Every day, according to Microsoft, more than 30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered. That’s about 21,000 a minute.
There are more than one billion copies of PowerPoint installed on computers around the world.
An estimated 120 million people know how to create a presentation on their computer.
As much as we all like to complain about “Death by PowerPoint”, it is the medium of choice to deliver business plans, marketing pitches, company updates, and corporate learning. In fact, no other visual communications medium is so ubiquitous in business.
As someone who was there in the infancy of computer presentations (I was part of the team that brought Lotus Freelance to market in 1985), I’ve watched with fascination as presentation software evolved from the early innovations of Freelance and Harvard Graphics, only to be swept aside by PowerPoint in the Microsoft Office tsumani.
Frankly, innovation in presentation software stagnated with PowerPoint’s dominance, and despite some flashes of brilliance from the likes of Prezi and Keynote, not a whole lot has changed in the last two decades.
Until now. And it’s happening, like so much else, ONLINE.
Presentations are now starting to find their proper place in an online, on-demand, social, video-enabled, anytime/anywhere, 24/7 world. And the tools to help them do that are evolving rapidly.
Among the major trends:
- Online presentations are adding video. Now, the facial expressions, gestures, and props of a good storyteller are all available to presenters with modern tools.
- Online presentations are going mobile. Increasingly, they employ responsive designs that adapt to the variety of screen dimensions, orientations, and display capabilities of smart phones and tablets.
- Online presentations are getting social. They are becoming part of the communications repertoire of social networkers, and at least in one case (SlideShare), they are a network unto themselves.
- Online presentations are inviting engagement. They are adding more ways for viewers to interact with the material, through clickable footnotes and calls-to-action, navigation, survey widgets and more.
- Online presentations are tracking their viewers. Higher engagement means more information for the creator of online presentations — not just on an aggregate level (how engaged is my audience and with what?) but also on an individual level (who specifically is the most engaged?). This is precious information for content marketers and e-learning professionals alike.
In short, modern online presentation tools are breathing new life into the tired old PowerPoint presentation. It’s a whole new medium, and the skills to put it to use are just beginning to evolve. That’s fertile ground for us to explore at OnlinePresentations.com, and we’re looking forward to exploring it with you.
As always, your comments and thoughts are welcome!
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