Although there are plenty of competitors these days, Powerpoint is still a preferred tool for creating presentations due to its familiar controls and ease of use. But many are no longer happy to simply create a presentation, show it to an audience and then let it sit on their computer.
One solution is to send copies of your slides to interested parties, but that is clunky and doesn’t scale well. A much better solution is to find a service that will publish the presentation on the web for anyone to see.
The most popular service for this is Slideshare, a large community where users upload and share not only Powerpoint files but also presentations created in Keynote (for Mac) and OpenOffice. It also supports PDF files and infographics.
You can create a profile on Slideshare and have a central repository for all of your presentations. But also popular is the embed option which allows you to re-publish your presentation on your blog, a personal website, an organizational site or any other spot on the web.
But is Slideshare the best option for embedding presentations?
Some have complained about how Slideshare tries to upsell you to its premium version on its website. It has also undergone several interface changes over the years and many say it now has too many features and a clunky look, instead of one that is intuitive and focused on what made the service great in the first place.
So if you are interested in Slideshare alternatives for embedding (and uploading) your presentations, here are some other services you might consider.
Our Pick – SpeakerDeck – The interface is much more attractive than Slideshare, although Speaker Deck only supports uploads of PDF files. (Of course you can easily convert a Powerpoint to PDF.) It has a useful embed feature where it auto-fills to the available area so don’t have to tinker with sizes like you do with Slideshare. For embedding, though, the forward and back buttons are a little hidden and not as obvious as with Slideshare. (You can simply click on the slide itself to advance, but readers might not know that.)
Skydrive – If you want to stick with Microsoft, the creator of Powerpoint, you can save your files with its Skydrive cloud storage service and then embed it on a blog or website using the Powerpoint Web App.
Google Drive – Google’s cloud storage and web-based office suite also allows you to embed presentations. Just upload a Powerpoint file from your computer or design a presentation from scratch using Google’s easy-to-use online editor (which might be attractive if you want to design it on the go). You will see an embed option under the File menu where you can grab the code.
Scribd – This service allows you to upload content in all sorts of formats–it’s popular for ebooks, for example–and you can even sell your content using the service. But it’s not great for embedding: if you embed a Powerpoint you have to scroll down instead of clicking through one slide at a time as you do with the other services described here.
SlideServe – You can upload presentations here without even signing up, although they give this ominous warning: “Your presentation will be removed from SlideServe portal at anytime.” They do encourage you to sign up for a free account in order to store it “forever.”
Box View – Another popular cloud storage service but the embed functionality is in beta and involves using an API http://developers.box.com/view/ It does look attractive though if you are tech-savvy and want to give it a try. We’ll have to stay tuned to see if they unveil this as a built-in feature.
How to Get Slideshare Not to Show Related Slideshows at the End
In answering this question, we discovered that the motivation for many people is Slideshare’s automatic display of related slideshows after the show ends. (Just like you get with embedded Youtube videos.)
But you don’t need to seek out a different service to fix that; you can actually turn it off easily.
Just click Embed -> Customize and check the box next to “Without related content.”
We hope this article has helped you figure out the best way to embed your presentation. Which service is your pick?
photo credit: Rock_drum
Two important plusses for Slideshare are
1. its prominence in Google search. A presentation on Slideshare will usually masively outrank the same presentakion on the alternative sites.
2. Slideshares own large user base and daily traffic.
When publishing your presentation on Slideshare there’s a good chance of getting found by a new audience.
Great points Ralf, and for reaching a new audience Slideshare definitely has the edge over other newer platforms. I recall a post on Pat Flynn’s blog with a blogger who hit Slideshare’s front page and got thousands of new visitors. (There are some great tips in that article.)
I wonder if any of the other platforms will try to make discovery a major part of their service moving forward.