At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited:
- I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.
- Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn't have to manually add line breaks to deal with this.
- Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn't anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don't even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides's limitations.
- Layer/object lists. (Note: I don't see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it's available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don't want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile.
(If you're wondering why I'm focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can't collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven't used PowerPoint much, it's okay.)
UPDATE: I've now done a little playing with Figma Slides.
The good news is that it has an object list. But it's only in Design Mode. (So it won't be available to free or non-designer accounts - that's a Figma thing.)
The bad news is that in this beta the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there's no way to change the timing or easing. However, "smart animate" is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like "move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2".
(Note the emphasis on this beta. Figma Slides won't be considered GA until next year, so I'm hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)
All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations.
Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work.
I just wanted to praise Keynote, since it gets so little love.
I sometimes wonder if Keynote will suffer now that Jobs is gone and the Apple keynotes have gone to using videos ever since the pandemic. I don’t think Cook ever liked doing the live demos, so the videos are likely here to stay. The presentations Jobs did were a big driver of Keynote’s development.
If you haven’t seen it, there is an interview with the guy who put those presentations together for 20 years. It’s pretty interesting.
Wow, I didn't know about that Keynote feature, that's amazing. it really shows the extent to which they care about visual design as an end result.
I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.
Keynote is absolutely the presentation software a designer would create, if they didn't have to do it while being saddled with inappropriate technologies.
I'm a pragmatist and I understand why collaborative editing and web-based "files" won out...but when you use a well-crafted piece of desktop software like Keynote it really makes you wistful for what might have been. People have forgotten how much of a hole you dig for yourself in when you have to build everything in the browser.
You prompted me to try out the little-known web version of Keynote on iCloud.com. I expected it to be surprisingly good if not quite up to the desktop standard, since Apple's front end web teams do amazing work. And sure enough, that's what it is.
I focused on animation features and it has most of those available in the desktop version, but it's missing a few (e.g. action build effects). It's also missing some of the image adjustments. But it's got Magic Move, and shape subtraction/intersection[1]. Most importantly feels pretty good to use, though it takes a while to load (on Chromium). I've no idea if they implemented that inner-detail object alignment - don't have an easy way of testing it.
My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.
If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.
> They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers)
Don't sleep on Numbers. It doesn't get a lot of attention but it can do some nice things in a much less bloated interface than Excel.
It's had regular expressions for a while for example, while Excel is just getting them.
I love being able to put multiple spreadsheets on a page and arrange them in whatever way you want. Reminds me of Lotus Improv [1] from back in the day.
I’ve been hot for this feature since the Improv days — I browbeat the AppleWorks people to support it better, and when a bunch of them split off to build <app I don’t remember the name of> I made sure they knew this was a key feature.
Ragtime is still a thing???
I had the pleasure of working in Ragtime 2.5 and then 3 in 199x on a MacPlus (I had a job translating the manual for Cricket Presents - “PowerPoint” before PowerPoint - from English to danish).
It was one of the reasons I ‘got in to computers’(Macs) - it felt like it could ‘do it all’ and was so easy to use (at the time x86 based pc’s did not do the same for me…
Remarkably enough it seems so. Unfortunately I've never been in a place where 1. I needed its particular skillset 2. It was the best candidate for the job.
I love the idea of having multiple worksheets in a particular document so much, and yet 99.9% of the time I just throw open a google sheet and start throwing in numbers. The collaboration smoothness is a beats-all-else feature.
In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).
I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.
I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.
Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.
Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.
I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.
Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.
Agreed. I've been using Pages quite a lot during the past year, growing frustrated with Word, and Pages is surprisingly good. It is much easier to use and to get nice results.
I love Keynote, but after spending a lot of time in LaTeX Beamer when almost anything can be changed temporally within a slide using overlays, Keynote has frustrating limits. For example, you can't animate changing the background color of a table cell.
Also, its tools for editing embedded videos are quite less capable than PowerPoint's.
Not sure if PowerPoint can do the table cell thing. But overall, I still feel the perfect slide making software doesn't exist yet.
Keynote is great if you are making a presentation for yourself and you don't need to share or collaborate on it. Otherwise, interoperability trumps features, and either Google Slides or PowerPoint is good enough and more likely to be compatible with your collaborators. It is sad, I'd love to use Keynote too, but the sharing barrier is just not worth it in 99% of my use cases.
edit: I think Figma slides has an uphill battle ahead for the same reason.
I was a speaker at this years Figma Config (ends tomorrow) and we all had to use keynote since it has way better support for video and animations than goog.
I’m sure that won’t be the case next year with this new announcement.
After I struggled with PowerPoint and Google Slides, Keynote was what I was super comfortable with and could very easily express what I wanted to. It’s the first tool I reach out to. I hope Apple keeps this alive for a long time.
My personal preference is the opposite: I came to hate presentations that use animations. Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
Agreed. I've given a few conference talks and found judicious animations super helpful when I'm presenting code.
Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and then the whole thing. Subtly animating the new line in is a great way to highlight what's changing. Double-so if I'm reordering lines. Otherwise the code is just flashing from one state to another and it's not always obvious what happened.
Even better, I sometimes want to walk through the execution of code. I love having a red arrow highlighting what line we're on, and animating it between positions is a good way to highlight that we're moving from one thing to the next, especially with non-linear jumps (like from the end of a loop back to the top).
Animation is an easily-abused tool, but it's also a powerful one.
It’s not ideal to have slides that only work if everyone is paying attention at all times. This animation should not be used to impart information. You can highlight changes in other ways.
I'm not sure if this is considered animation or not, but I've demonstrated code refactors between slides by adding a colored border around the code in question (both in the before and in the after slide).
I'd probably do something similar for stepping through code. But at that point it's a quasi-animation (albeit, one that can still be understood by pdf slides).
Animations are essential for presenting mathematical concepts visually to help more of the audience follow along. Also, rendering LaTeX. Google Slides makes you use other tools and only clunkily lets you insert them into your presentation.
It's not PowerPoint ala 97 with spinning text. It's highlights or a story based presentation where thing unfolds, or perhaps interacting with something without leaving the slides. Adjusting parameters in a graph. Which is hard to do in Google. The end result of each slide could still be compiled to a static pdf. Think like a 3bluebrown video, or numberphile or something. You don't want static for all kinds of presentations, that's hyperbole.
> Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
I feel the complete opposite - if the presentation can be distilled in a static PDF, I'd rather just read the blog post. The entire point of a presentation is being engaged with the speaker to me.
I suggest watching a lecture by Matt Might. I used to hate animations but he used them in ways that I found incredibly helpful to understand concepts like parsing transforms and stuff.
Agreed with all your pain points. I push Google Slides pretty close to its limits for my talks, and it's got its quirks and limitations, but other presentation software I've looked at doesn't have the same flexibility in terms of drawing, shadowing, adding borders to arbitrary objects, etc. So I'm very excited to see this problem approached from a vector-illustration perspective.
Yeah it's like slide software was bifurcated: either you can actually collaborate (google) or make quality slides (keynote). Finally some hope: Figma actually does both of those things really well.
I'm also excited by what you can potentially do programmatically in Figma. Has anyone ever tried using the google slides API? It’s one of those APIs where you sort of wonder if you are the only actual user or if other people just enjoy eating razors to feel alive.
Footnote rant: And WHY Google for the love of all things can you STILL not import an SVG into a google slide deck?! It's supposed to be web software for crying out loud!
