A free PowerPoint alternative that runs in your browser

Slides builds a deck in the browser tab, laid out as PowerPoint is, with its ribbon, thumbnails and notes: eight layouts and a slide master, five colour themes, text boxes, pictures, shapes and tables put anywhere on a slide, transitions and animations, a footer and slide numbers, speaker notes, and a slide show with a presenter view. It opens a .pptx somebody sends you and saves one that opens and is editable in PowerPoint, Keynote and LibreOffice, and it exports one HTML file that plays in any browser, a PDF, and each slide as a picture. The deck is kept in this browser, or written into a folder on your disk. There is no account and nothing is uploaded. What it does not do is video, charts on a slide, or two people editing at once, and it says so.

What people actually mean by "PowerPoint"

Almost nobody who looks for a free alternative wants the whole program. They want to put a title on a slide, some bullets under it, a picture on the next one, a big number on the one after, and stand in front of it. Then they want to send it to somebody who will open it in PowerPoint, which is the part that decides whether an alternative is one. Slides does that set: the deck goes out as a .pptx with its words and their formatting, pictures, shapes, tables, transitions and notes, editable there.

What is there

• Eight layouts and a slide master. Title Slide, Title and Content, Section Header, Two Content, Title Only, Blank, Big Number and Quote. Switch a slide’s layout at any time and the words stay. View, Slide Master sets the title and text styles, the theme’s colours and fonts and the background for every slide, and where each layout’s placeholders sit.
• Five themes. Clean Light, Carbon Dark, Warm Ochre, Forest Green and Slate Blue, applied to the whole deck; the thumbnails follow.
• Anything, anywhere. Text boxes, pictures, PowerPoint’s preset shapes and tables on any slide, dragged, resized, turned and snapped to each other and to the slide’s middle, with fill, outline, shadow and glow, grouping and alignment.
• Transitions and animations. Fade, Push, Wipe, Split, Reveal, Cover and Zoom between slides, and entrance, emphasis and exit effects on anything on a slide, on a click or after the one before, in the order the Animation Pane lists them.
• Presenting. F5 from the start, Shift+F5 from the current slide. Presenter View shows the next slide, your notes and a timer, and a second window draws only the slide for the projector. B blacks the screen and W whites it. Before presenting on somebody else’s machine, save the deck as a file: their browser does not have your local storage.
• Getting one in. File, Open takes a .pptx: the words with their formatting, lists, pictures, shapes, tables, groups, backgrounds, transitions, hidden slides and speaker notes come in, and a slide built on PowerPoint’s placeholders arrives in the matching layout here.
• Getting it out. File, Save writes a .pptx. Export also writes one HTML file that plays in any browser, a PDF with a slide a page or with the notes under each slide, and every slide as a PNG or a JPEG.
• Where it lives. In this browser on this device by default, which is private and is not a backup; or in the folder you have chosen for the site, as a file.

About the PowerPoint file

A .pptx is a zip of XML parts, and Slides writes it in the tab: one part per slide, a slide master and its layouts, a theme, and the pictures as files. Text goes with its bullets, numbering, levels, alignment, spacing, fonts, sizes, colours and links; shapes go as PowerPoint’s own preset shapes with their fill, outline, effects, rotation and flips; tables as tables, groups as groups, and each slide’s background, transition and notes with it. Everything on a slide is held as a percentage of the slide, so it lands where you put it. What the file is not is a copy of the screen: PowerPoint lays text out its own way, so a slide that fits here can run a little long there.

What is not there

This is the part a comparison page usually leaves out.

• Animations in the .pptx. They play in the slide show here, but stay in this browser’s copy of the deck: the PowerPoint file and the web page export do not carry them, and animations in a file that arrives do not come in.
• Charts and SmartArt. A chart in a .pptx that arrives does not come in. Sheets draws a chart from a block of cells and saves it as a picture, which goes on a slide like any picture.
• Video and sound on a slide.
• Themes and templates beyond the five and the eight. The master changes their colours, fonts and backgrounds, but there is no gallery of designs to download.
• Working together. One person, on their own machine. Send the file.

Why in a browser, and what that costs

The free slide tools online keep the deck on their computer, which is how they can show it on any device and also how they can read it, keep it, and change the terms. Here the deck is on yours, and the cost is that it is only on yours: nothing syncs, and a deck to show on another machine has to travel as a file. For most decks that is a fair trade and a short one, since the file is one export away.