PowerPoint Plugins for More Powerful Presentations
As you move into making the best possible PowerPoint decks to move your business forward, knowing which plugin to turn to can sometimes be more art than science. The tools for making better presentations are legion, but finding the right tool among the many options should not be a futile search. Whether you need to resize images instantly, share slides with team members or embed web content into your presentations, our curated lists of the best plugins are a good place to begin.
We've neatly filtered and grouped these PowerPoint add-ins based on application and whether they are free or paid, so you can easily find what you are looking for.
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For creating the most common business graphs and diagrams, Flevy Tools comes in handy. This PowerPoint chart plugin creates diagrams like Gantt Charts, Value Chains and Waterfall Charts. Flevy Tools includes general-purpose charts as well as specialized charts for particular industries. These include high tech, health sciences, aerospace, defense, automotive, manufacturing, retail and media. The plugin adds a ribbon to the far right of the PowerPoint screen, allowing for ease of access and use. Flevy Tools is available on Mac and Windows. The PowerPoint chart plugin requires Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 or later.
Oomfo is helpful for making specialized charts you are not able to get by default in PowerPoint. It offers charts like Pareto, Waterfall, Marimekko and Pyramid, all efficient elements for a corporate design, for example. Oomfo allows you to plot live charts from multiple Excel files at the same time and include them in your PowerPoint presentation. You can also connect data from cloud applications such as Salesforce, making this a good tool for business presentations. In addition, Oomfo can convert your existing charts to Oomfo charts with the click of a button.
For integrating PowerPoint and Photoshop, you will want to use the pptXTREME Photoshop Import plugin. The plugin lets you import from and export to Photoshop. Your Photoshop layers will be separate for faster, easier and more precise formatting. In addition, you can import layers from Photoshop to individual shapes in PowerPoint, automatically sized and cropped to match your original Photoshop file. When you make changes, the plugin retains linking information to enable easy updating.
The pptXTREME Import and Export plugin lets you import hundreds of images into PowerPoint in seconds. The plugin has functionality to find, import and export images from a single dialogue box in seconds. Given the amount of time you might be spending on finding images for your slides and manually pasting them into PowerPoint, the plugin can be a useful time saver. It includes the ability to export slides to bitmaps at any resolution or file format.
Circlify does just what its name implies – it lets you create stunning circular 2D and 3D illustrations, graphics and icons for your presentations. The plugin includes functionality to design diagrams and shapes to amaze your audience. Not only can you create beautiful shapes with Circlify, but you can use animation functionality to animate those same shapes in PowerPoint presentations. Professional illustrations that would have taken hours to make are now feasible to make in minutes. The plugin brings hundreds of shapes and objects you can create, along with powerful shape-editing functionality.
The Perspector plugin is one of the PowerPoint animation plugins with free 3D graphics for your PowerPoint presentations. The plugin runs in Microsoft Windows 2000, and lists support for versions of Windows up to Windows 7. It supports versions of Microsoft PowerPoint from PowerPoint 2000 to PowerPoint 2010 (32 bit only). As of version 4.2.1 of the plugin, the team behind the product has decided to withdrawn the Perspector product range from sale. However, they have made available a free version with a corresponding license for users of the plugin.
Think-Cell addresses all your visual charting needs for PowerPoint, and offers an efficient elements’ alternative. Think-Cell brings the capability of making many different types of charts that you can use in your PowerPoint presentations. It offers Waterfall, Gantt, Mekko, Arrows and Labels charts, among numerous others, ready to add to your presentations. The ability to create 40+ chart types in a few minutes means less time for you hunting down templates or fiddling with PowerPoint controls to make charts. It also brings the graphics knowledge of top consultants to your fingertips.
ShapeChef is a graphic and chart library for PowerPoint. It combines elegant design with a large number of samples to make graphing and charting in PowerPoint easy. The plugin gives you access to a growing set of high-quality graphics, charts and icons. Some of its pictographs include computer network icons, flowchart symbols, Gantt charts and illustrative stick figures, all very useful when creating a corporate design. Once installed, the plugin integrates a library pane into your PowerPoint window, allowing you to download premade graphic collections for your work.
Aploris is a PowerPoint chart plugin that allows you to make clear, insightful and simple graphs. It brings powerful charting features that you can use on Windows and Mac. Aploris supports descriptive elements including data rows, trend lines, growth arrows and average lines. Using the plugin, you can make advanced graph elements like combined stacked and clustered bars. Annotation data on your charts also allows you to include descriptive information with your figures so that your charts are crystal clear.
Pexels will appeal to all photo lovers and to those who recognize the power of good visuals in a presentation. A web-based stock photo service, Pexels brings you a wide collection of free photos you can use in your PowerPoint presentations. While this is not a plugin, it aims to collect the best free photos in one place and will be very useful for bringing your PowerPoint slides to life. Perhaps most significantly, the images you use from Pexels come with a license that gives you free personal or commercial use.