Totally with you on Google's lack of SVG support. SVG works fine in PowerPoint, and Keynote even lets you break SVGs apart[1]. It's embarrassing that Google were beaten by both MS and Apple on basic web standards support.
I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.
There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?
There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:
Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).
Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.
Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.
Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!
This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).
What I think a lot of the comments are missing here is that many companies who use Figma are already using Figma to create and present slide decks. (The company I work for is a perfect example.) It's maybe not the intended use of their software, but it's a very popular one.
So the competitive angle here isn't stealing market share from Google Slides/PPT, or trying to get new users to pick this over other web presentation tools. It's adding this as a first-class use case for people already building slides in Figma to further ingrain the 'ecosystem'.
This doesn't really make sense, there would not be ROI to cater to a market of users who are choosing to already use the product for that use case when it's not supported. They _are_ ingrained in the ecosystem. It is pretty clearly targeted at making this more mainstream and mass-market.
I’ve haven’t worked at a company where Figma is used “correctly”. It’s mostly used as a canvas to dump designs, slideshows, flowcharts and diagrams.
For example, N/Shift+N moves forward/backward a frame. I’m yet to see a Figma file where frames are correctly ordered or laid out, rendering this feature almost useless.
FYI - there are plugins that can help you easily order your frames by position or in other ways that make sense (I think the one I use is called Sorter).
But that's another example of the sort of hacky 'workaround' that should have first-class support if enough people need it.
When you have a thousand engineers who cares about ROI anymore? It's how Google got to be Google. By building cool stuff and letting other teams pay the bills
Designers are pretty good at siloing themselves. I worry this may further silo them as the rest of the business will continue to use PPT.
Designers frequently express frustration about "not having a seat at the table." It's going to be tough to influence the business when using a different tool than everyone else.
Edit: PPT or Google Slides* My point was more about using the tool that the rest of the business is using.
As a dev, I say more power to them. I support people using better tools for things. Maybe if we kept this up we’d all be using good things, and not stuck with MS Teams and Google slides because little Timmy in marketing chews crayons and can’t figure out how to use anything but the most basic software.
In my experience, its always higher level management that doesn't want to change, not the labor people.
Little Timmy will use whatever Thomas the Senior Manager tells him to use and those people get waaay to attached to the way they have always done things.
No, some people should be shamed into being better.
I was shamed into using more advanced operating systems and it ended up with me having a hugely important and detailed understanding of operating system design. This has been hugely beneficial not just to me but to every person I worked with since.
I would not have elected to do this and not edged out of my comfort zone if I had not been shamed.
I was resistant to change otherwise. It is a good motivator.
As an engineer for well over a decade, I've never once touched PowerPoint or any Microsoft productivity suite, so I don't think it's as black and white as you say.
Google slides have been the bread and butter of all the engineering presentations I've seen and been a part of. And that's too many to even try to count.
I think this depends on what the C-suite was sold more than anything. I've never worked in a "Microsoft shop".
Let designers use their own thing. There's no harm.
Interesting. I don't know a single person that uses google slides in a professional context. It's ppt files or even just pdfs. Designers will whip something up in InDesign or Illustrator if they want total control in rare instances, though.
To add another data point, I can't remember the last time I've seen a PowerPoint. Maybe in high school? In every job I've had, people used Google Slides, if presenting a slideshow at all. Additionally, when designers have demonstrated things (e.g. mock designs), they have always shared a Figma window.
Europe (especially germany, or gamedev) is all PPTs.
I sold google workspace to my org and Google Slides is what is giving me the most backlash because it is considered woefully inadequate compared to powerpoint. Especially around brand identity tied to fonts.
"brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool.
I guarantee you that if you substituted your company's cherished sans serif font for another sans serif font, no one would notice or care except the designers who have nothing better to occupy their time with.
> "brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool.
I mean, first, I'm not so egotistical as to claim tacit knowledge of domains that aren't mine. Corp Comms and Marketing deserve to work with good tools, the same as engineers do.
Second, I can't imagine a marketing person coming to me and forcing me to use a different IDE that didn't permit debugging because of their personal preferences.
I would (rightfully) chew them out for being so arrogant to have an opinion on what is useful for my work.
Genentech, and possibly the rest of the Roche pharma conglomerate, uses the full Google Suite instead of Office. Sure, they're still using Windows computers, but it's not unheard of for companies to use something other than Office.
Same here, looking at the companies I have interacted with, it's mostly MS with a few Google shops here and there. I am currently in Australia and work regularly with EU-based companies. I see you are being downvoted, perhaps in other areas such as the US the market is different. We are starting some projects with a few US companies, I will keep an eye on what they use, I'm curious.
The goal is to use the best tool to solve a problem. But it is tricky when you don’t know better and everyone around you follows the herd for different reasons.
Most presentation tools are poorly designed.
For example, many cognitive studies support the idea that the same brain channel handles text and speech. If you try to read and listen to different things, you can’t simultaneously pay full attention to both. Yet most presentation software encourages using bullet points, which are used extensively in business presentations.
Superfluous animation is distracting, yet presentation software animation capabilities are redundant and don’t have basic things like having a timeline with keyframes.
Outlining and notes are handy during the ideation phase of a presentation, yet outlining features are terrible.
Google Slides is extremely painful to work with. Taking a template and filling in the blanks with bullet points is okay, but even formatting a text box right is painful. PPT is better, but it has the typical MS problem: feature bloat, where the most valuable things are half-baked.
Keynote is one of the best. However, its sharing editing capabilities are between buggy and nonexistent.
By contrast, Figma's visual editing capabilities are orders of magnitude better: components and auto-layout help you work faster with a tool abstraction that is much better than the crappy master slides.
So, if you work the whole day with Figma and are productive with it… why inflect yourself the pain of using PPT/Google Slides for your presentation? You will be the one presenting. (Note: many times, I used Google Slides for those shared presentations, which I suffer… but if its my presentation I prefer Keynote or Figma depending on the case)
Slides are consumed in a variety of different ways.
Slides can be something to keep the eyes busy while someone is talking IRL. Alternatively, they can be a way to exchange information outside of a presentation, reading them like a book. In the latter case, bullet points are quite useful.
A lot of features of presentation software are there solely to stop people from going to sleep.
Considering how bad tools parasitically benefit from rigid company structures, I'd diversify where possible and deal with the incompatibilities when they arise, rather than get locked into even more Software like Jira, Teams, etc...
Ideally, coworkers should discover the best tools for themselves and then get recommendations from each other.
My company somehow managed to get sold a proprietary VPN when Wireguard and OpenVPN exist. Obviously the only compatible client is bad.
You could extrapolate that into "software engineers should write code in MS Word because otherwise the finance department can't collaborate with them". Just use the right tool for the job.
Yeah I used Excalidraw for a while, but once the novelty of the sketchy look wears off it's really a very basic drawing program. Not suitable for proper technical diagrams (which to be fair it isn't intended to be).
In a way it felt to me like Excalidraw works around your diagrams not looking very good by just making them obviously not intended to look good. But Draw.io solves that problem by just making them actually look good.
The only issue I have with Draw.io is that it can't export text in SVG properly - every text object is really an embedded HTML element, which means you can only view the resulting SVGs in browsers. They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF). https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems
It doesn't seem like they care about solving that problem properly unfortunately. Their "solution" is:
> "Convert Labels to SVG" transmits the diagram to our servers, generates a PDF, then pipes that through Inkscape, and returns the SVG output.
