What are the viable presentation software alternatives to Powerpoint?

This best alternative is nothing. Talk from the heart. Works every time.

As all depends on purpose, let me contribute with short review of my personal experience.

After issuing separate pptx format PowerPoint lost 100% compatibility with itself. Anyway it is still one of the best in a market.

Keynote from Apple www.apple.com/iwork/keynote is No1 for Professionals. It always is a step ahead of Powerpoint. Keynote has better library of effects and more advanced functions like professional dashboard on screen while transmitting slide-show to projector.

OpenOffice, other opensource and GoogleDocs-like alternatives still lack smoothness so may be used as cheep replacements just for non-professional or occasional affairs. I used to check these:
openoffice.org/product/impress.html
symphony.lotus.com
docs.google.com
zoho.com

I fully agree with Jesse, that prezi.com looks very impressive and innovative. Unfortunately one needs more time to learn this software and it is hungry for computer resources. Anyway, prezi.com promises bright future especially for extravagant marketers and innovators.

Don't forget Adobe Reader too, as one of the best no-surprise tool, especially when you deal with international fonts, such as Korean, Arabian, Russian, etc. or mix of them.

MightyMeeting is alternative: you upload your deck (Keynote / GoogleDoc/ PDF/ Powerpoint) presentation or email it to your private MightyMeeting account. Presentations can then be viewed on the iPad, iPhone, Android device,Galaxy Tab, etc.

I share presentations in online meetings over 3G or WiFi wireless directly from the iPad, iPhone, Galaxy Tab, etc. The app is nice because it has a pure HTML interface. It's popular with folks who present on the road.

If you want to give it a look : www.mightymeeting.com

It is more important to develop good presentation skills. Then you can use a paper pad or whiteboard effectively, along with your own body language and speaking style, and tune your presentation to the interests and interactions of the audience. Speak to the audience, not to the agenda.

If you must use PowerPoint, or the Open Office alternative, do not ever read the slides to your audience.

View the TED Talks videos on YouTube for some examples of good presentation skills.

PowerPoint, used with some level of design sense, is hard to beat. But do not lean on PowerPoint alone, or any other computer-based system come to that. When presenting, you want to engage an audience and this is best done through interactions. This means bringing in some dynamic aspects to your presentation - use a white board, post it notes, index cards, whatever. Any presentation tool that allows a presenter to create slide after slide of bullet-pointed text is going to be BAD for the audience. You need to break out of that. It is less about the tool and more about the creator behind it.

Prezi is an interesting option, but again, care needs to be taken with the effects available. Too much zooming in and out, and twisting around, will leave an audience feeling nauseous (really), but it does provide a novel option for delivering content.

SlideRocket offers a nice platform to work with, especially if you are cloud-oriented. And if you are using something that is image-intensive and needs some level of multimedia functionality, take a look at Animoto.

There are a number of viable alternatives but no perfect one.

I've been playing around with Prezi - interesting idea and a very different approach - but not what I'd call a mature offering. Limited but has potential - definitely worth a look if you're frustrated by the constraints of 'slides'.

I also use Keynote from time to time - as you might expect from an Apple product it's graphically very nice, and has decent (but not perfect) compatibility with Powerpoint. The iPad integration is nice although not very intuitive.

I've tried to use Google (Docs) presentations but haven't been very successful - it's improving but still seems very rough around the edges.

I've used Prezi - it's nice but kind of gives me a headache
Sliderocket is great when you need to analyze the viewing patterns and the like
Google docs and Zoho are both pretty marginal to be honest
But... it's hard to break away from PowerPoint - sad but true...

just came across this:
http://www.fastcompany.com/1716191/say-no-to-powerpoint-week?partner=rss

Roger - by all means try out Keynote. Another response rightly says that is is graphically very nice. But be aware that what makes Steve Jobs a strong presenter is less to do with the tools that he uses, (pretty much everything he shows during his presentations could be created in a variety of presentation tools) and more to do with the content. Check out guidance from Carmine Gallo on this topic. Jobs, for example, will devote one slide to just two or three words - white on black. As simple as that. These are some of the many techniques that help a good presenter become a great one.

No one has mentioned Corel Presentations. It is far superior to PowerPoint in terms of layout possibilities, better graphics and different animations.

For those of you who worry about cross platform use of PowerPoint or some other applications, depending on how you will use the presentation, you can convert it to .pdf to make it compatible for almost any computer.

Brainshark allows you to convert a PPT deck into an on-demand presentation with audio. I've used it a few times with lots of success. I've also used Prezi but do find it has a lot of limitations and has a bit of a learning curve. It's fun and kind of funky but you run the risk of giving your audience motion sickness (true).

