12 Essential Apps to Prepare Your Presentations

Discover the best programs to make your next presentation a success

Almost all social media professionals need, at least sporadically, to prepare presentations for coworkers, clients, or followers.

One of the fundamental requirements for effective presentation is to transmit the content in a clear, concise, and captivating way. It is also essential to understand how we process information to arrive at the best visual solution possible.

Katya Kovalenko (@katyakovalenko) is a designer who helps companies highlight their products' purpose through graphic visualizations. By combining a simple analytical and aesthetic approach, she tells visual stories based on data. In this post, Katya lists the essential tools you'll need to make your next presentation a success.

Organize data

Before creating your presentation, you need to organize the content. To do this, Katya recommends three programs to create spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Apple Numbers (the latter exclusively for Mac OS and iOS).

The great advantage of Excel is its variety of export formats (BMP, GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG) compared to Numbers (PDF, PNG) and Sheets (HTML, PNG). However, it is also a paid app and service.

Create presentations

Katya suggests Apple Keynote (exclusively for Mac OS and iOS), Microsoft PowerPoint, and Google Slides.

All three have similar functions, so the choice will depend only on your preferences or the device you typically use. Again, the Microsoft program is the only one that requires making an investment, and it costs the same as Excel.

Design

You can also create presentations to be viewed as websites, for social networks, and even as infographics. To do this, Katya suggests four programs, all paid apps: Adobe Illustrator, Figma (this one, however, offers a basic free version), Sketch, and Adobe XD.

The first three focus on vector illustration, while the last one is based on the final user experience. Both Illustrator, Figma, and XD have monthly subscription costs for their personal plans. Sketch, on the other hand, charges upfront.

Online resources

These two applications, both free and available online, are accessible from any device: Canva and Miro Mind Map.

The first one is a great tool to create graphic design pieces for social networks. Its greatest strength lies in its numerous templates. The second one is kind of an infinite whiteboard, very useful for brainstorming, presentations, and creating mood boards.

Now that you know the main tools to create and organize the content of your presentations check Katya Kovalenko's Domestika course, Graphic Visualization: Telling Complex Stories through Simple Images, where you will learn the principles of design and the hierarchy of graphics, tables, diagrams, and other tools that can help you better visualize an idea or a concept.

English version by @angeljimenez.

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