ActivePresenter Review

Detailed Reviews

ActivePresenter is a screen recording software with several new features, including animations, PowerPoint presentations, templates, slides, effects, and much more.

It is a package of templates and designs including numerous customizations. It has come a long way from the stereotypical image of screen recorders of being boring and tedious. Slightly it has stepped into the world of amazing, designer presentations and screenshots.

Pros

• Numerous templates.
• Can create a presentation.
• Allows adding mathematical equations.
• One can add a YouTube video and other web objects.
• Various shapes and icons are available.
• Several interactive features.

Cons

• Interactive features work only with the pro version.

Introduction

If Your presentation looks dull because you do not have enough options to customize it, or you created some presentation but face problem in getting a PDF version for it then ActivePresenter can be one of the things you require.

The screen recording software provides numerous customizations to your images, screenshots, videos, and presentations. You can choose templates according to your need and choice. You can create different pages for different purposes; you can create a question paper with checkboxes, a rating card, an essay, and much more.

Let's review and find out what else this software can provide you.

Like theme like template

Would you not like to choose the template that is suitable for the theme of the presentation or that of the video? If you create a presentation for kindergarten kids, shouldn’t it be colorful and animated?

A business presentation must have a light-colored and sober background. Nobody wants the same white or noir color for every presentation irrespective of the theme or occasion.

ActivePresenter provides you several templates to choose. You can choose a colorful template, a pure black, or some other template according to your need. The image below shows the various templates.

You can choose a template for your presentation, or to record videos. As soon as you choose the template, you have four options to choose; blank project, record video, record software stimulation, and responsive project.

A blank project is an all-new presentation that you start. You get a blank slide with the selected template, and you write the text on it. Every new slide you select, it already comes with the selected template.

You cannot change the template for only the current new slide once you make a choice.

Record video; the other option, does nothing with the template, it allows you to record the current screen and the activities going on it.

The responsive project comes with more and better customization and editing features. It also comes up with the template you choose. Here, you have features to edit the text, draw lines and dots, and create some new shapes on the slide.

The image below shows a slide of a responsive project.

One can create several numbers of presentations with the available templates while some might feel not having enough of them.

Record software simulation

Software simulation is to model and imitate to show the actual running of software.

You are a trainer at some organization and teach some software to the beginners. They might forget some step if you narrate them the process, but they can remember it better and longer if they learn it from a presentation or video.

You can use ActivePresenter for this. You can record the entire software simulation process for showing your students. During the simulation, when you strike a key, it automatically shows the name of the key on the screen. You can also add audio of your voice narrating the steps of the simulation process.

Give shape to your imagination

As we discussed, ActivePresenter can do much more than merely recording screen. When we imagine creating some presentation, we think of it sitting at the peak of our creativity but fail to reach there practically.

You can get much out of your creativity through ActivePresenter. You get multiple options and customizations for the things you add to your presentation. Be it some shape, color, text styles, size, their position on the slide, or some line. You can have them precisely what and where you want to be.

A picture speaks a thousand words. You can add a picture in your presentation and edit them as required.

Narrating stories by books to the kids in school has become obsolete nowadays.

Create your own story, that too with dialogues by using the text bubble and show it to the kids instead of narrating it. You can use various available shapes and lines to create it.

‘free scribble’ is something you use to draw the shape of your own choice.

Everybody needs a flowchart at some time or some arrows to show the progress in anything; whether it be business or a scientific process. You have arrows of various shapes to select according to your need.

Math is no longer boring

Love mathematics? Want to teach it to your students? The long equations or mathematical expressions are not easy to write and explain. Writing them all over again on the board becomes tedious not only for the students but also for teachers.

Instead of writing equations on board to explain, make a presentation for your students. No! You don't need to type the equations except for them that are not already available in the software.

The commonly used equations are already present there in the software. You only need to select the equation and change its font, color, size, if required.

Guess what? That’s not all. You can add any equation of your choice, and it would be available to you from then. You get symbols, operators, accents, brackets, and much more.

Missed your class? Was it a class on matrices? Don’t worry. You merely need to ask your teacher for the presentation.

