The second most popular presentation tool everyone uses

Let's Unmute The Audience🎙️. Down with boring, one-way presentations 😡

Hi there!

In this newsletter:

• Learn: Changing the way you do your next presentation

• Interesting: The second most popular presentation tool

• Roadblock: Why we’re focusing on PowerPoint desktop for our new app

This is how we think all PowerPoint presentations should be done.

To learn how to create interactive PowerPoint slides with polls, word clouds, interactive maps, spinner wheels, and more, join our live workshops this week.

• Present on Zoom? Register here

• Present on Teams? Register here

We’ll explore how to turn static presentations into real-time, two-way conversations. Whether you’re leading a webinar, a client pitch, or an internal meeting, discover how to bring your audience into the story and keep them engaged from the very first slide.

💡 What You’ll Learn

​​🔹 How to make your slides interactive, without changing your workflow
🔹 Ways to involve your audience live, even with cameras off
🔹 Techniques to boost engagement inside your deck (not outside it)
🔹 How to turn passive viewers into active participants in real time

It’s happening TODAY and Thursday

🗓️18th November (Zoom) & 20th November (Teams)
⌚11am EST | 4pm GMT | 9:30pm IST
🌍 On Zoom & Teams (Yes, presentations on Zoom can be fun!)

Can’t make it? Register now and we’ll send you the recording

What’s the second most popular presentation tool today?

Every week we run two workshops.

One on Zoom.

One on Teams.

The first thing we do is show people something they’ve never seen before:

A PowerPoint slide that is written and updated in real-time by the audience.

People tell us where they are from and PowerPoint updates the world map instantly

We also ask people what presentation tools they use and there’s a definite pattern emerging here.

Despite all the jokes about PowerPoint, it’s always the number one tool that people tell us that they use.

PowerPoint is always the favorite choice for creating presentations

Before running these weekly workshops we assumed that Google Slides would be the second most popular. But we’ve found it’s often not even the third most popular.

Rising up the rankings are two relative newcomers to the world of presentations:

• Canva

• Gamma

Once the StreamAlive app for PowerPoint is finished, we’ll definitely be looking at integrating with Canva or Gamma next.

Want to influence our roadmap? Vote for your preferred presentation tool below!

50 tips to being a better virtual presenter

At the end of this month (November), we’re publishing a book on 50 tips to being a better virtual presenter.

We’ve had the who’s who of presenters, facilitators, educators, and live streamers submit their tips to help you become a better virtual presenter.

We’ve still got a few spaces left, so if you’ve got a tip that you’ve learned from all your virtual presenting experience, we’d love to include it in the book!

All submissions come with your name and mention of your company and/or LinkedIn profile.

The deadline is November 14th.

Rebuilding our PowerPoint add-in

We’re hard at work getting the StreamAlive add-in for PowerPoint ready to be used by everyone. One of the roadblocks that we hit is that PowerPoint works very differently when it’s being used online vs offline (ie. desktop PowerPoint).

This has been causing more than a few headaches because things that work fine on the desktop are not working on the browser version. Our code became more and more messy as we had to build exceptions to the different ways PowerPoint online and offline handled things.

After speaking to some senior folks at Microsoft who work on the PowerPoint product we’ve decided to halt development on our add-in for the PowerPoint browser version for now.

The Microsoft folks indicated that support for add-ins is more robust and mature in the desktop version than in the browser version, which makes sense because the desktop version has been around for 38 years!

Hopefully this doesn’t disappoint anyone who presents solely from the browser version of PowerPoint!

​Catch us on our social pages

If you haven’t already, check out our social media pages to stay updated on our quirky takes on the latest social media trends and the occasional piece of engagement-related advice.

All the best,

Peter and the StreamAlive team
100% human-written with ❤️