In the first (proper) part of this series about Better Church Presentations, I’ll be taking a brief look at some of the many programs, apps and sites where you can make presentations. I’ll also look at costs, as that’s a big factor for many churches and ministries (and people in general!).
I guess a good place to start is the program that’s now so synonymous with presentations, that we often call them by its name – even if they’re not made using it – PowerPoint.
Here goes:
PowerPoint
The orange icon of PP has been the big player in presentations for many a year and it still probably is the biggest player (and is certainly the one you have to make sure your presentations ‘work with’ if you’re showing them on someone else’s computer!).
It’s had many incarnations over the years but with Office 2007 a big change in the design came along; which many, including myself, REALLY didn’t (and still don’t) like! The computer in my church uses PP 2007 and it still take me ages to make any changes, if I need to!!!
PowerPoint comes with many built in templates, but to be honest, most of them are not great design wise!
You can also go online with PowerPoint with the Microsoft Office Web Apps and there’s a version of Microsoft Office as a mobile app for the Windows 7 Phone.
Platforms: PC, Mac (only available in Microsoft Office for Mac ‘Home and Student’ or ‘Home and Business’), Online, Windows Phone 7
Cost: PC $139.99 (single); $199.99 (in Office ‘Home and Business); Mac $199.99 (in Office ‘Home and Business); Online is free for ‘personal’ use.
‘Impress’ in OpenOffice and LibreOffice
Both OpenOffice & LibreOffice are free full ‘Office Suites’ which are compatible with Microsoft Office (mostly, there are some things that don’t fully translate properly but they’re pretty good!).
OpenOffice is now ‘looked after’ by Apache. LibreOffice (which is also open source) is run by a not-for-profit organsation, the document foundation. LibreOffice started as a branch of OpenOffice when the future of OpenOffice looked in doubt a couple of years ago.
The presentation part of both suites is called ‘Impress’. Design wise it’s very much PowerPoint before the Office 2007 redesign and anyone who’s used to using those versions of PP should feel at home with Impress.
It’s pretty full featured, although hasn’t got all the bells and whistles of some presentation software (although that’s not necessarily a bad thing!). However, it doesn’t come with any clipart (also not necessarily a bad thing!).
I use a Mac and use LibreOffice as my office software and it works great for me. Having said that, I make my presentations in something else, in fact the next program we’ll look at!
Platforms: PC, Mac, Linux
Cost: FREE!
Keynote
Keynote is Apple’s own presentation software (and is Mac only). As I said above I use Keynote and I LOVE IT!
Design wise it’s very ‘Apple’ (i.e. rather lovely to use!) and has all the design features that you’re ever likely to need (including many useful things you don’t find in most other presentation software like ‘instant alpha’ and photo manipulation in the program itself).
Building animations/build ins/build outs is very simple yet powerful in Keynote.
The templates that come with Keynote are all very nice indeed, with nice touches like photo frames and some even have front ‘covers’.
I also use Keynote to do draft layouts for the websites I design as it’s so easy to lay things out. (There’s a great theme to help with this called Keynote Kungfu)
If you’re a Mac user, get Keynote (like as soon as you’ve finished reading this post – it’s that good)!
Although Keynote is Mac only – there are ways you can use it with a PC (as I do!). Keynote can export presentations as ppt files (although some design things like shadows, fades and opacity can be lost). If you’re happy without having any animations and slide transitions, then you can export the slides as individual images (you can also export the slides in ‘build parts’ as well as whole slides) and then either import the images into a very basic PP form or use a PC program like the FastStone Image Viewer to view the slides.
My church uses FastStone to show the ‘pre service’ slides, which I create in Keynote. (I also then use those slides in the slider on the home page of my church – Minehead Baptist Church)
To have a presentation with the ‘niceness’ on a PC, you can export the presentation as a QuickTime (.mov file) with ‘manual advance’ which works fine on a PC. (I’ve already covered how you can use Keynote to make motion graphics and export as a movie.)
You can also export presentations as a PDF, with or without ‘builds’ and slide notes, etc.
There’s also an iOS app for iPhones and iPads that comes with a few (nice) themes and allows easy creation of presentations on the move! You can export to a full Keynote file, PPT or PDF and also share/access existing presentations on iCloud.
