After the emergence of the Coronavirus, most of my clients migrated to telecommuting and staging virtual events. This meant designing for web conferences rather than in-person meetings, and generating PDFs instead of printed leave-behinds. The typical presentation I work on today is designed as a kind of hybrid: One which a client may present live to a remote audience and then distribute to audience members as an interactive document. Because of this, I have made more use of the hyperlinking function in PowerPoint, adding clickable navigation aids and using linked slides to build interactive experiences (e.g., a decision tree where the user makes a series of selections to arrive at a specific endpoint).

GSlides, Google’s answer to PowerPoint, features fewer bells and nary a whistle, its main advantage being live collaboration. Two or more users can work on the same file without spawning a competing version. Users can see what one another is doing and work together, or tackle different sections of a presentation at the same time rather than taking turns bouncing a file back and forth all day.