Decades ago, having a presentation simply meant getting up in front of a room full of people and sharing ideas. Maybe that meant having some figures on a large board or illustrating a concept on a pad of paper. In today’s world, a presentation almost always includes some sort of visual aid that guides along your verbal presentation. The tools in which we use to deliver these messages have also evolved over time, as our technology advances and our own computer skills become more innate.
PowerPoint has long been the most resourced tool for developing and sharing presentations. From high school to professional use, PowerPoint has been the Microsoft Office arm that allows us to combine our verbal skills with our creative skills. We learn how to tell a story in pieces to make the listening and learning experience more well-rounded. Instead of simply listening to a presentation, we’re also watching and engaging with the content more. PowerPoint encourages its users to be more experimental with images and multimedia. It helps drive a visual story to bring color, life, and emotion into the content that we want to share.
Introducing Google Slides
The inception of cloud-based software has changed a lot of our processes for business operations. Instead of worrying about storying our important documents and works-in-progress on our individual or shared hard drives, we now have the capability of storing these documents in the cloud. This allows for incredible advantages. Collaborators can access a document at the same time, in real-time, which encourages more efficiency and drastically saved time.
The tools within Microsoft Office are now all available in this cloud-based software under G Suite, including PowerPoint. The interactive and real-time version of PowerPoint is called Google Slides.
Since there are so many instances in which there are multiple people working on one presentation, having the ability to grant editing access to key stakeholders helps save tremendous time and energy. You no longer have to waste time transferring the same document back and forth for version control, and with interactive abilities inside the document, your conversation can continue while you’re actually in the document.
PowerPoint is still an incredible tool for creating captivating presentations. Both offer advantages for any kind of business, but here are a few side-by-side comparisons that will help your organization decide which platform will deliver the best long-term results for your company.
Saving and revising capabilities
No matter how old we are or when we learned how to use Microsoft Office features, we were all taught to consistently save our work as we develop our presentation. Crashes are inevitable, and even though our technology is advanced and continues to be more intuitive, we still must always be prepared. Since PowerPoint is an installation on your hard drive, unsaved work can easily get lost due to a lack of a back-up. This is an advantage for Google Slides – since the application lives on the cloud, it’s automatically saving throughout your work and saving every change you make.
Additionally, since this can prove to be problematic if there are additional collaborators in the document, Google Slides also offers a revision history capability so if there were unapproved changes made, you can visit the collaboration history to determine who made the change and when and revert if necessary. With PowerPoint, unless you save multiple versions, there’s no way to bring back the original.
Pricing
This is a huge consideration when comparing Microsoft Office with G Suite when used with custom Zoho CRM. While the pricing factors also of course depend on the number of users you have, it still is almost hands-down an easy decision for a company of any size.
Microsoft Office requires an annual subscription to the features. Google Slides, a part of G Suite is free. If your company is heavy into design or visual production, it might be beneficial to look into Zoho integration with Microsoft Office due to its additional and advanced features (as well as it’s optional add-ons). For those looking for standard capabilities for the average presentation or proposal needs, Google Slides will easily save you valuable budget dollars.
Design capabilities
As mentioned above, PowerPoint is emphasized in design and visual appeal, which is why the design options are important to consider when comparing the two platforms. Microsoft PowerPoint has been around for decades at this point, so it can be argued that some of the templates and design features are a bit elementary and tired. Since Google Slides is a much more recent development and feature, its available design elements are more modern and aesthetically pleasing to the eye.
For analytical companies or those that focus solely on data, this may not be an incredibly crucial detail to have. For others, however, that value imagery and branding, having these updated looks available might realistically turn a prospect into a client. Additionally, the purpose for presentations is less is more on the screen to emphasize the messaging at hand, so the imagery must be strong and truly complement the oral story.
Ultimately, each case is unique when it comes to a company’s needs for presentations. It’s also crucial to take an inventory of how often people work together on group projects to fully take advantage of the collaboration feature with Google Slides.
If your company churns out a ton of presentations or proposals (think about your sales and marketing departments) and need to utilize the advance features of Microsoft PowerPoint, it might be beneficial to consider sticking with the powers of PowerPoint. If you have the capability, it’s also an option to integrate your G Suite capabilities with Microsoft Office so you can move back and forth within the platforms with ease. This will not only allow your creators to take advantage of all the PowerPoint capabilities, but you’ll also have the ability to share and collaborate once the bulk of the presentation is complete.
Sharing and co-creating has never been easier with Google Slides, but if you’re thinking about making the switch, it’s beneficial to consider the breadth of which your sales and marketing are using the tools in PowerPoint before making a final decision.