Platforms: Mac, iOS (5.1 or later)
Cost: Mac $19.99 from the Apple App Store; iOS $9.99 from the iTunes Store
Those are the main players in making presentations in ‘programs’. However, there are now some good ways of making presentations on the web – now downloads needed!
Google Drive – Slides
Slides is part of Google Drive (formally Google Docs). It comes with a selection of basic themes (some nicer than other!) and can do basic animations and transitions.
You can also add image from your computer or your Google Drive.
Presentations can be viewed online or downloaded as pptx, pdf or as images. They can also be published to the web where you get a link like: http://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1kr6hv2a1ByPyUMUkL5jfT6sc9-F02MPMyd2C71lBZ1o/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000
Cost: Free
sliderocket
sliderocket is a very nice online presentation maker. There are different levels from free to rather expensive(!) but even the free ‘Lite’ version comes with some very nice themes and features. The interface is very simple to use but does everything most churches/ministries would need – including recording audio in the browser to go with the presentation.
You can signup with Facebook, a Google ID or good old email & password!
The only limitation that the Lite option really has is that you can only view/publish presentations online – there’s no downloading. However, the presentations are nicely mobile optimised.
Here’s a simple presentation made with sliderocket: http://portal.sliderocket.com/CWQPK/9B697392-BE18-4F4E-8913-2C7EFA063733
Cost: ‘Lite’ Free (basic tools and no offline); ‘Pro’ $24 per user per month (more tools, offline and analytics)
Prezi
Prezi is something a bit different in the world on presentations. Rather than having traditional ‘slides’, it’s more designed for telling stories and taking people on journeys. All elements are on one ‘canvas’ and each ‘frame’ (slide) is an element that you zoom around into!
For presenting projects and ideas it could be a very clever and different way of doing things. However, I’m not sure it could replace ‘traditional’ presentations for sermons and the like (but with some imagination it could be used to a good effect in sermons!).
Prezi comes with a range of funky templates, designed to help you start presenting your ideas.
Presentations can be viewed/shared online and downloaded to your computer (but even simple presentations are BIG) to download!
Here’s a demo: http://prezi.com/z61icdcyouir/demo-for-churchmag/
There are different levels, ‘Public’ – 100mb of storage and all presentations are public; ‘Enjoy’ – 500mb storage, private presentations, no prezi branding, and better support; ‘Pro’ – 2gb storage and work offline on presentations.
Cost: ‘Public’ Free; ‘Enjoy’ $4.92 a month; ‘Pro’ $13.25 a month
So those are some of the ways you can make a presentation! Next time I’ll be looking at the basics of good presentation design – what TO DO and what NOT TO DO!
What do you use to make presentations?
Have I missed any good ways of creating presentations?
Are there any presentation design features you’d like to see covered?
Isaac says
One giant hole in that list, and it frankly should be at the top, Renewed Vision’s ProPresenter!
James Cooper says
Thanks Isaac. ProPresenter certainly is VERY powerful and can create slideshows/presentations – its main purpose is as church worship software “for displaying lyrics and videos” as they put it on their site! (Which is why it also imports from PowerPoint!)
And at $400 for a single license and $800 for a site license – that’s way beyond the budget of many churches & ministries…
However, I’m sure many of the tips in further posts in the series will be relevant to ProPresenter users as well 🙂 Are there any design topics you’d like to see covered?
Isaac says
Powerpoint was built for business presentations, by business men, then adopted by churches. There are hundreds to features that a church presentation will never need. I’ve done more than enough training with the average church employee (who is not as computer literate as you would think), and the common thread is difficulty just finding the few simple features that they need to make a basic presentation. I’ve seen those same people pick up ProPresenter with much greater ease, as well as seen nearly untrained individuals execute incredibly smooth presentations with ProPresenter
Churches don’t qualify for personal use, so lets say the basic price of PPT is $200/per seat. If only 4 people in your church use ProPresenter, the site license work out the same cost, ($800/4) and every other computer is free. It doesn’t take much to get to 4 computers (ie. Pastor, Youth Leader, Worship Leader, Presentation computer in meeting space).
