A PowerPoint presentation can be just a deck of slides. But with specific PPT add-ins, you can turn it into a stunning presentation with beautiful charts and other amazing visuals, or even into impressive eLearning courses. At any rate, a good presentation requires hard work. However, add-ins let you make slides more appealing and interactive with less time and effort required.
Here you’ll find 5 great PowerPoint add-ins that will benefit you in one way or another.
1. iSpring Suite
iSpring Suite is an indispensable PPT add-in for those who want to create great learning content without mastering complex software. It allows you to turn PowerPoint presentations into online courses and enhance them with engaging interactive activities.
The tool is integrated right into PowerPoint. To use its functionalities, you just need to switch to the respective tab on the PowerPoint toolbar.
Except for slide-based courses, the iSpring Suite add-in enables you to create other kinds of instructional content:
- Quizzes and surveys. Build interactive quizzes with 14 question templates, from the ubiquitous multiple-choice to fun drag-and-drops. Make them cheat-proof by randomizing questions, shuffling answer options, and setting a time limit for a quiz.
- Role-play simulations. Create interactive scenarios that imitate real-life situations to help your learners develop their communications skills. Streamline the authoring process by adding ready-made characters and locations from iSpring’s Content Library.
- Instructional videos. Use iSpring’s screencasting and webcam recording capabilities to create training videos and software tutorials. Make them look professional by utilizing video editing features: cut unwanted fragments, slow down and speed up the recording, and add intro slides and annotations.
- eLearning interactions. Present content in a more engaging way with 14 ready-to-go templates. Create interactive catalogues, timelines, FAQs, and more with ease.
- eBooks. Convert your PPT, Word, and PDF files into easy-to-read eBooks with a page flipping effect in a snap.
- Longread courses. iSpring Suite comes with an online space where you can collaborate on the content with your stakeholders and create courses together with other authors online. For example, while you’re working on the text, your colleague can add images or create a quiz.
Cost: Starts at $770/year
2. Power-user
The vendor presents Power-user as a productivity add-in for PowerPoint, Word, and Excel users. It empowers them with a set of tools that help streamline their work with presentations and reference documents and design good-looking branded deliverables.
The add-in provides access to thousands of visual assets: 400 templates, 3,000 vector icons, and 100,000 pictures. The user can also choose from among different types of charts, 200 maps that can be edited like PPT shapes, and smart diagrams.
With Power-user, you can structure your presentation with an agenda. The tool creates and updates a table of content pages for you automatically. You just need to select what your agenda will look like from existing presets.
Another great feature this add-in comes with is Clean Menu. It’s designed to clean your slides from inconsistencies and errors before sharing the presentations with other people. The inconsistencies that the tool will detect and fix for you include the mix of multiple fonts, missing slide numbers, confidential information on slide notes, double words and/or blanks, and empty placeholders.
With Power-user, you can also easily manipulate shapes in your slide deck: place shapes symmetrically, equalize the height or width of selected shapes, bring them closer or farther away, swap positions, stack shapes, and more.
Cost: There’s a free plan with limited functionality. The paid plans start at 18.75/month.
3. PowerPlugs Ultimate Combo
PowerPlugs Ultimate Combo is a comprehensive multimedia enhancement suite for PowerPoint specifically designed to take your presentations to the next level — make them more effective at capturing attention and impressing your audience. It has 21 full volumes of presentation-enriching multimedia content and effects, 4 PowerPlugs add-ins, and an annual subscription that provides a vast library of ready-to-use PPT templates.
The add-ins included in the suite allow you to select between thousands of visually stunning charts and diagrams of various types and styles, insert animated and editable 3D character slides to make your presentations even more engaging, and add multiple-choice question and answer slides to your slide deck.
Cost: $366
4. SlideHub
SlideHub is a comprehensive PowerPoint asset platform that enables you to combine off-the-shelf assets with your company’s slides, icons, and images right in PowerPoint. It will provide you with access to over 3,000 inspiring slides of different categories: graphs, timelines, bullet points, data charts, organizational charts, tables, and others. Slides automatically adjust to your corporate template and colors. The add-in also includes 100,000 searchable icons across 10 different icon styles and enables you to add license-free images from Unsplash directly into PowerPoint.
With SlideHub, you don’t need to browse multiple sources and websites in search of slides, images, and icons – they’re all available in a single combined experience. The add-in also has analytics features that let you track who is using which assets in the company.
Cost: Starts at $14 per active user per month with a minimum of three active users.
5. ToolsToo Pro
The ToolsToo Pro add-in is developed to help PowerPoint users make presentations faster and easier. It adds over 115 powerful yet easy-to-use productivity tools to the PowerPoint ribbon.
There are different types of tools. For example, slide tools include ones that can copy agenda slides and show progress within the presentation, paste clipboard as new slide and scale to fit, split text into two slides, show word, character, and paragraph counts, and track slide statistics and estimated duration. There are also 90 tools that consolidate work with shapes on the slides, letting you easily change the size, spacing, format, font name, and rotation.
For maximum productivity, you can string together any combination of the tools into custom toolchains and activate a toolchain with a single click when needed.
Cost: $19.95
Conclusion
Try some of these PowerPoint add-ins the next time you need to work on a presentation. They’re a great way to boost your productivity and turn simple slides into stunning content. Find your favorites and install them to make your slides more beautiful and the creation process easier.