Jesus.
Aside from that it's an amazing program. A worthy successor to Dia.
Yes but that requires an extra step and we're also using the SVGs with Asciidoc which can generate HTML too. I don't think it even supports PDF images. We'd basically have to do what Draw.io did - export to PDF (very slowly), then covert it to SVG with Inkscape. Gross.
draw.io is pretty good IMHO. The fact that it has a reasonably rich set of built-in shapes, and you can add any arbitrary jpg or png file to your diagram, makes it immensely useful IMHO. I also love that it integrates with Google Drive or you can download/upload an XML file yourself.
Ultimately it just feels better, over Keynote I’d say better alignment controls, less defaults to unset, collaboration and sharing which keynote lacks, zoom out to see the whole thing and move things about easier.
Also because it’s already an excellent design tool you never hit the wall where a diagram can’t be created in it like you hit often in Keynote/PPT/Google Slides
(I haven’t tried Figma Slides yet, this is normal Figma)
With the way figma has been rugpulling free features for paid ones Im worried prototyping will be enshitefied (or some other needed feature) so we can no longer present from designs without paying for slides
I read the announcement ages ago. This is it now? Something everyone can replicate with html in less than 5 minutes? Edit: and of course it's subscription-based.
You can buy it "like software in a box" and it is certainly more than HTML and five minutes of work. The same way IA Writer is more than just a text box.
Give it a try. It's all about workflow. And they have a one-time purchase option as well; no need to subscribe if you don't like subs (which I understand).
Funny, I was just wondering today why Google doesn’t have an infinite canvas product. All I want is Google Slides with an infinite canvas.
Products like Figma, Miro, and Excalidraw are all great, but they’re not integrated into Google Workspace like Docs/Slides. I like comments, tagging users, auto-completing links to other docs with their title, etc.
Jamboard was never an infinite canvas. It was a very awkward thing that didn't allow you to select multiple items at once (or if it did, I never discovered how), or to expand the canvas to accommodate more content.
Even when you pay for enterprise, Google support will say things like, “Just change your brand font to use a Google Font!” It’s pretty awful and arrogant.
I don't know if the tone selector UX was used by other companies before but it is so simple and intuitive I'm surprised I haven't seen it more. I wouldn't be shocked if it becomes a standard within all the AI tools
Great stuff from Figma, many people I know have already been using it for slides and this is a great next step
Figma is already my favorite way to design presentations, but the lack of presentation tools like presenter notes has prevented me from switching from traditional tools.
Happy that the Figma product team identified this as an opportunity worth investing in. Figma's overall product trajectory is exceeding my expectations.
Tried it, wrote a long comment here, but seems I accidentally discarded that. Here's the gist of it; The product does not from other presentation tools except in that it is integrated with Figma. Only the best parts of Figma, the design things, are very much restricted unless you pay for a subscription that includes design mode. There are still some bugs, and animation support it underwhelming and slide transitions don't work as well as in other applications.
As a casual user, I would have loved something more integrated with the design workspace in Figma. With how the product is now, I might as well continue using Libreoffice Impress and get way more features at the cost of having to use an ugly piece of software.
I don't know if you've changed it, but when I tried used Pitch last year I couldn't zoom in on a slide, which was such a basic use case I needed while putting slides together that I stopped right there.
I don't know if I'm interested on giving you a free UX consultation
Your product to me seems to be just another freemium presentation product meant for sales pitches, a target market I'm not a part of. For that reason, your product doesn't really strike me as any more interesting than Figma's offering, even if it is technically superior. Figma's has a considerable edge too, as I already trust their web-based design products.
Packaging on this is interesting – from pricing page:
How much will Figma Slides cost when it is generally available?
Figma Slides will be included in all Starter plans for free or can be purchased for $3 per seat/month on Professional plans, and $5 per seat/month on Organization and Enterprise plans.
Do I need to have a full Figma design seat to use Figma Slides?
No, you do not need to have a paid Figma Design or paid FigJam seat to use Figma Slides. You will need a paid Figma Design seat to use advanced design tools in Figma Slides.
Counterpoint: I have never encountered a “designer deck” that I couldn’t recreate in PowerPoint. Most people just really suck at PowerPoint / Slides and, to be fair, the functionality to make things look good is often unintuitive.
Just as a random example, most people don’t know that shapes in PowerPoint are full vector objects with editable Bézier curves and Boolean tools available.
PowerPoint I believe you (or at least don’t know enough myself to argue). But for Slides, there’s no way. How, for example, would you put an outline around text?
Or embedded videos, or non-trivial animations, or non-Google fonts, or transparent strokes, or vector shapes (excluding the workaround I shared above). Sure, you can win clients without any of that stuff. Why do you need anything more than basic text and maybe some pictures?
But there are reasons people and companies strive for more polish and professionalism. There's a reason even Google uses Keynote for the I/O keynote, even though you can technically show the same information in Slides.
Powerpoint's font rendering is horrible. If you care about typography it's a show-stopper. I can tell sth was made in Powerpoint just by looking at the font.
Apple Keynote, otoh, has always been excellent at rendering fonts. The same slide, with a single Arial 80 headline, always looks better in Keynote than Powerpoint. Figma's font rendering is also excellent, which gets me very excited, because Keynote just isn't collaborative.
What does this add over slides.com, pretzi.com or any of the many other presentation tools (for devs there also the many text to slides tools like reveal.js, slides.dev, impress.js)?
I thought this space is pretty saturated is this essentially just to capture and lock in more users into a single tool?
But it has Presenter Mode (a feature that PowerPoint has shipped with for the last 20 years..)
> See your presenter notes and preview the next slide—all within Presenter View
Wow… This is going to murder Google Slides in the design industry. We only used Slides because it was remote friendly—designing slide layouts in it was absolute torture.
Its crazy that Figma has time to bring out a completely new product but has no time to just implement a Dark Mode for FigJam [1]. Its been 3 years and counting.
Well in that case many won't be using FigJam which is a real shame because it is an awesome product. The only thing stopping me from using it is that it causes eyesight issues. It is not even some fancy feature. Basic accessibility in 2024 shouldn't be a big ask. Especially considering they implemented dark mode for Figma in 2022 [1]. Extending to FigJam is just a few more lines of code. Shouldn't take 3 years to do this.
Funny..but I was expecting them to have it all be done with just one Ai Prompt.
"Computer.. generate a 10-slide presentation with my branding style in `file-X`,
The goal of the presentation is to pitch investors about our startup. Focus on these slides : [Sure! Here are the main section titles for the 10-page slide deck:
1. Title Slide
2. Problem Statement
3. Solution
4. Market Opportunity
5. Business Model
6. Go-to-Market Strategy
7. Traction and Milestones
8. Team
9. Financial Projections
10. Closing and Call to Action]
Played around for 30 minutes and it's kinda underwhelming. It works and is pleasant to use but it's very simple and doesn't really do anything any slides software from 10 years ago couldn't do.
This is great. I find I'm using Figma in place of other tools more and more. I could see using Figma instead of Word / Google docs pretty soon as well.
I know very little about Figma, but if their presentation product can (one day) understand LaTeX math syntax and render it, then I’ll definitely learn it!!
A ton of people in the comments are talking about Google Slides. Does nobody use PowerPoint anymore? What advantages does Google Slides have over good old fashioned PPT?