You also have the option to create matrices. You can create empty matrices, Identity matrices, matrices with brackets, and sparse matrices.

You also get operators like radicals, degree, operators from the set theory; union, intersection, etc. Several trigonometric functions are available to use directly or to create equations.

Moreover, you get fractions, operators to perform integration and differentiation, limit, and log. The basic operators of addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication are available.

With this software, you can create a complete video classroom for your students.

Annotations and other customizations

Adding any note or comment is helpful while you present yourself or speak about some subject. You get various annotations to add to your presentation. Further, you get many other options to squeeze out every drop of your creativity.

You can add different icons, images, shapes, captions, audio, videos, and many other things.  You can add gesture effects, make changes in the footer section. You can also capture the screenshot and add it to your presentation.

If you want to point some portion of the slide using cursor during the presentation but feel some problem in deciding the entry and exit of the cursor, you can rely upon the option ‘cursor path’. You can decide the trajectory of the cursor that it follows on the slide during the presentation.

You explain some subject through an image on the slide and might need to talk about some interior details of that image, you can zoom the selected portion and through ‘Zoom and pan’ that would appear by enlarging that portion at that slide in the presentation.

We shall try to elaborate on some of these features.

Shapes and icons

While you navigate through annotations, you encounter options to add some shape or icon to your presentations.

If you are making a video presentation for someone special, you might need a heart shape icon to write and express. Something religious would require a cross.

If you show some story consisting of dialogues or monologues, that would require you to have text bubbles. Sometimes you might need a star, an arrow, or something through which you could draw the shape of your choice.

You can have all these shapes and many others through this software. Apart from available shapes, you get a free scribble to draw some shape of your choice.

Don’t write typing much? You can express through emoticons or icons present there. You get various icons, be it education, travel, technical devices, media, or social platforms.  There are enough emoticons to show your different moods.

Affect through Effects

The way things, whether it be an image, a quote, or some icon appears in a presentation, makes a difference.

There is always something in the presentation which needs to come under the spotlight, and this is what the ‘spotlight’ feature does.

You write a quote from some famous personality; you might like your audience to read it. You can highlight the text by using the highlight feature.

Some animations or effects let the audience engaged in the presentation. The gesture effects are one of those kinds. You can have several gesture effects like single tap, which presents the effect of a single tap on the screen, double-tap for a double-tap effect. There are many more options to choose from these gesture effects. The effects are generally used to make the video more presentable and letting the audience remain engaged throughout.

You created some presentation on behalf of your company and want the name of the company to be displayed in the video and that too while retaining the presentability of the video. What do you do? Don’t think. You can go for the footer option and add the name of your company at the footer of the slide.

If you want the date to appear there, you can select whether some fixed date of the year or you can allow the software to set the date automatically on which you create the slide. You can choose some specific slide for this, can apply on each slide of the presentation or deselect only the title slide.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and a video can make them speak

As the saying goes, a picture can speak a thousand words. An image in your presentation can reduce your speaking efforts.

Adding an image to your presentation is another annotation feature which allows you to add an image to the slide. You can choose an image from a file that is already saved at your computer.

You can select the position of the image in the slide and can also change its size.

Adding an image to the slide does not prevent you from adding texts. You can add the texts and quotes as you do naturally.

What’s new with the video?

Sometimes you might need a video to clarify your subject of the presentation.

You can add a video to the presentation. You can add a video which is already there in your PC, or you can add a webcam recording as the video.

There is something more with the video.

Let us see what it is?

YouTube at your slide

Watched something on YouTube that you want to show to your audience, or mere some part of that video? What you need is just the link of the video.

The image above shows the insertion of a YouTube video to the presentation. You enter or paste the link of the video to play it during the presentation.

You can see some other options in the image. You can either play the entire video or can choose a specific portion to play.  When you select playing a specific part, you are required to choose the duration of that part.

You can also have the option to choose whether the video begins to play on its own or at the time you want it to play. Enabling autoplay permits the video to play as soon as the slide arrives, if it is disabled, you can choose when to begin or even whether to begin or not.

