280Slides

Full Review

280 Slides is a very solid app that does what you would expect an online slide creator to do. The actual interface works very much like PowerPoint, though the feature-set is nowhere near as deep as what PowerPoint has. I'll walk through my experience in making a sample slide.
The app has a handful of built in themes to choose from, and three preset slide layouts (title, main content, and blank). It's fairly barebones, and that's a general theme of 280 Slides - it gets the job done and is extremely simple, but perhaps to a fault.
I picked a theme and made a 8 slide deck, and it's incredibly easy to do. There are no complex menus, the buttons to add text, videos, movies, and shapes all live at the top on a toolbar. For adding media, 280 Slides has a nice built in web-search tool, so I could place YouTube videos and images without having to copy and paste any embed codes or links.
Formatting and editing are consistent with the bare-bones themes. Scaling and rotating work fine, there's a long list of fonts to choose from, and you can even tweak the opacity of objects. There is no cropping, shading, border effects, tables, SmartArt, header, footer, and many other features that make PowerPoint great.
All in all, the 280 Slides experience was good, the interface is very intuitive and fast. But the experience wasn't remarkable, and certainly not innovative. The biggest comparison I can make is to Prezi, which creates an entirely different way to conceptualize presentations. In contrast, 280 Slides takes the core features of PowerPoint and introduces cloud benefits. To be fair, those cloud benefits are significant: access from anywhere, no software to download, and easy to share with anyone. And all of this comes for free, so 280 slides is still an attractive app.

The Bottom Line

Objectively, 280 slides is a powerful and highly useful app, especially given that it's free. It could certainly come in handy when budgets are tight and you just need something simple that gets the job done. Just don't expect the feature-set of PowerPoint or the unique approach that Prezi brings if you choose to use it.

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