Great way to add new use cases for existing users! Not sure if this will bring people over from ppt but certainly many folks who would rather continue using figma don't have to leave
I like IA and I'm checking out their new presenter, thanks for the tip. But geeze I wish they'd have a better example in their showreel video. Who, exactly, makes, presents and is presented with these "What is design?" fluff shows with giant "inspirational" pictures accompanied a single line of text? Even Apple has to occasionally show, you know, a slide that isn't just a giant well-chosen picture.
Meanwhile, I use typesetting (Typst) to create slides. I know I should just dump it and use Google Slides but I just can't help myself, as a hacker in spirit. Take a look at one of my school project presentations, Hypnotherapist-GPT: https://typst.app/project/r-gKDYaSo4KvbEJo-LNYTV
This is just another webapp, please God please can we go back to making true desktop/native apps again. We have these powerful machines that are under utilized for what they are.
It would be good to see some demos of what this can produce, this just looks like PPTX-light on the web, and the slide templates don't really show much.
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I would disagree. Figma Slides got maybe the most positive response at the keynote. Most designers I know already use Figma for slides, so to make a first party experience with speaker notes and good UX would be understandably very popular.
Announcement post: https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-slides/
At my previous job we used Google Slides, and I rapidly came to hate it. Here's why Figma Slides has me excited:
- I use animation a lot, for many reasons, such as keeping audience focus on parts of the slide and visually explaining information changes and multi-step processes. It's particularly helpful for video. Figma already has much better tools for this; Google's are not particularly powerful and buggy as hell.
- Consistency. Google Slides will sometimes render the same text object with wrapping at different points on different machines. I shouldn't have to manually add line breaks to deal with this.
- Precision and flexibility. Google Slides just isn't anywhere near as smooth at design work as Figma. I don't even consider myself a designer and yet I regularly hit Google Slides's limitations.
- Layer/object lists. (Note: I don't see this in the Figma Slides demos, but I assume it's available in design mode?) Once you have a bunch of shapes on a slide, especially grouped, it makes selection so much easier. I don't want to play click roulette when trying to select one object from a pile.
(If you're wondering why I'm focused on Google Slides: Apple Keynote is great but can't collaborate through Google Workspace. I haven't used PowerPoint much, it's okay.)
UPDATE: I've now done a little playing with Figma Slides.
The good news is that it has an object list. But it's only in Design Mode. (So it won't be available to free or non-designer accounts - that's a Figma thing.)
The bad news is that in this beta the animation tools are even less flexible than Google Slides: you can only choose from a limited set of transitions; those transitions apply to the entire slide, not to individual objects; and there's no way to change the timing or easing. However, "smart animate" is one of the transitions, which does a Magic-Move-like "move the objects in slide 1 to their positions in slide 2".
(Note the emphasis on this beta. Figma Slides won't be considered GA until next year, so I'm hoping that all the animation tools from regular Figma will be available by then.)
All of the things you mentioned (save maybe layer lists) are why I fell in love with Keynote, and wish I could use it for all presentations.
Sadly, 99% of my time is spent in Google slides, which is like banging rocks together. Keynote's ability to do things like introspect into postscript/vector objects and align on lines within the object is one of those things that makes you re-evaluate how software should work.
I just wanted to praise Keynote, since it gets so little love.
I sometimes wonder if Keynote will suffer now that Jobs is gone and the Apple keynotes have gone to using videos ever since the pandemic. I don’t think Cook ever liked doing the live demos, so the videos are likely here to stay. The presentations Jobs did were a big driver of Keynote’s development.
If you haven’t seen it, there is an interview with the guy who put those presentations together for 20 years. It’s pretty interesting.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210205063616/https://www.cake....
That thing about the presentation having a color scheme match the emotion and villains and heroes.
Is there an essay that analyzes the iPhone launch as you would a book or a movie?
I don’t think that will affect it. Apple’s public use of Keynote has always been very basic
They mention a book, book seems like it never came out?
Wow, I didn't know about that Keynote feature, that's amazing. it really shows the extent to which they care about visual design as an end result.
I desperately wish Apple's office apps got more development. They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers) but Apple seems content to just update a couple of minor features a year and leave it at that.
Keynote is absolutely the presentation software a designer would create, if they didn't have to do it while being saddled with inappropriate technologies.
I'm a pragmatist and I understand why collaborative editing and web-based "files" won out...but when you use a well-crafted piece of desktop software like Keynote it really makes you wistful for what might have been. People have forgotten how much of a hole you dig for yourself in when you have to build everything in the browser.
You prompted me to try out the little-known web version of Keynote on iCloud.com. I expected it to be surprisingly good if not quite up to the desktop standard, since Apple's front end web teams do amazing work. And sure enough, that's what it is.
I focused on animation features and it has most of those available in the desktop version, but it's missing a few (e.g. action build effects). It's also missing some of the image adjustments. But it's got Magic Move, and shape subtraction/intersection[1]. Most importantly feels pretty good to use, though it takes a while to load (on Chromium). I've no idea if they implemented that inner-detail object alignment - don't have an easy way of testing it.
[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/combine-or-break-apa... - note the feature about breaking apart SVG images too, I wonder if that's related to the inner-detail trick.
My only counter to this is that after, what, two _decades_, Apple _still_ has not added the ability to adjust number boxes with the up/down arrows on the keyboard (like text size for example). A designer would have included this on day 1, it’s such a common UI pattern in design tools.
If anyone on the iWork team is reading this, _please_ get to that Radar.
> They have the potential to be world-beating (especially Numbers)
Don't sleep on Numbers. It doesn't get a lot of attention but it can do some nice things in a much less bloated interface than Excel.
It's had regular expressions for a while for example, while Excel is just getting them.
I love being able to put multiple spreadsheets on a page and arrange them in whatever way you want. Reminds me of Lotus Improv [1] from back in the day.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Improv
I like numbers, but AFAIK its file format is not open and Apple just dropped support for older versions some years ago.
Imagine not being able to open a spreadsheet from 5 years ago.
> put multiple spreadsheets on a page
I’ve been hot for this feature since the Improv days — I browbeat the AppleWorks people to support it better, and when a bunch of them split off to build <app I don’t remember the name of> I made sure they knew this was a key feature.
Ragtime still supports it as far as I know. https://www.ragtime.de/start.html?lang_id=en
Ragtime is still a thing??? I had the pleasure of working in Ragtime 2.5 and then 3 in 199x on a MacPlus (I had a job translating the manual for Cricket Presents - “PowerPoint” before PowerPoint - from English to danish).
It was one of the reasons I ‘got in to computers’(Macs) - it felt like it could ‘do it all’ and was so easy to use (at the time x86 based pc’s did not do the same for me…
Remarkably enough it seems so. Unfortunately I've never been in a place where 1. I needed its particular skillset 2. It was the best candidate for the job.
I love the idea of having multiple worksheets in a particular document so much, and yet 99.9% of the time I just throw open a google sheet and start throwing in numbers. The collaboration smoothness is a beats-all-else feature.
In my experience of many years, not only is Keynote fantastic, but Pages is better than Word and Numbers is better than Excel (though not the extensive Excel ecosystem).
I agree. I recently tried to do something in MS Office that was fairly simple in Pages: create a straightforward invoice.
