Slidebean Review

Detailed Reviews

Slidebean is a presentation building tool that helps its users create beautiful presentations with the help of layouts and various design features. The tool also exhibits the use of artificial intelligence to create the presentation. The platform gives one the option of creating presentations from scratch as well as using the available templates on the platform to create them.

Pros

• A lot of template options under multiple categories.
• Uses AI to change layouts of slides.
• Has a rich media library.
• Can take care of the design if needed.
• Provides some analytics related to the presentation.

Cons

• There aren’t a lot of options for transitions and effects for elements.

Introduction

A presentation can be the reason why your business is soaring to new heights. Or it can be the reason why you were unable to convert a prospect even when you had all the resources to do the job.

No matter how much we preach against it, people often end up judging a book by its cover. First impressions are often lasting and can decide the course of your relationship with a client, prospect, investor, etc.

The corporate world relies a lot on presentation. It is inarguably an efficient way of pitching an idea or service, but a poorly curated presentation can end up doing more bad than good to a business.

You need to dedicate due time to the process to make sure that the presentation can put the idea across the table. You also need to keep it interesting enough to make sure that you have all the attention of the audience throughout the review.

Creating a presentation with all the right design elements and a proper structure is a time-consuming task. And it takes some experience for one to know what kind of presentations work better.

Slidebean is a presentation builder that takes away all the legwork out of the presentation building process and allows you to focus on the content. It would take care of all the design elements and lets you modify them if you do not like what you see.

In this review, we will test out all the features of Slidebean and tell you how this tool can help you with the presentation. We would analyze the quality of presentations we end up getting, and the ease of use of this tool.

They mention the use of artificial intelligence to create these presentations, and it will be interesting to see how much of a difference that makes. By the end of this review, you will have a concrete idea of the capabilities of Slidebean, and you will be in a much better position to decide if this is the presentation tool you were looking for.

The two ways of creating presentations

It is a simple presentation builder, and you can start with the process right after the sign-up process. There will be an onboarding video, and it will give you a great idea of how and where to start.

Slidebean primarily offers two ways to create the presentations. The one is in which you can use one of the existing templates on the platform and modify it to your needs, and the other method is to create one from scratch.

 Let us briefly go through both the methods and see their pros and cons, respectively.

Create presentations from templates

One way of ensuring that there are better chances of achieving the end goal with presentations is to use the formats that have already proven to be successful in various use cases.

Slidebean offers you templates not just to speed up through the process, but the templates they provide are designed to achieve the best results. It can be a sales pitch or a presentation for getting more grants. The template is geared towards achieving the end goal.

Another obvious benefit of using a pre-built template is that you don’t need to care much about the design-related decisions. Some people fret at the idea of choosing the right color scheme or deciding the font.

A template would make it much easier to make all those decisions, and you can spend more time focusing on the content of the slides. After all, it is what matters the most in the end.

If you choose to create presentations using this method, your success rate would depend a lot on the templates that you decide to choose. Therefore, it is necessary that you have a collection of rich and effective templates at your disposal.

Slidebean offers a diverse enough collection of templates to take care of the needs of most users. You can browse them based on popularity, or you can find a category that is much suited to your needs.

There are templates grouped under startups, business, marketing, sales, and academic. When you get into one of these categories, you will find templates focused on very specific tasks.

The template collection is one of the USPs of Slidebean. It is the element that allows the user to be done with the presentation in a matter of minutes, in some cases.

If we are to go by their words, the templates on Slidebean incorporate the learnings from some of the industry leaders and some of the top presenters of the world. There is something for everyone right from students and academicians to salespeople and entrepreneurs.

One can find a presentation template for showcasing quarterly reports to the ones that will fetch you investments. The templates on Slidebean aren’t much restrictive, and you can introduce a whole lot of changes.

We will be discussing more about the editing part in a later section of the review.

Create presentations from scratch

The other method of creating a presentation on this platform is to build one up from scratch. The method will prove to be useful in case you do not find what you need in the template gallery or if you have a specific idea for the presentation that you want to execute.

Even when you decide to create a presentation all by yourself, Slidebean would give you the option to focus on what’s most important, and leave the rest onto the software. The content and story are the most important things on a presentation, whereas you can put the designing part one tier lower than content in the list of priorities.

The tool lets you populate the slides with all the content and media that you want to have in your presentation, and then it can do the rest based on the theme that you choose for your presentation.

The features make it much easier to create a presentation from scratch on Slidebean, as compared to any other builder such as Microsoft PowerPoint.

Let’s now have a look at all the design and editing options that the software provides.

The neat editing experience

Any slide in your presentation would compose of two primary elements, one would be the content such as text, image, video, etc., and the second element is the design and effects on the slide. Slidebean allows the user to focus on these sections one at a time.

The editor is divided into two sections- outline and design.

