What's the best software for collaborating on a slide deck?

Every time I've tried to take on tasks like shared conference talks, or even just get help on my own slides I've found we get caught up in the world of passing back different versions of the slides or only being able to collaborate synchronously and having a hard time swapping things without colliding.

Are there any good tools that enable async collaboration without being overly convoluted. Something akin to my git workflow but hopefully with a gentle enough learning curve?

It's either a case where there is a tool I'm missing or I'm just not using my current tools effectively. Either way, I'm reaching out to the community for thoughts!

Thank you.

Comments

[Filipe Ramalho]

Powerpoint always works like a charm for me. You just have to use OneDrive with it and then you can collaborate and get past versions. (Some features require Office 365)

Work together on PowerPoint presentations

The new versions have so many cool features including live transcription.

Present with real-time, automatic captions or subtitles in PowerPoint

[Mohammad Rajabifard]

I used Figma for my pitch deck and it was fantastic! Zero lag collaboration and sharing, advanced text tool and so fast.

However, if you want animations or heavy code blocks it won't work for you, unfortunately.

[Boris Mann]

The more complicated question is what the collaboration looks like! Plain text in whatever shared plain text format you like for editing.

The best slide decks still come out of Keynote, with PowerPoint in second place. Working on a separate slides and then having one person being design / final layout with some copy editing.

Keynote and PPT can be shared directly in Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever for the syncing part.

[Abraham Williams]

I generally use Google Slides for everything. It's easy to edit, work with remote collaborators, and share with the audience afterwards.

[Dan]

I recommend quip for collaboration stuff. There are slides available on the desktop version of the site or the download.

[Meghan (she/her)]

you forgot the http://

[Dan]

Thank you!

[Warren Allen]

I've bounced back and forth between Deckset and Remark for this. It's almost a toss-up for me, but I use Deckset.

• Deckset: Simple and pretty, but $ and no page-embedding (and Mac-only viewer in case that matters).
• Remark: A bit more power and flexibility, but with a bit more complexity and a few too many quirks for my tastes.

[derek]

I just did a presentation and built it with 🦆🦆go 👇🏽

deckdeckgo

And I 😍it!!!

If you treat it like any repo/project you can collab that way. Plus it's just html or markdown

The webRTC remote is nice, but they need a way to secure it for presentations.

[Orlando Brown]

Yes this is dope!! Well done!!

[David Dal Busco]

Your comment made my day ♥️

Absolutely the access to the presentation through the remote will be protected at some point, I already opened an issue about it a while ago github.com/deckgo/deckdeckgo/issue...

Currently we are focusing on releasing (soon) the beta of our upcoming web editor for presentations but afterwards this enhancement will be implemented 😉

[derek]

Awesome! Thank you for creating it! It's an amazing project 💯

[Florimond Manca]

Maybe text-based slides generators? And then store the Markdown files in git. 🌟

There are a couple of options for Markdown-based slides generators, for example:

• Marp
• Landscape (apparently they templates from Google Slides )
• DeckSet (Paid, macOS only)

This is absolutely not a plug about DeckSet, but I use it and enjoy it a lot because it’s just Markdown with a bit of sugar on top for layout and theming (Marp does the same, but it’s more limited in features).

Text-based slides are obviously more limited/less flexible than your usual PowerPoint. But at the same time I’ve found that less freedom kind of forces you to focus on the content rather than spending hours tweaking the aesthetics, and allows you to use git to get async collaboration. :)

Edit: actually MDX Deck looks like a great implementation of this too. 👍

[Stephen Belovarich]

Call me old fashioned but I use reveal.js. I like it because you can highly customize the content with HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Collaboration = Git and PR at that point, so the process of making a slide deck = process of web development.

[Juan F Gonzalez]

I found it once when I was going to give a lightning talk and haven't used anything different since

[Dave Follett]

MDX Deck, you can get started here:

Learning MDX Deck: Getting Started

Dave Follett ・ 2 min read

#react #mdx #slides #javascript

Note: shameless plug of my own series.

[Ben Halpern]

Plug away! I know I’d come across stuff like this but couldn’t put my finger on it. I can’t wait to read.

[Dave Follett]

I forgot to say why its collaborative. Its collaborative because the slide content is just MDX (markdown + JSX) and that is easily put into SCM. So I probably should have said, collaborative with other developers.