I discovered that Word doesn’t even support formulae in its tables, which came as a great surprise. Apparently I needed to do this in Excel, which of course meant that the whole document needed to be written as fixed-width cells. This totally sucked for my use case.
Not too long ago I had to write a short paper in the current version of Word for Mac for a class I was taking and was surprised at how frustrating the experience was, in several ways feeling like stepping back in time a couple decades. Thankfully assignments since have accepted PDFs so using Pages is no problem.
Keynote is awesome. Last I checked a few years ago though Numbers was nowhere even close to Excel. No dynamic array formulas, Power Query, lambda functions, VBA, etc. All are pretty essential if you're doing anything beyond basic spreadsheets but I may need to checkout Numbers again.
I should have qualified "better". I find Numbers easier to use for basic spreadsheet tasks. Advanced, programming-like tasks are better in Excel, which has many more advanced features. I don't think Numbers is Turing complete, but then again I tend to use Python rather than Excel for advanced math processing.
Word has some features that Pages doesn't have, but they're not commonly used, and if you're doing any kind of page layout, Pages is __much__ easier to work with than MS Word.
Agreed. I've been using Pages quite a lot during the past year, growing frustrated with Word, and Pages is surprisingly good. It is much easier to use and to get nice results.
> Numbers is better than Excel
???????
Nothing is better than Excel.
fair point :)
I love Keynote, but after spending a lot of time in LaTeX Beamer when almost anything can be changed temporally within a slide using overlays, Keynote has frustrating limits. For example, you can't animate changing the background color of a table cell.
Also, its tools for editing embedded videos are quite less capable than PowerPoint's.
Not sure if PowerPoint can do the table cell thing. But overall, I still feel the perfect slide making software doesn't exist yet.
Keynote is great if you are making a presentation for yourself and you don't need to share or collaborate on it. Otherwise, interoperability trumps features, and either Google Slides or PowerPoint is good enough and more likely to be compatible with your collaborators. It is sad, I'd love to use Keynote too, but the sharing barrier is just not worth it in 99% of my use cases.
edit: I think Figma slides has an uphill battle ahead for the same reason.
Keynote has had real time collaboration[0] for years. It's great.
[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/keynote/intro-to-collaborati...
I was a speaker at this years Figma Config (ends tomorrow) and we all had to use keynote since it has way better support for video and animations than goog.
I’m sure that won’t be the case next year with this new announcement.
Agree 1000%
After I struggled with PowerPoint and Google Slides, Keynote was what I was super comfortable with and could very easily express what I wanted to. It’s the first tool I reach out to. I hope Apple keeps this alive for a long time.
> I use animation a lot,
My personal preference is the opposite: I came to hate presentations that use animations. Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
There's useful animations—guiding the audience that something has changed for ex.
Then there's the terrible animations—a gif of a meme playing in an infinite loop. These make the slide unwatchable for me.
Agreed. I've given a few conference talks and found judicious animations super helpful when I'm presenting code.
Showing 10 lines of code on a screen at once is a surefire way to have the audience either not read/understand it or to read it, but ignore what I'm saying. So I like to build up a slide full of code by starting with a couple line (eg the function definition), then adding a few more, then a few more, and then the whole thing. Subtly animating the new line in is a great way to highlight what's changing. Double-so if I'm reordering lines. Otherwise the code is just flashing from one state to another and it's not always obvious what happened.
Even better, I sometimes want to walk through the execution of code. I love having a red arrow highlighting what line we're on, and animating it between positions is a good way to highlight that we're moving from one thing to the next, especially with non-linear jumps (like from the end of a loop back to the top).
Animation is an easily-abused tool, but it's also a powerful one.
It’s not ideal to have slides that only work if everyone is paying attention at all times. This animation should not be used to impart information. You can highlight changes in other ways.
I'd be curious to hear how you'd do the execution flow like they mention? Just use multiple sequential slides?
I'm not sure if this is considered animation or not, but I've demonstrated code refactors between slides by adding a colored border around the code in question (both in the before and in the after slide).
I'd probably do something similar for stepping through code. But at that point it's a quasi-animation (albeit, one that can still be understood by pdf slides).
Animations are essential for presenting mathematical concepts visually to help more of the audience follow along. Also, rendering LaTeX. Google Slides makes you use other tools and only clunkily lets you insert them into your presentation.
It's not PowerPoint ala 97 with spinning text. It's highlights or a story based presentation where thing unfolds, or perhaps interacting with something without leaving the slides. Adjusting parameters in a graph. Which is hard to do in Google. The end result of each slide could still be compiled to a static pdf. Think like a 3bluebrown video, or numberphile or something. You don't want static for all kinds of presentations, that's hyperbole.
> Any presentation that can't be presented in static pdf is a presentation I'd rather miss.
I feel the complete opposite - if the presentation can be distilled in a static PDF, I'd rather just read the blog post. The entire point of a presentation is being engaged with the speaker to me.
I suggest watching a lecture by Matt Might. I used to hate animations but he used them in ways that I found incredibly helpful to understand concepts like parsing transforms and stuff.
Agreed with all your pain points. I push Google Slides pretty close to its limits for my talks, and it's got its quirks and limitations, but other presentation software I've looked at doesn't have the same flexibility in terms of drawing, shadowing, adding borders to arbitrary objects, etc. So I'm very excited to see this problem approached from a vector-illustration perspective.
Google slides has a bunch of "smart" features, which is when things automatically change without telling you in unexpected ways.
Yeah it's like slide software was bifurcated: either you can actually collaborate (google) or make quality slides (keynote). Finally some hope: Figma actually does both of those things really well.
I'm also excited by what you can potentially do programmatically in Figma. Has anyone ever tried using the google slides API? It’s one of those APIs where you sort of wonder if you are the only actual user or if other people just enjoy eating razors to feel alive.
Footnote rant: And WHY Google for the love of all things can you STILL not import an SVG into a google slide deck?! It's supposed to be web software for crying out loud!
Totally with you on Google's lack of SVG support. SVG works fine in PowerPoint, and Keynote even lets you break SVGs apart[1]. It's embarrassing that Google were beaten by both MS and Apple on basic web standards support.
I cannot stand the lack of SVG support in Google slides. When I worked on the hardware team there I hated that I had to import my polished vector block diagrams into slides as PNGs.
There was a 10+ year old bug thread with 100s of +1s for SVG support in Docs. IIRC the reasoning behind the delay was security concerns - seemed like a bit of a cop out, but what do I know?
There’s still one painful workaround to get SVGs into Google Slides! I actually posted it in that bug thread at Google and then ended up with people attacking me like I was on the team and claiming the workaround is good enough. Anyway, here’s how to do it:
Download Inkscape and then convert your SVG to EMF (some PowerPoint vector format I think).
/Applications/Inkscape.app/Contents/MacOS/inkscape file.svg --export-filename=file.emf
Upload the EMF file to Google Drive with content type “application/x-msmetafile”.
rclone copyto --http-headers '"Content-Type","application/x-msmetafile"' file.emf gdrive:file.emf
Right-click on the file in Drive and open in Google Drawings (if Google Drawings isn’t an option, you don’t have the right content-type set on the file.
Copy from Google Drawings to Google Slides.
Enjoy your painful-but-at-least-possible vector objects in Google Slides!
Wow! Thanks for this!
This is the second time that the EMF file format has come in handy for me. In college I used to export my Matlab plots as EMF so they'd import into my Word documents all crisp - it was the only format which enabled that (please don't tell the LaTeX folks I did my lab reports in Word).