I think that it would be fair to point to out where ProPresenters focus on worship can be less than ideal, but I think that a tool that can work in many contexts (worship, classes, speaking engagements, etc) is worth considering for the those churches whose budgets need to stretch a long way.
glad to find another venue if you’d like to continue the discussion…
James Cooper says
Thans for the info Isaac! You obviously know your way round ProPresenter – like a Pro! Have you ever considered blogging about it? I’m sure you’d be very welcome to write about it here on ChurchMag and share your knowledge with readers of the blog. If you’re interested, have a read of: https://churchm.ag/contribute/
I certainly understand about ‘not so techy’ users within a church. I’m the ‘resident geek’ at my church and get asked all the questions 😉
Allan White says
I’m a heavy ProPresenter and Keynote user. In my view they each have their place in the arsenal of the presenter and the showman. In fact, I use them together quite often; in spite of the apparent simplicity of Keynote, it’s quite a powerful design tool. I’ll use it to create backgrounds, graphic elements with transparency, and combine them in ProPresenter.
At our Luis Palau festivals, ProPresenter is our front-line tool for all video and animation playback, as well as artist lyrics. I think of it more like a real-time instrument than a linear presentation tool. Gotta stay on your toes!
ProPresenter is wonderful for live events, or for presentations that are more non-linear (like, when I’m teaching a class and need to hop around). That said, it’s nowhere near as powerful as keynote’s templates, design elements, and object transitions.
They each have their place, and together they’re even more powerful. If you’re just getting started with presentation software, I recommend starting with Keynote. I really can’t describe how much I despise PowerPoint – but that’s another story…
James Cooper says
Good stuff Allan and with you 100% on PowerPoint!
Allan White says
Just soooo many headaches trying to get PPT to “work” outside the machine it was created on, especially when video is involved. Just awful. No wonder there’s a market for online tools.
BTW my wife, who teaches college classes, really like slideshare and used another “online keynote” (Was it 320slides?) that worked well. She just wants to walk up to whatever computer that’s there in the class and have it work. A valid scenario.
Chris Langille says
I tried using Prezi once, and it’s cool, but it has a bit of a learning curve. I already have Keynote, so I guess I should become more familiar with that.
Are there any good tutorials for creating awesome Keynote presentations?
Allan White says
I love working in Keynote. I like to tell people, “Keynote is the tool that master presenter Steve Jobs designed for himself”.
My background is design. Coming from industrial-strength tools like Illustrator and Photoshop, you might think that Keynote’s tools are underpowered; I find that they’re simple but just powerful enough to make you or your speaker look great and get the job done quickly.
As for training, I’m frankly not sure – there’s probably some good stuff online. If anyone wants some personal training, I do that regularly in the Portland, Oregon area, and would be happy to do something online if anyone’s interested.
James Cooper says
Go for it with Keynote Chris – you’ll love it! Apple have got some tutorials for Keynote: http://www.apple.com/support/keynote/
This looks like a goo starting video as well: http://vimeo.com/9763123
If you find anymore good ones, less us know!
Allan White says
Speaking of Keynote, here’s a writeup of a cool project I did with it: I made a fake iPad “app” for my son’s “adventure birthday”:
http://allanwhite.tumblr.com/post/37172639423/decaleague-app-details
The expansion of Keynote to iOS is huge. We’re sending out presenters with just their iPads, even just iPhones sometimes, for full HD presentations that look great. I’m not aware of any presentation software for mobile devices that comes remotely close to the power and quality of Keynote there.
In my work doing web development, I often use Keynote to mock up wireframes or comps for web or mobile app projects. Here’s a post from a guy doing just that:
http://www.edenspiekermann.com/en/blog/espi-at-work-the-power-of-keynote
Allan White says
One more thing: if you have Keynote, and want to download the DecaLeague “game” I made to see what can be done with it, look for the zip download link in the article.
http://allanwhite.tumblr.com/post/37172639423/decaleague-app-details
Took me about an hour or two to make. Easy!
Sorry to be so chatty, it’s just one of my favorite topics!
James Cooper says
Do you happen to like Keynote by any chance Allan?!?!?! 😉
Thanks for all your thoughts – the ‘app’ you made for your son is pretty cool!