Other web Objects

The software is not confined to mere YouTube videos; you can add other web objects as well. You either add URL of the object or the embed code. It would automatically appear in the presentation when that slide arrives, which means, unlike YouTube videos you do not have a choice to make regarding the timing to start or end or enabling or disabling the autoplay.

Create and interact

So far, we have discussed various features and functions that can create and edit the presentation. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could create something which can interact with the people and collect their feedback?

We have discussed that a teacher could create his math classroom through ActivePresenter. It would interest you to know that the same software can be used to make question papers as well or say, virtual question paper which can be presented through slides.

You must have attempted several multiple-choice questions through a computer, here is the platform for you to create and present one. How? We shall see in a while.

You can add various buttons, checkboxes with numerous customizations. There are some other interactive features that we shall see.

You can choose the ‘mouse click’ option if you want a text to appear on clicking the mouse during the presentation, it allows you to write the message in the text box that it provides. The same function for some other keystroke is provided by ‘keystroke,’ which is immediately next to the mouse click option.

You can also add a radio button or a checkbox to your presentation if you are presenting some multiple-choice type questions. You can use a checkbox to show some checklist. There is also an animated timer which records the time for the response to come.

Writing an essay is another new feature. It is just like a usual slide, with an area to create a title and the remaining portion to add text.

You can also create a multi-response question, which takes more than one response at a time, unlike a multiple-choice question, which accepts only a single response at once.

The other option is for dragging and dropping some text from the files that are already on the computer.

You can also create a rating scale in your presentation.

All these features are interactive, which means they all wait for the response of the user or behave as per the settings. You get several options to change how they interact and response. You have many customizations for the appearance of different buttons or checkboxes; even you can have many at once.

To use and ‘interact’ with all these features, you must have a Pro version of the software; even the standard version does not allow you to interact with the presentation.

What else can you add?

A creative mind never stops to think and create. It keeps on adding to every little thing around it. When it comes to creating a presentation, it digs up the deepest core of creativity.

If you augment every little thing, you can use the feature like animation. Through this feature you can have entry and exit effects of the texts, images or icons of your slide, that means that you can select the way or pattern in which your texts or icons appear or disappear during the presentation.

You can have ‘float in’ animation for the entry and ‘peek out’ for the exit. Alternatively, you might like a ’swivel’ entry and a ‘spin’ exit.

There might be several icons or images in a slide, that you might not require from the beginning, but want them to show up at some specific time during the presentation; to achieve this, you can choose the duration of the icon on the screen.

There are some other options for these animations in the ‘add effect’ section. You can choose some new and unique animation effects from here. You can add a few customizations to these effects by ‘effect options.’

Another feature is transition which is the transition of slides; it is the entry and exit effect for the entire slide and not only for its entries.

For slides, you get only an entry effect. It is pretty much like the slides we create through Microsoft PowerPoint. You can select the duration of the effect on the slide and the duration for which the slide stays back there on the screen.

‘Design’ is another option you see in the software. You can choose various designs for your slide. You can browse and add other themes to improve the customizations of your presentation.

You can choose various colors, to add to your slide. You get few customizations in font styles, background style, and size of the slide.

Export and save presentations to other formats

You made some presentation in ActivePresenter but want to publish it as a PDF or a DOC file. Some of you might like to present it as a traditional PowerPoint presentation.

 If you want to share your presentation with the world as a video, export it as a YouTube video. There are a few more formats in which you can share the presentation.

When you select the ‘export’ option in the software, it provides you various options in which you can export the presentation.

As you can see in the image, the software allows you to export the presentation as an image, a video, a YouTube video, HTML slide show, PDF document, word document, an excel sheet, a PowerPoint presentation or a video through HTML 5.

The format you choose depends on the requirement. If you want the entire presentation as it is and don’t want anybody to edit it, export it in a PDF format.

If you want an editable version of the presentation, you can go for a word document format.  You can make changes regarding the size of the slide and edit the content in a DOC file.

You can also have an excel sheet that contains your slides as its entries. It is another editable format to your presentation.

If you want to share only some of the slides of the presentation and do not want to reveal the entire presentation, you can export the selected slide as an image. It saves each slide of the presentation as a single image. You can choose the slide you want to export.