It also really stinks at resizing raster images, as does all Gsuite apps. It makes diagrams look terrible.
Looks like it should be available in the free plan according to the pricing page.
> "Available in beta through 2024. In early 2025, Figma Slides will be free on Starter plans and $3 or $5/month depending on your paid plan."
https://www.figma.com/pricing/
What about Canva slides? They are both design focused
this seems like a pr post? might tagging it with #ad at least
What I think a lot of the comments are missing here is that many companies who use Figma are already using Figma to create and present slide decks. (The company I work for is a perfect example.) It's maybe not the intended use of their software, but it's a very popular one.
So the competitive angle here isn't stealing market share from Google Slides/PPT, or trying to get new users to pick this over other web presentation tools. It's adding this as a first-class use case for people already building slides in Figma to further ingrain the 'ecosystem'.
This doesn't really make sense, there would not be ROI to cater to a market of users who are choosing to already use the product for that use case when it's not supported. They _are_ ingrained in the ecosystem. It is pretty clearly targeted at making this more mainstream and mass-market.
If you don't see how "Our users are using our tool for X, let's make that easier for them" adds value then remind me to never work for you.
I'm no product manager, but how on earth does it not make sense to elevate a use case that people clearly want from ad-hoc solution to actual feature?
I’ve haven’t worked at a company where Figma is used “correctly”. It’s mostly used as a canvas to dump designs, slideshows, flowcharts and diagrams.
For example, N/Shift+N moves forward/backward a frame. I’m yet to see a Figma file where frames are correctly ordered or laid out, rendering this feature almost useless.
FYI - there are plugins that can help you easily order your frames by position or in other ways that make sense (I think the one I use is called Sorter).
But that's another example of the sort of hacky 'workaround' that should have first-class support if enough people need it.
Ah interesting. I only have a viewer account, so I imagine I wouldn’t be able to use such a plugin.
When you have a thousand engineers who cares about ROI anymore? It's how Google got to be Google. By building cool stuff and letting other teams pay the bills
Designers are pretty good at siloing themselves. I worry this may further silo them as the rest of the business will continue to use PPT.
Designers frequently express frustration about "not having a seat at the table." It's going to be tough to influence the business when using a different tool than everyone else.
Edit: PPT or Google Slides* My point was more about using the tool that the rest of the business is using.
As a dev, I say more power to them. I support people using better tools for things. Maybe if we kept this up we’d all be using good things, and not stuck with MS Teams and Google slides because little Timmy in marketing chews crayons and can’t figure out how to use anything but the most basic software.
In my experience, its always higher level management that doesn't want to change, not the labor people.
Little Timmy will use whatever Thomas the Senior Manager tells him to use and those people get waaay to attached to the way they have always done things.
Timmy in marketing knows things you cannot fathom
Can’t be much since he is in marketing :P (obvious sarcasm)
Such as the taste of crayons?
it's possible to make your point without disparaging others that you feel are beneath you
No, some people should be shamed into being better.
I was shamed into using more advanced operating systems and it ended up with me having a hugely important and detailed understanding of operating system design. This has been hugely beneficial not just to me but to every person I worked with since.
I would not have elected to do this and not edged out of my comfort zone if I had not been shamed.
I was resistant to change otherwise. It is a good motivator.
Some people get abused into being better, but it's not the only way.
Shame != Abuse
As an engineer for well over a decade, I've never once touched PowerPoint or any Microsoft productivity suite, so I don't think it's as black and white as you say.
Google slides have been the bread and butter of all the engineering presentations I've seen and been a part of. And that's too many to even try to count.
I think this depends on what the C-suite was sold more than anything. I've never worked in a "Microsoft shop".
Let designers use their own thing. There's no harm.
Interesting. I don't know a single person that uses google slides in a professional context. It's ppt files or even just pdfs. Designers will whip something up in InDesign or Illustrator if they want total control in rare instances, though.
To add another data point, I can't remember the last time I've seen a PowerPoint. Maybe in high school? In every job I've had, people used Google Slides, if presenting a slideshow at all. Additionally, when designers have demonstrated things (e.g. mock designs), they have always shared a Figma window.
Europe (especially germany, or gamedev) is all PPTs.
I sold google workspace to my org and Google Slides is what is giving me the most backlash because it is considered woefully inadequate compared to powerpoint. Especially around brand identity tied to fonts.
"brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool.
I guarantee you that if you substituted your company's cherished sans serif font for another sans serif font, no one would notice or care except the designers who have nothing better to occupy their time with.
> "brand identity tied to fonts" sounds like more of a problem related to your company culture/ego of the marketing team than a shortcoming of the tool.
I mean, first, I'm not so egotistical as to claim tacit knowledge of domains that aren't mine. Corp Comms and Marketing deserve to work with good tools, the same as engineers do.
Second, I can't imagine a marketing person coming to me and forcing me to use a different IDE that didn't permit debugging because of their personal preferences.
I would (rightfully) chew them out for being so arrogant to have an opinion on what is useful for my work.
Genentech, and possibly the rest of the Roche pharma conglomerate, uses the full Google Suite instead of Office. Sure, they're still using Windows computers, but it's not unheard of for companies to use something other than Office.
Same here, looking at the companies I have interacted with, it's mostly MS with a few Google shops here and there. I am currently in Australia and work regularly with EU-based companies. I see you are being downvoted, perhaps in other areas such as the US the market is different. We are starting some projects with a few US companies, I will keep an eye on what they use, I'm curious.
The goal is to use the best tool to solve a problem. But it is tricky when you don’t know better and everyone around you follows the herd for different reasons.
Most presentation tools are poorly designed.
For example, many cognitive studies support the idea that the same brain channel handles text and speech. If you try to read and listen to different things, you can’t simultaneously pay full attention to both. Yet most presentation software encourages using bullet points, which are used extensively in business presentations.
Superfluous animation is distracting, yet presentation software animation capabilities are redundant and don’t have basic things like having a timeline with keyframes.
Outlining and notes are handy during the ideation phase of a presentation, yet outlining features are terrible.
Google Slides is extremely painful to work with. Taking a template and filling in the blanks with bullet points is okay, but even formatting a text box right is painful. PPT is better, but it has the typical MS problem: feature bloat, where the most valuable things are half-baked. Keynote is one of the best. However, its sharing editing capabilities are between buggy and nonexistent.
By contrast, Figma's visual editing capabilities are orders of magnitude better: components and auto-layout help you work faster with a tool abstraction that is much better than the crappy master slides.
So, if you work the whole day with Figma and are productive with it… why inflect yourself the pain of using PPT/Google Slides for your presentation? You will be the one presenting. (Note: many times, I used Google Slides for those shared presentations, which I suffer… but if its my presentation I prefer Keynote or Figma depending on the case)
Slides are consumed in a variety of different ways.
Slides can be something to keep the eyes busy while someone is talking IRL. Alternatively, they can be a way to exchange information outside of a presentation, reading them like a book. In the latter case, bullet points are quite useful.
A lot of features of presentation software are there solely to stop people from going to sleep.
Considering how bad tools parasitically benefit from rigid company structures, I'd diversify where possible and deal with the incompatibilities when they arise, rather than get locked into even more Software like Jira, Teams, etc...
Ideally, coworkers should discover the best tools for themselves and then get recommendations from each other.
