you need to create your presentations and allows you to add such things as subtitles, links to web sites within the presentation itself, skip to parts of a video even before it is done loading and many more user-friendly features.
Zoho Show: Zoho Show allows you to import PPT, PPS, ODP, SXI files, create new presentations that can be set to public or private, guide viewers through a presentation with chat capability, export newly created works to PowerPoint and more.
What are some of your favorite presentation tools?
Sean P Aune