You made the presentation through this software, but your organization wants it to be a traditional PowerPoint presentation. You do not need to create another. You can easily export your presentation to PowerPoint and present it as the one.

You can also export it as HTML 5 or merely HTML slide show. The software, by default, allows you to have an HTML preview.

A video is another format into which you can export the presentation.

There is another feature that interests people who want to get famous; you can export your presentation as a YouTube video.

You only need to sign in using your email ID and the password.

In the export section, you get some player settings, where you can make changes regarding the name, preview, theme, color, resources of the presentation. You also get an option to change the language of the player. The software automatically begins the preview of the presentation when you select the option of player settings that is similar to the one you see through ‘HTML preview,’ except for the options to change settings.

Let us get back to screen recorder

Readers, don’t forget that in the end, it was meant to be a screen recording software. These were some new and additional features we discussed so far. Not necessary to mention, you also get all the features of a screen recording software; it allows you to record the screen with customizations like selecting capture area or recording a video call through webcam.

You can capture the screenshot with few new customizations like capturing shadow or opaque background. When you capture the screenshot, it automatically inserts the screenshot image into the current slide.

You can record an audio or add one to your presentation. There are some built-in audios in the software, like a mouse click, or audios for a correct answer or incorrect answer. However, they remain futile if you do not use annotations which is available only with the pro version.

Miscellaneous Features

There are several other features which require your attention. Features like timeline, pane layout, object states, and many more are also present in the software. We shall elaborate on some of these features.

The timeline

There is a timeline feature to set the duration of the slides in the presentation. There is a timeline graph below the slide that shows the duration of every slide in the presentation. You can have various customization in speed, audio, or narration in the presentation.

You can add captions, record audio, or you can also convert the caption into the audio. You can zoom in or zoom out the entries at your screen. If you have separate audio and video objects, you can join them together or split out. Noise reduction is a noteworthy feature. With a pro version, you can use this feature and can reduce the unnecessary sound in your audio without any editing.

Except for a few features, no features are available in the trial version. Some of them are present in the standard version, but to get access to all features of the timeline, you ought to have a pro version.

Resources

Resources are those external objects that we add to the presentation, whether it be an image, a video, or a web object.

The option ’resources’ opens icons of all the used resources on the right side of the screen and provide some options to edit or customize them. Only a few of them work with a trial version.

Properties

Properties, as the name suggests, can be used to change the properties of the selected slide or the current slide. You can change the name of the slide. You can have customizations in the appearance of the cursor at that slide. You can have all these features in every version of the software.

Slide, slide pool and selection

With the option ‘slides’ you can change the properties of the slide, you can select how the upcoming slides appear on the left side of the software screen.

Slide pools are something which you import from other presentations or projects and use them in your presentation. It reduces the effort of making the same thing again that you created in some other presentation.

Selection is the feature which lets you know what properties or resources you have chosen for the current presentation or say slide. It opens a list of the objects and properties selected for a slide.

Is that all?

Is that all? You might be having this question in your mind after knowing almost everything about this software.

There are a few more things about the software. In a pro version, you get features like pane layout, cursor snapping, canvas snapping, and timeline snapping.

You can change the language of the software to the one that suits you. You get various formats, be it for color, line, or shadow to augment the slides of the presentation.

If you are a beginner, you can rely on “help” of the software. You get user manual to understand the functioning of the software. You can purchase a license or get information about any updates of the software.

Conclusion

We discussed almost every feature and function of this screen recording software. Calling it merely a screen recording software would not do the justice to its stupendous features and functionalities.

The mathematics equation features have boosted up its utility.

We saw that it does not remain confined to the features that are already there but provide numerous customizations, whether it be equations, templates, or transition effects.

The software does not seem ignorant towards the problems and requirement of the users. It allows you to export the presentation in any required format. The ease of adding a YouTube video works as a cherry on the cake.

The feature of noise reduction is another smart addition.

Some features, particularly annotations, do not work with the free version or standard version while some of them work with the standard version. To access all its features, you are compelled to get a pro version of the software.

In a nutshell, this software has nothing much to complain.