My company somehow managed to get sold a proprietary VPN when Wireguard and OpenVPN exist. Obviously the only compatible client is bad.
Why does it matter? How does designers using a tool affect anybody? Are you familiar with Figma? It's ubiquitous and awesome.
And, as if developers use a non-plethora of non-esoteric, non-outdated tooling.
Lack of collaboration with folks in other expertise areas who won't/can't use that tool.
You could extrapolate that into "software engineers should write code in MS Word because otherwise the finance department can't collaborate with them". Just use the right tool for the job.
Why do others need to be able to use the tool?
By the way, Figma has powerful live collaboration features.
Hell, I’m a dev and I already produce most of my slide shows in Figma. I’m so happy a dedicated product is coming!
I find Figma unmatched for architecture diagrams. It’s nice to have them at my disposal when preparing slide shows.
For architecture diagrams Ive found Google drawing will work for my use cases. And if its something fancy, lucidchart.
I would definitely use Draw.io over Google Drawings. That sounds a bit masochistic to be honest!
Google Drawings was the bees knees 15 years ago, and since it is a dead product and hasn't changed one bit today it isn't.
We use excalidraw a lot, but my excitement has waned a bit there as well.
Yeah I used Excalidraw for a while, but once the novelty of the sketchy look wears off it's really a very basic drawing program. Not suitable for proper technical diagrams (which to be fair it isn't intended to be).
In a way it felt to me like Excalidraw works around your diagrams not looking very good by just making them obviously not intended to look good. But Draw.io solves that problem by just making them actually look good.
The only issue I have with Draw.io is that it can't export text in SVG properly - every text object is really an embedded HTML element, which means you can only view the resulting SVGs in browsers. They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF). https://www.drawio.com/doc/faq/svg-export-text-problems
It doesn't seem like they care about solving that problem properly unfortunately. Their "solution" is:
> "Convert Labels to SVG" transmits the diagram to our servers, generates a PDF, then pipes that through Inkscape, and returns the SVG output.
Jesus.
Aside from that it's an amazing program. A worthy successor to Dia.
> They don't work anywhere else you'd want to use an SVG (e.g. embedded in a PDF)
My workflow is exporting to PDF and then just embedding that inside the larger PDF. Works fine?
Yes but that requires an extra step and we're also using the SVGs with Asciidoc which can generate HTML too. I don't think it even supports PDF images. We'd basically have to do what Draw.io did - export to PDF (very slowly), then covert it to SVG with Inkscape. Gross.
draw.io is pretty good IMHO. The fact that it has a reasonably rich set of built-in shapes, and you can add any arbitrary jpg or png file to your diagram, makes it immensely useful IMHO. I also love that it integrates with Google Drive or you can download/upload an XML file yourself.
I had never heard of Google drawing until now. Interesting.
Just curious, why do you use Figma over other slide making tools? Just for architecture diagrams, or your familiarity with the tool?
I'm not a Figma user and have no clue, and am wondering if it's worth giving a shot as a new user.
Ultimately it just feels better, over Keynote I’d say better alignment controls, less defaults to unset, collaboration and sharing which keynote lacks, zoom out to see the whole thing and move things about easier.
Also because it’s already an excellent design tool you never hit the wall where a diagram can’t be created in it like you hit often in Keynote/PPT/Google Slides
(I haven’t tried Figma Slides yet, this is normal Figma)
visual control
With the way figma has been rugpulling free features for paid ones Im worried prototyping will be enshitefied (or some other needed feature) so we can no longer present from designs without paying for slides
I have fallen in love with the opposite approach: IA Presenter [0] (no affiliation).
It's just markdown and content. The rest is taken from you.
0 - https://ia.net/presenter
I read the announcement ages ago. This is it now? Something everyone can replicate with html in less than 5 minutes? Edit: and of course it's subscription-based.
What an uncharitable and reductionist take.
You can buy it "like software in a box" and it is certainly more than HTML and five minutes of work. The same way IA Writer is more than just a text box.
Give it a try. It's all about workflow. And they have a one-time purchase option as well; no need to subscribe if you don't like subs (which I understand).
This is indeed awesome. Our design team made a few templates to stay on brand.
It’s a bliss.
Funny, I was just wondering today why Google doesn’t have an infinite canvas product. All I want is Google Slides with an infinite canvas.
Products like Figma, Miro, and Excalidraw are all great, but they’re not integrated into Google Workspace like Docs/Slides. I like comments, tagging users, auto-completing links to other docs with their title, etc.
Google had something called Jamboard that kinda fits the description. But Google being Google, it was recently discontinued.
Jamboard was never an infinite canvas. It was a very awkward thing that didn't allow you to select multiple items at once (or if it did, I never discovered how), or to expand the canvas to accommodate more content.
Agree. The fixed canvas size in Jamboard is incredibly annoying and limiting.
Google slides has other pretty major problems for presenting things.
Notably if your corporate identity requires the use of a specific font, then its not possible.
Figma is a lot better in this regard, but the pricing is aggressive for the design part.
Even when you pay for enterprise, Google support will say things like, “Just change your brand font to use a Google Font!” It’s pretty awful and arrogant.
I understand a large amount of the technical and legal reasons for this, but I agree.
It hurts my position greatly as an advocate of their services internally and leads to us having to use Powerpoint anyway.
Object sizing and alignment is also garbage, barely functional, and has not been fixed in decades.
I worked somewhere where they went through this and got a custom font added: https://www.reddit.com/r/gsuite/comments/170jgfl/upload_cust...
Pretty disappointing and convoluted though.
Try Canva whiteboards. You can embed an inf canvas into slides
They do, but it’s not easy to use.
I don't know if the tone selector UX was used by other companies before but it is so simple and intuitive I'm surprised I haven't seen it more. I wouldn't be shocked if it becomes a standard within all the AI tools
Great stuff from Figma, many people I know have already been using it for slides and this is a great next step
Figma is already my favorite way to design presentations, but the lack of presentation tools like presenter notes has prevented me from switching from traditional tools.
Happy that the Figma product team identified this as an opportunity worth investing in. Figma's overall product trajectory is exceeding my expectations.
Tried it, wrote a long comment here, but seems I accidentally discarded that. Here's the gist of it; The product does not from other presentation tools except in that it is integrated with Figma. Only the best parts of Figma, the design things, are very much restricted unless you pay for a subscription that includes design mode. There are still some bugs, and animation support it underwhelming and slide transitions don't work as well as in other applications.
As a casual user, I would have loved something more integrated with the design workspace in Figma. With how the product is now, I might as well continue using Libreoffice Impress and get way more features at the cost of having to use an ugly piece of software.
I'm the CTO of Pitch, so obvious bias here, but have you tried our product? Would love to know what you miss from Impress when using Pitch.
I don't know if you've changed it, but when I tried used Pitch last year I couldn't zoom in on a slide, which was such a basic use case I needed while putting slides together that I stopped right there.
I don't know if I'm interested on giving you a free UX consultation
Your product to me seems to be just another freemium presentation product meant for sales pitches, a target market I'm not a part of. For that reason, your product doesn't really strike me as any more interesting than Figma's offering, even if it is technically superior. Figma's has a considerable edge too, as I already trust their web-based design products.
No worries! Didn't mean to ask for free work, thought since you were trying out Figma Slides you might on the hunt for a new tool.