I am having dejavu with new software emerging like Prezi. It reminds me of when PPT first came out and replaced the old transperencies and overhead projector (Am I showing my age?). We were fooled for a while with PPT thinking the grovy graphics and effects was making for a more engaging presentation...it wasn't. Content is still king and by content it is not only what you say and how you say but what you actually dont say...which is just as important. We have just released a FREE eBook called Eliminate Death by PowerPoint and you can download it from our website. We hope you find it useful http://www.onethousandandone.com.au/

Gabrielle Dolan

Could not resist throwing in this gem from the new Nokia CEO "burning platform" memo:

'At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.” They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.'

We should all think - and as Gabrielle just pointed out - are we too focused on the tools? And are our competitors running right past us whilst we align grouped images to perfection?

Keynote on the Mac or any platform can use Open Office

In my opinion the only viable alternative is GoogleDocs. The reason is that the file formats are able to be read and used across software. I think you must think about the life of the the presentation, how the presentation material is passed from person to person after the meeting. Powerpoint and GoogleDocs are interchangeable formats and so it supports the life cycle and usability of the presentation after the initial meeting and presentation.

I must say that Jerry makes a very valuable point, a tool does not make a successful presentation, the person does.

Well, I should add that since the ppt (or pptx) format has become the de-facto standard, you'll have a hard time delivering the presentation on any other computer unless you use one that's 100% compatible. I have not tried GoogleDocs but I also know that compatability and 100% compatability is not the same. Even converting a pptx file (Office 2007 and above) to ppt (Office 2003 and below) can yield funky results.

So, while you may not like Microsoft, you're better off sticking with it (in my opinion).

I use OpenOffice exclusively. And yes, to Paula's point, it is not 100% compatible with Powerpoint (reading pptx files can give you messed up graphics and builds). But it gives you everything you need and runs in Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux. I love the easy export to PDF.

For us, it was not so much finding an alternative to PowerPoint as finding great ways to get PowerPoint presentations online. Several people in this thread have noted the personality and skills of the presenter, and I think this is absolutely essential to preserve when you go online. One problem with PowerPoint presentations is that often they're passed around without the author's commentary...and therefore need to read more like a report than a presentation. Slide sharing services like SlideShare and SlideRocket and narration services like BrainShark don't cut it -- we were looking for a way to let the personality of the presenter come through...and in these days of online video, that means I want to SEE the presenter as well as hear him/her.

KnowledgeVision (http://www.knowledgevision.com) is an online presentation tool that finally puts this all together. It doesn't REPLACE PowerPoint, but its capabilities make PowerPoint presentations work better in an online, on-demand world.

There are some great responses and suggestions here. I really appreciate all your guys knowledge on the area. I'm definitely going to check out each one starting with Prezi, since it was mentioned the most times (although not always with the best rating). I want to try out Keynote as well since I enjoy Steve Jobs' presentations but am afraid that it won't work so well for Windows.

Anyway, since I have all of you experts here, I wanted to pick your brains a little and ask who you consider a very good presenter and why? How do you guys deal with presenting on a boring subject? What tips do you have on captivating your audience?

Hey guys, i moved the above question about great presenters to the link below if you guys are interested in answering:

http://www.focus.com/questions/other/who-do-you-consider-great-live-presenter...

Thanks!

You should really try www.sliderocket.com it has really transformed our communication to investors. It also provides analytics back to so that we can track interest.

Saw this cool little mashup video on Prezi + Brainshark from one of our users (I'm with Brainshark) - Very creative and cool:

Here's an example of it: http://bit.ly/hha2vC
Here's how to do it: http://bit.ly/dU29V3

Thanks to @slidedynamic for this - they have a number of cool mashup videos like this on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/Slidedynamic

I think we have OCD when it comes to presentations. OK… As far as alternative to Powerpoint is concerned PowerPoint is an offline application so pptplex and Prezi is very fashionable. For online I’m awed by Mybrainshark. The addition of a url as a slide is a stroke of genius. Many of the online tools offer non liner navigation which is what we have built within Powerpoint. Its an add-in and there is a free http://www.slidedynamic.com/ I’m not a mac person so cannot comment of Keynote etc

There's a brand new tool just out that runs circles around the audio-only Powerpoint narration tools, in that it synchronizes the presenter to the presentation via webcam. It's called Knovio -- check it out at http://www.knovio.com. Drop-dead-easy user interface, and good tools for sharing on email, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

There are many alternative available like.

1) Prezi
2) Slide Rocket
3) Zoho Show
4) Empressr
5) Google Docs

Online software have several pros against desktop competitors – they are accessible on every computer that have internet connection and you may forget about difficult installation and configuration process. In this article I want to share some of the presentation applications you can use for your business.

There are some interesting non linear products too such as Freepath.