Power Up PowerPoint with Add-ins and Templates

Not all of the goodness PowerPoint offers comes in the original box. You can choose from a plethora of free and low-cost add-ins and tools that make PowerPoint even more useful. These software tools can help you, for example, make presentations that combine your PowerPoint slides with videos, still images and audio in a paneled interface. Some can format your presentation and find images for you, and others help you browse presentations in nonlinear ways.

In short, these add-ins and templates make designing a PowerPoint presentation easier on you, and they can help you make a more dynamic presentation for your audience. To get you started, I’ve rounded up some of the best PowerPoint add-ins and templates available. Some are from Microsoft and others from third-party providers.

Essential PowerPoint Tools

Make Nonlinear Presentations with PptPlex

PptPlex is an add-in from Microsoft that lets you make and interact with your presentations in a nonlinear way. PptPlex lets you group slides into sections and then zoom in and out of the slides and scroll around from section to section in any direction. The add-in works with PowerPoint 2007 and 2010, and you can download PptPlex here. You can read more about using PptPlex in our article, How to Create PowerPoint Presentations with Pizzazz.  

Visual Bee for PowerPoint

Visual Bee PowerPoint add-in

Office Timeline 2010 PowerPoint add-in

Figure 2: Office Timeline 2010 is a handy tool for creating timelines in PowerPoint.

Office Timeline installs into PowerPoint as a tab on the ribbon, and it runs using a Wizard interface. To create a new slide with a timeline, click New and then follow the Wizard to select the type of timeline. Next enter the milestones for the timeline and set the intervals. The newly created basic timeline will be added to the presentation as a new slide, and you can then change its formatting using the options in the Office Timeline task pane.

If you need to display time-related data to people who are not familiar with complex tools such as Gantt charts, then Office Timeline can help. The results are easy to read and understand, and they match the look and feel of the new PowerPoint themes so they blend into your presentations very nicely.

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