Packaging on this is interesting – from pricing page:
How much will Figma Slides cost when it is generally available? Figma Slides will be included in all Starter plans for free or can be purchased for $3 per seat/month on Professional plans, and $5 per seat/month on Organization and Enterprise plans.
Do I need to have a full Figma design seat to use Figma Slides? No, you do not need to have a paid Figma Design or paid FigJam seat to use Figma Slides. You will need a paid Figma Design seat to use advanced design tools in Figma Slides.
All of our serious decks are produced in Figma. Slides and PowerPoint can't make a good enough looking presentation.
Internal stuff, quick stuff to show clients, whatever, use Slides, but for trying to win new accounts, we use Figma.
Counterpoint: I have never encountered a “designer deck” that I couldn’t recreate in PowerPoint. Most people just really suck at PowerPoint / Slides and, to be fair, the functionality to make things look good is often unintuitive.
Just as a random example, most people don’t know that shapes in PowerPoint are full vector objects with editable Bézier curves and Boolean tools available.
PowerPoint I believe you (or at least don’t know enough myself to argue). But for Slides, there’s no way. How, for example, would you put an outline around text?
Yep, it's the outline around text that won you the client.
Or embedded videos, or non-trivial animations, or non-Google fonts, or transparent strokes, or vector shapes (excluding the workaround I shared above). Sure, you can win clients without any of that stuff. Why do you need anything more than basic text and maybe some pictures?
But there are reasons people and companies strive for more polish and professionalism. There's a reason even Google uses Keynote for the I/O keynote, even though you can technically show the same information in Slides.
Powerpoint's font rendering is horrible. If you care about typography it's a show-stopper. I can tell sth was made in Powerpoint just by looking at the font.
Apple Keynote, otoh, has always been excellent at rendering fonts. The same slide, with a single Arial 80 headline, always looks better in Keynote than Powerpoint. Figma's font rendering is also excellent, which gets me very excited, because Keynote just isn't collaborative.
What does this add over slides.com, pretzi.com or any of the many other presentation tools (for devs there also the many text to slides tools like reveal.js, slides.dev, impress.js)?
I thought this space is pretty saturated is this essentially just to capture and lock in more users into a single tool?
Besides a familiar UI/UX.
It adds that I don't need to reach for yet another tool.
What it offers is additional market capture, which leads to additional data capture for their AI projects.
Their landing page does not really show much about this product. It looks just like boring powerpoint.
But it has Presenter Mode (a feature that PowerPoint has shipped with for the last 20 years..) > See your presenter notes and preview the next slide—all within Presenter View
Figma invested years in this super powerful real time canvas, only using it for UX mocks is not tapping its full potential
What use case(s) would leverage the potential more?
Wow… This is going to murder Google Slides in the design industry. We only used Slides because it was remote friendly—designing slide layouts in it was absolute torture.
Figma has a reputation with its dark patterns for pricing - people might be wary before adopting their products.
Wow, it supports WebP images.
Google Slides doesn't support WebP, despite google being the company that _invented_ WebP.
In what way would Figma be better for creating slide decks than Canva?
Figma components could be used in it.
Penpot has components and is open source and I would like to see slide shows in it. https://penpot.app/penpot-2.0
How much they will charge for something we can already do?
Its crazy that Figma has time to bring out a completely new product but has no time to just implement a Dark Mode for FigJam [1]. Its been 3 years and counting.
[1]: https://forum.figma.com/t/dark-mode-for-figjam/3147
Happy to see them making the correct prioritization
Well in that case many won't be using FigJam which is a real shame because it is an awesome product. The only thing stopping me from using it is that it causes eyesight issues. It is not even some fancy feature. Basic accessibility in 2024 shouldn't be a big ask. Especially considering they implemented dark mode for Figma in 2022 [1]. Extending to FigJam is just a few more lines of code. Shouldn't take 3 years to do this.
[1]: https://forum.figma.com/t/launched-figma-dark-mode-theme/229...
Funny..but I was expecting them to have it all be done with just one Ai Prompt. "Computer.. generate a 10-slide presentation with my branding style in `file-X`, The goal of the presentation is to pitch investors about our startup. Focus on these slides : [Sure! Here are the main section titles for the 10-page slide deck:
1. Title Slide 2. Problem Statement 3. Solution 4. Market Opportunity 5. Business Model 6. Go-to-Market Strategy 7. Traction and Milestones 8. Team 9. Financial Projections 10. Closing and Call to Action]
dont forget the hockey stick figures.
Played around for 30 minutes and it's kinda underwhelming. It works and is pleasant to use but it's very simple and doesn't really do anything any slides software from 10 years ago couldn't do.
Does anyone have a good, straightforward guide on how to get the most out of Figma? Whenever I am sent a link, the experience is always a bit jarring.
Seems like a slam dunk idea for Figma
This is great. I find I'm using Figma in place of other tools more and more. I could see using Figma instead of Word / Google docs pretty soon as well.
I know very little about Figma, but if their presentation product can (one day) understand LaTeX math syntax and render it, then I’ll definitely learn it!!
A ton of people in the comments are talking about Google Slides. Does nobody use PowerPoint anymore? What advantages does Google Slides have over good old fashioned PPT?
It's free
Does this export to PowerPoint?
I use Inkscape with Sozi to create some nice slides.
I'm really happy with this, so we can move our company presentations to Figma and move out of Google Slides, specially for Product.
Great way to add new use cases for existing users! Not sure if this will bring people over from ppt but certainly many folks who would rather continue using figma don't have to leave
I’ve been making my slides in Figma for a couple of years now, and having this supported as a first-class flow will be very welcome!
Figma, allow us to do local changes even when files are read-only, so we can fix last minute stuff before exporting to svg.
Seems like Figma and Miro are converging a bit but from different directions
Combining the best of Google Slides and Apple Keynote
This does not work in Firefox really well.
iA Writer also added presentations recently. Seems like presentation software is getting popular again.
I like IA and I'm checking out their new presenter, thanks for the tip. But geeze I wish they'd have a better example in their showreel video. Who, exactly, makes, presents and is presented with these "What is design?" fluff shows with giant "inspirational" pictures accompanied a single line of text? Even Apple has to occasionally show, you know, a slide that isn't just a giant well-chosen picture.
Meanwhile, I use typesetting (Typst) to create slides. I know I should just dump it and use Google Slides but I just can't help myself, as a hacker in spirit. Take a look at one of my school project presentations, Hypnotherapist-GPT: https://typst.app/project/r-gKDYaSo4KvbEJo-LNYTV
Make ppt more fun
Wow this is really cool
Now the question is will there be offline mode that works with embedded videos so one can do a proper conference talk.
This is just another webapp, please God please can we go back to making true desktop/native apps again. We have these powerful machines that are under utilized for what they are.
While I'd agree with you 99% of the time Figma's web stack is probably one of the very few that can actually compete against native/desktop apps.
Figma has done an amazing job, I just don't want to depend on a constant connection for my software, and someone else's computer
It would be good to see some demos of what this can produce, this just looks like PPTX-light on the web, and the slide templates don't really show much.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
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Understood, thanks.
I would disagree. Figma Slides got maybe the most positive response at the keynote. Most designers I know already use Figma for slides, so to make a first party experience with speaker notes and good UX would be understandably very popular.
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For anyone has hard time watching full figma config conference keynote - I made detailed summary note for that video. Hope this can help you guys.
https://lilys.ai/digest/842857