We often share slides online. There are several tools that handle this, but none seem to retain all of the intended experience. Why so hard?!
The viewer should be able to experience the presentation as it was intended by the author. Click and watch without any loss.
For example, many of them do not retain animations. Even if they do retain some animations, some are almost always lost. This is likely because the tools we create them with don't handle them in a consistent manner. I use a lot of subtle transitions, animations, and animated gifs in my presentations - and often these are part of the presentation's experience.
Here is a quick comparison of some of the slide sharing tools.
Notice I did not include some others that allow you to create slides in HTML. The baseline for this comparison is that I want to create my slides in a tool such as keynote, powerpoint or google slides. Those three prove to be the highest quality and easiest tools to design and create slides quickly. While tools like prezi are very cool, I prefer the more powerful tools listed above.
| Site | link | Retains Animations | Full Screen | Fonts Retained | Animated GIFs Retained | Custom Links |
| Google Slides | https://slides.google.com | Most | Yes | No | No | Yes |
| Slides.com | https://slides.com | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Speaker Deck | https://speakerdeck.com | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| Slide Share | https://www.slideshare.net | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Google Slides are very cool for sharing slides. You create them online and they can do quite a lot. I find them a notch behind PowerPoint and Keynote for some animations and transitions, so I still use Keynote and PowerPoint for creating slides. When I upload slides (powerpoint, keynote, or pdf) from those tools into Google Slides, most of the experience is retained. Often the transitions, some animations, and fonts are lost. It's worth noting that a custom link can be created using a bit.ly or other link sharing tools. I use a custom domain of jpapa.me for mine.
I also like Slides.com a lot. It allows uploading a powerpoint or pdf file, but all animations are lost. However, unlike Google Slides, the fonts are retained in slides.com.
So which do I use? Depends on whether I feel more strongly that the experience is better with the fonts or the with the animations and animated GIFs.
If I am missing a better experience, feel free to add your constructive comment.
