Slide Rocket: RIP PowerPoint

As someone who spends about 9 hours a day making PowerPoint charts, I am always on the lookout for new ways to make presentations better.

And I am usually disappointed.

But SlideRocket is the exception that makes years of exploring for alternatives worth the trouble.

SlideRocket is a web based service that lets you make gorgeous animated presentations that can then be offered in online environments like a web page or blog. It offers absolutely beautiful animations by easily integrating an incredible range of Flash and other technologies. Using Slide Rocket, you can author content and import a verity of media into the show. Slide Rocket makes it easy. Stupid easy and I mean that as a great compliment.

Here's an intro video from Fast Company:



So what can you import?

Photos
Movies
Flash animations
Graphics
Other multimedia



And the other great strength of the service is that file sizes -- which can be a massive problem when you try to incorporate video or other large assets into a PowerPoint -- are managed through the cloud. (I have been waiting to say managed through the cloud for months!)

Does Slide Rocket make all presentations better? Nope. But it empowers you to do things that PowerPoint can only hint at.

And for those who are resistant to change, you can actually author your preso in PPT and then move it to Slide Rocket to make it all shiny and gorgeous and better communicating.

There have been other web based presentation tools, and acceptance has been modest because they required an Internet connection to show the presentation. Not so with Slide Rocket. You can show the presentation offline, and soon you will be able to author without a connection as well.

The service also offers great controls so that, for example, Marketing can control versioning so that the company speaks with one voice.

Give this a whirl. It's awesome! At least go to their site and see some demos. If that don't convince ya...

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.