I love keynote when wireframing as well. The ‘Keynote Kungfu’ theme I mentioned in the post is a real time saver.
Gangai Victor says
Another not-so-known software is Slide Effect. Useful for creating presentations with great eye-candy. Creates movie files and screensavers too.
http://www.slide-effect.com/
James Cooper says
Thanks for the tip Gangai!
Matt Peterson says
I’m working on a project called Proclaim. http://www.ProclaimOnline.com
It’s simple for volunteers to learn quickly, but also does some cutting-edge things like sharing presentations in the cloud and sending Bible verses and more out to the mobile devices of those in the congregation. We’re about to release the ability to live survey your congregation and show the results right on screen.
James Cooper says
Thanks for letting us know Matt – that looks VERY COOL!
I’ll have a play. Might be that a post on Proclaim will be needed…
Curtis says
I’d be interesting in hearing feedback on how easy it is to publish and share a presentation on-line, after you have created it. A nice presentation is fine, as far as it goes. But these days, you won’t be five minutes after giving your presentation, when someone will come up to you and say “can you share that with me”?
How do these tools compare in being able to share the final presentation with others?
In my experience, PowerPoint is the absolute worst in terms of sharing with others. There just seems to be no way to know for sure if your presentation will really work anywhere except on the computer that the presentation was built on. Web-based tools, like Googe Slides and Prezi are, by their nature, every easy to share. You usually just give the person a link and you are done. However, Prezi maybe does not make much sense as a shared presentation, because it is not at all linear. A person who has never viewed a Prezi may not know what to do with it. And Google Slides lacks a lot of the eye-candy that PowerPoint and Keynote can provide.
Any thoughts on what tools are best for sharing presentations with others?
James Cooper says
A very good question Curtis and watch this blog – because later in the series I’m planning on doing a post on the different ways you can share presentations online 🙂
Allan White says
I’ve thought about this a fair bit as well. Here’s what I keep coming back to:
What is a presentation?
Is it the slides? The spoken words? Videos or images? The total experience?
There’s obviously a lot of kinds of presentations. The kinds I make for my clients tend to shoot for TED-level quality when it comes to visuals; if I was to put those exact same slides online, without context or audio, they become nearly meaningless.
I could, of course, record the audio and embed it or export it as a video (Keynote does this, with limitations, as a rendered video with voice-over). Matching up audio later (like Slideshare, et. al.) is pretty time-intensive. Sometimes I’ll have ScreenFlow running, which is recording my audio & video and lets me edit these together later. This is great for training presentations (example), but could also be used for stage-type presentations. Still, a lot of work “in post”.
I don’t have a single answer on the best way to share it. A lot of companies (esp. the big ones) just use slides as written documents, which of course they’re completely unsuited for. Ugh!
If I can spare the time up front, I’ll create a written outline for handout/download; if it’s available I’ll have a video of the presentation.
To echo Curtis’ question, any other thoughts on the best way to share a presentation?
James Cooper says
More good thoughts Allan! As I said, in a future post I’ll cover some of the sites/tools (such as slideshare) where you can ‘share’ presentations.
But the question ‘what makes a presentation’ is a good one.
I guess in this context I’m talking about say, being able to listen to a sermon online and you can click through the slides that were shown…
But more on that in the future 🙂
Raoul Snyman says
Since everyone else is punting their worship presentation apps, can I punt mine too?
I’m the project leader of OpenLP, an open source (i.e. FREE, not just to download, but to use, copy, give to your friends, etc) program that displays songs, Bible verses, etc. like ProPresenter or ProclaimOnline. OpenLP also can integrate with PowerPoint on Windows, and LibreOffice/OpenOffice on Linux and Windows. We don’t have Keynote or PowerPoint integration on OS X yet, but that’s currently in the works.
BUT it is not the be-all and end-all. I highly recommend using a presentation for fancy announcements or slides for a sermon. With OpenLP it is of course very easy to include that presentation in your service, right next to your songs and Bible verses, but that doesn’t have to be the case (indeed with any presentation software).
Also, as is the main point of this post, just simply making a presentation is not enough, it needs to be a GOOD presentation. This is something I am continually frustrated with in churches.