Microsoft PowerPoint vs. Google Slides: What’s Best for a Business Presentation?

Picking a right business presentation tool can be tad challenging, especially when options that you are weighing seem to be close. For business presentations, the most popular options that anyone would come across are MS PowerPoint & Google Slides. And too often, narrowing down on the best option seems burdensome.

While PowerPoint has been on the market for ages, Google Slides has been a late entrant but has been able to impress the audience with its features. But can it really match PowerPoint when it comes to business presentations? With this article, we will compare MS PowerPoint & Google Slides and help you choose the best one that suits your professional requirement.

Pricing

Well, for business entities, Google Slides comes along with G Suite packages. For individuals, it’s free.

PowerPoint comes as a part of MS Office, which is available for purchase at different prices depending upon the individual or business requirement, annual subscription or one-time subscription, etc. Officially, you could get access to free PowerPoint if only you could flaunt your student status; otherwise, you would have to buy it. But, with all those features PowerPoint offers, it seems worth every penny that you shell out.

Template Availability

Finding the right template is one of the common pain points for business professionals. The look and feel of the business presentation are very crucial because that too will leave a considerable impact on the audience.

With Google Slides, there are handful of templates available – 27 to be precise. The number isn’t enough especially when you are looking for templates that fit your business needs. This is because most of the templates are more casual in nature – like templates for a party invitation, album, etc.

PowerPoint’s Quick Starter feature offers intelligent solutions by displaying various relevant templates based on the topic that you choose. Even if you aren’t really using the Quick Starter feature, you will have plenty of themes to choose from, just feed in the right keyword.

If at all, the PowerPoint template library falls short for you, there are third-party business PowerPoint presentation template providers like SlideUpLift who can offer an array of business PowerPoint template options. Google Slides gives no competition when it comes to third-party template support. You can then pick a business PowerPoint template that goes well along with your theme. Most professionals spend time on getting the template part correct, but with PowerPoint, it is apparently easy & time-saving.

Developing Slides

Presentation of the content is also very vital because the message that you want to deliver has to hit the bull’s eye.

With Google Slides, you would have to probably create everything from scratch. Although there are sections that allow you to add text and title similar to PowerPoint, the embedding graphics, charts, and icons don’t come that easily because you have to browse through the menu option. If you are someone who would like to experiment and customize with available themes, then Google Slides is likely to disappoint you because of the lack of options available.

PowerPoint goes well with all kinds of users: from a starter to an expert. For a business presentation, building slides by adding animation, templates, fonts, tables, charts, etc. is comparatively more smooth for two reasons:

1) Easy to do

2) Too many choices available

Editing & formatting backgrounds is a cakewalk with PowerPoint. For business use, one would often want to add tables, charts & diagrams to present data.

You can change styles, colors, borders for a table that you have inserted along with heights & widths. Similarly, for charts, you have 17 main types of charts at your disposal with PowerPoint. You can go even deeper by choosing subtypes of these charts, and you can always work on customization by editing it as per your business needs.

With Google Slides, basic charts & editing options are available, but it doesn’t really match what PowerPoint offers.

Offline & Online Access

Accessing the presentation during a meeting can be a little tricky. Professionals nowadays, make sure that they have both online and offline access to a business presentation that they have built so that if one thing has a problem, they can switch to the other option.

Google Slides is more of an online application because it being cloud-based. So, accessing it through a browser is a tad easy. If you are creating a presentation on Google Slides, that would be saved to Google Drive storage.

PowerPoint too can be accessed easily online through Office 365 or an online web-based app. Your presentation will be saved to One Drive.

The cloud-based storage for both Google Slides & PowerPoint makes it easy to share the file with colleagues or clients. You can share it via link or e-mail. Sharing on social media is also available. You can even control the presentation by choosing view & edit options.

For offline access to your presentation, one cannot imagine anything better than Microsoft PowerPoint. Again, for professionals, the PowerPoint desktop application is heavily recommended because it gives you the required edge, and there’s no denying the fact that it is robust. Google Slides hardly exists in the offline space, although you can get access through the Chrome browser. Google Slides loses to PowerPoint by a mile here.

All in all, Microsoft PowerPoint comes off more as a sophisticated alternative to Google Slides. From a business perspective, PowerPoint wins hands down, simply because one is spoilt for choices. PowerPoint offers an amazing library of all elements that can help you build a powerful business presentation, which is not true for Google Slides. Even if you are looking to create a quick presentation without investing much of your efforts & time, PowerPoint will serve you just right.