The outline

The outline section is the one that would let you add in all the body elements into the slide. You can add in different kinds of content blocks into the slide to create a wholesome presentation.

The content blocks are once again distributed into three different categories- text, media, and tables & charts.

The text blocks would let you add in a heading, text, quote, number, footer, or even a code snippet. All you need to do is click on these elements to add them to the slide. Once the block is available on the slide, you can drag it above or below other elements on the slide.

The snippet code element lets you describe the programming language of the code that you insert on the slide, making things that much easier.

The text blocks would also let you change the properties other than the font. The user gets the option to add emoticons, bullets & numbers, and take care of the headings, as well.

Some elements, such as the heading and quote, come with two spaces and allow the user to insert the break in the text where needed. It is the subtleties like these that help a user manage the content better.

Usually, the media elements are the ones that captivate the interest of viewers and make presentations better than other forms of deliverables.

Slidebean comes with the resources to help you with all kinds of media you want to introduce on the slide. They would help you with images, gifs, and icons. The library allows you to search for appropriate content, as well. We’d say the platform can easily take care of most of your needs when it comes to media elements.

For audios and videos, you get the option to paste the appropriate link in the content block. Slidebean will also let you add voiceovers if you prefer things that way.

The tables and charts segment comes with the most number of options. It would let you add most kinds of infographics that you can probably think of adding to the presentation. The options include tables, bar charts, pie charts, line charts, Venn diagram, funnel, etc.

The outline section comes with all the features that allow the user to focus on the content in peace. You can leave all the design processes for another section.

The design

The designing is probably the most confusing part for most users when it comes to presentations. There is so much to take care of, and it’s tough to decide which way the audience’s preferences align.

Before we get into the manual options of beautifying the slide, let’s have a brief look at the artificial intelligence bit.

When you select the option of arranging the slide with AI, all you need to do is move through the different arrangements the option presents to you.

It gives you an appropriate arrangement of elements present on the slide, and it can keep reshuffling them for you.

If we are to believe Slidebean, the AI gives you patterns and arrangements that have proven to bring positive results for businesses and organizations. You won’t end up with just a random arrangement with this feature.

If you aren’t satisfied with what you see on the slide, you can hit the AI button once again, and it will give you some other arrangement. However, you will start getting the same recommendations again after some time. So, there aren’t enough arrangement options, but it’s highly likely that you will find something you like in the available option.

If it turns out that you do not like the AI patterns, then you can take things in your hand, as well. You can bring the first set of changes by moving around the elements on the slide and changing their sizes.

You can also decide the order in which the items will appear on the slide. The only disappointment we had, in this case, was that there weren’t much effects and motions for the user to play.

The items would just appear and disappear from the slide, and a lot more could’ve been achieved with better transitions and effects.

Just like there were a lot of options for templates, you get a load of options for the theme of the presentation. You can browse through the different categories, and pick the one that you like the most.

Slidebean also provides a lot of options for the color palette. You can find the one which resembles closely to your brand and include it in the presentation to make things even better.

And finally, you can choose the font that you want. They provide you enough options for fonts, and you need to select one from the design section rather than having the luxury of changing fonts while editing text.

The rest of the design options will be available on the right panel that opens when you select an item on the slide. You can change color set, background, background pattern, and much more using this panel.

The panel will also give you some customization options for the selected element, and you can take care of its appearance.

The design section will let you be done with the modifications in seconds if you want. And if someone wishes to be thorough, then they will find all the options to make the adjustments.

Share and track the presentations

Slidebean allows you to share and download the presentations once you are done with them. However, you might have to subscribe to an upgraded account if you want to have the freedom of downloading the presentation and using it wherever you want.

You can also share the presentation without downloading. All you need to do in this case is to share the link of the presentation.

You can manage the privacy settings of the presentation and make it visible to only a selected few. They will also give you a break down of the number of views and the number of visitors that the presentation has.

If you are still in the middle of building the presentation, then you can also see the percentage of work you have completed. Even though there is nothing revolutionary about these features, they make the user’s life easier for you sure.

Conclusion

When you get a presentation building tool, you can’t have a lot of expectations from it. You can want it to be fast when it comes to creating presentations. You can also expect it to create stunning presentations almost on its own.

What else? Maybe the feature that would make it easier for one to share the presentation.

Slidebean comes with almost all the features that you can desire to have. It doesn’t take much longer to create a presentation other than the time it takes you to populate the content on the slides.

They provide you enough beautiful templates, divided under various categories, to make the job much easier for you.

Those who don’t prefer using templates will also be happy on the tool since there are enough features to create beautiful presentations all from scratch.

The use of AI on the platform was the highlight for us. It came up with interesting and new ways of arrangements for the elements present on the slide.

You can start creating presentations on Slidebean without providing your card details. We think it’s a perfect opportunity for everyone to give this presentation builder a try.