Beautiful.ai

In all these years, Microsoft hasn’t done much to revolutionise their business presentation software. Most organisations have not opted into the costly Copilot add-on as yet, and CoPilot for PowerPoint has not gained accolades .

If we’re really honest, most of the features in PowerPoint feel more fitting for primary school teachers. Still dominating business as the presentation leader, PowerPoint has many bells and whistles yet most we recommend should be ignored.

PowerPoint remains a landscape form of word upon which we get to insert text boxes, images and annoyingly simplistic elements. Animation is painstaking. The best feature is the new AI slide design tool but this can be as erratic as Cape Town weather and if used on every slide, will result in a slide fruit salad smorgasbord. When asked do we offer courses to train people how to use PowerPoint, we respond that we can achieve this in about fifteen minutes if you’re already using MS Word. The truth is using PowerPoint isn’t the problem, designing in PowerPoint is.

Yet we know that visual media when used right, can be impactful. The odds are your organisation is expecting you to show up with a slide deck. We also know that very few of us have a natural talent for design, and even when we learn the fundamentals, this remains an onerous and uninspiring task when compiling a presentation.

We would all like better options for us lesser mortals who do not own Apple hardware and enjoy the similarly dated but better-looking KeyNote. In our search for alternatives and enhancements we shall share our findings in this series of reviews.

We bring you our no-nonsense and hopefully time saving wrap-up of Beautiful.ai. Is Beautiful.ai an alternative to PowerPoint for busy presenters?

What exactly is Beautiful.ai? We quote: “The first presentation maker with design AI.

Create professional, stunning presentations in minutes. Beautiful.ai has hundreds of smart slides built with AI-assisted design, so you can present ideas meaningfully, easily, and without putting other work on hold.” – Beautiful.ai

Our expectations were high. Let us be clear as to what we feel we need and believe you would want too as busy business presentation designers. Our minimum expectations:

– Easy to use intuitive design tool that assists non-designers to craft good looking slides

– The ability to export our designed slides to PowerPoint (stated as a feature)

– Great looking charts and graphs, preferably with some snazzy animations

– Ease of use and ease of design with AI assistance and hopefully suggestions to make the tedious work of slide design faster and smarter

– Useful customisable templates

As one of the pricier options, we were looking forward to seeing how our presentation design woes would be resolved. So how did Beautiful.ai rate?

Let’s get this over quickly. In less than half an hour of usage, we were ready to unsubscribe.

In all fairness we must insert an important disclaimer. We understand that technologies are constantly evolving and what we are seeing now may not be what we will see in a few months or years’ time. This review is a snapshot of the current version as of the date of this article.

We began by attempting to import a few slides from an existing presentation to establish if we could receive any AI design suggestions. What we got instead was simply a conversion into a cloud-based editor. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t look like Beautiful.ai will help you improve your existing presentations unless you edit them manually (which you may as well do in PowerPoint).

We then examined some sample pitch deck templates. We see these formats of content layering as rote formats that are repeatedly articulated, but to be fair, Beautiful.ai is really design software, not a strategic messaging tool.

We attempted to modify a rather impressively animated trend line graph by changing the data. Area of concern: Only 11 currencies are supported. The rest of us clearly don’t have economies that Beautiful.ai anticipated as target markets.

We asked Beautiful.ai to craft a presentation based on a popular topic. In response, we received a rather visually bland and uninteresting slide deck that didn’t contain a single image. We were hoping for more AI intelligence especially “beautiful” design intelligence at a minimum.

Despite our disappointment, we then attempted to export our edit to PowerPoint. And the show was over. Kiss those animations goodbye. The conversion needed some tidying up and we can make allowances here, but we feel there are no tangible advantages over downloading a PowerPoint template and editing it within PowerPoint.

We believe that visual media needs moving elements that a presenter should be able to trigger to guide the audience’s eye. Movement is also far more interesting than a static slide.

After examining numerous competitors who we plan to review shortly, we realise we are over ambitious expecting animations created outside of PowerPoint to convert back.

All is not lost though as in our next review we will share a truly powerful PowerPoint alternative that has offline functionality. When presenting face-to-face in different locations, the ability to plug and play without dependency upon connectivity we feel is essential as not all presentations are online (thank goodness!).

Many user reviews indicate excellent satisfaction and we agree if you’re looking for an online presentation tool and don’t own PowerPoint already, this would be advantageous.

In short, sadly we didn’t feel this design tool adds enough value to substantiate switching from PowerPoint just yet, nor did the embedded AI blow us away.

Stay tuned as we continue in our quest to uncover feasible, secure and time-saving alternatives to enhance or replace PowerPoint for time strapped professionals. Brought to you by presentation experts who, like you, would rather focus on enhancing our communications than spending hours making rectangles look good using limiting tools.