The pptXTREME Effects Library is a good tool in the hands of the professional. The plugin allows you to save complex PowerPoint animations to a pull-down menu library. This means that if you find yourself applying the same animations over and over in presentations, you now have that reuse option available with a single click. The plugin comes with three additional technologies for working with images. These are:
With pptXTREME Edit, you can save hours from your current process for designing animations or sizing images in PowerPoint. The plugin includes one-click actions and shortcuts that eliminate the need to manually rebuild complex animations. You can save your animation settings using the plugin so that you don’t have to figure every animation from scratch each time you require an animation. In addition, you can apply multiple attributes from an object in PowerPoint to any other object, making it easy to reuse work you have done already in new projects.
True to its name, Office Timeline helps you make professional-looking timelines quickly, right inside Microsoft PowerPoint. Timelines can add clarity in presentations involving project management, time-sensitive objectives or subjects involving a series of steps to be followed. Office Timeline makes them all easy to create, thanks to a simple and intuitive interface. A powerful Timeline Creator Wizard that comes with the plugin helps you get a timeline on the page in minutes.
The pptXTREME Color Picker add-on allows you to pick a color anywhere on your desktop and use it in your PowerPoint slides. The add-on is helpful when you want to set color properties like Fill, Outline, Text-color, Shadow or Background. It comes with easy access buttons for each essential tool, as well as RGB value display on the screen for pinpoint precision. In addition, the add-on enables you to apply selected colors to shapes and slides within your presentation.
PresentationPro’s vMaps plugin enables you to easily insert more than 3000 editable vector maps in PowerPoint slides and presentations. The plugin adds a new button to your PowerPoint ribbon, giving you access to the vector-drawn maps at a single click. You can edit, style or animate the maps as you desire. You can make full maps of the entire earth, or subregions like Asia, North America and the like. There are more than 250 countries available, along with more than 3,000 U.S. county maps.
Another plugin by PresentationPro, Opazity helps you apply special effects to catch your audience’s attention with visual elements. It allows you to manipulate your images and text to stand out or to call attention to specific elements. It helps you do things like blur surrounding text so that a particular sentence or phrase is highlighted, reveal backgrounds or make foregrounds stand out. The plugin combines power and functionality with an easy-to-use interface. For making your presentation communicate a bit more clearly, Opazity’s special effects are a great tool.
MagPointer is useful for adding visual highlights and special effects to make PowerPoint presentations easier to follow and thus more effective. With this plugin, you can select and enlarge specific slide objects such as images or charts. When your presentation begins, MagPointer allows you to highlight, focus or magnify any slide object on the fly. The plugin includes a laser pointer, an easy-to-use magnifier, selective screen dimming and navigation through slide elements.
Project Timeline is a free PowerPoint add-in that gives you the ability to insert timelines into PowerPoint slides with a few clicks. With this plugin, you can create tasks and milestones for a project, along with start and end dates, as well as other timeline content. Once you have finished the design, you click a button to draw the timeline in your slide. The full version allows you even more features, such as applying themes, displaying critical paths and computing end dates of milestones. The plugin comes in English and French versions.
PowerMockup is a user interface mockup plugin available for use in PowerPoint. With over 800 user interface elements, this plugin helps you create screen prototypes of mobile, web and desktop applications. The plugin uses PowerPoint shapes to create mockups right within PowerPoint. Some of the prototypes you can make are Android phone mockups, Twitter Bootstrap elements mockups and Windows desktop mockup shapes. PowerMockup adds a library pane into the PowerPoint window from which you can search and access the included wireframe shapes.
The PowerPlugs PowerSuite helps you create stunning 3D transition effects, impressive 2D and 3D charts, as well as a plethora of animations. The plugin collection aims to add instant appeal to your presentations. The individual plugins are:
PowerTOC creates summaries of your PowerPoint presentations at the click of a button. The advantage of using PowerTOC is that as your slides and presentation change, PowerTOC keeps your summary or table of contents slide in sync, automatically. You can configure the content that you want to be summarized and how your summary should be formatted. Once you pick the slides to watch, PowerTOC keeps your summary up to date, regardless of other parts of your presentation that may change.
The Podium plugin gives you hundreds of PowerPoint templates and backgrounds in one easy-to-use package. This plugin is a useful tool for instantly setting your slides apart from everyone else with a professional set of designs and carefully crafted visual elements. The plugin comes with 200 free PowerPoint templates with well-thought out layouts, colors, fonts and images. A selection of royalty-free stock photos is available in the package alongside high-quality shapes and business objects for your presentations.
STAMP is a plugin that allows you to add closed captions to audio and video files included in your presentations. This helps to make your presentation more accessible to those with hearing disabilities. You can use STAMP subtitles to translate and localize your presentation for different languages. In addition, you can import and export subtitles in the Timed Text Markup Language (TTML) files. STAMP is available for Microsoft Office 2016, 2013 and 2010.
PresentationDeck is not a plugin as such, but a suite of PowerPoint templates and infographics that save you time when designing your presentations. You have a wide selection of templates available, serving a variety of business use cases, and have to download each one separately. Categories available include technology, finance, business, abstract, nature and education. The templates you download come with a multiple-use license, meaning you can reuse them for future presentations. PresentationDeck templates come with elegant theme designs and consistent slide layout.
SlideShark is a plugin to help sales teams upload sales presentations to the cloud and control access in the field. SlideShark allows a sales team to always have its pitch deck or other critical sales presentations up to date, shortening sales cycles and improving productivity. Presentations using SlideShark are available from desktop computers or Apple iOS devices. SlideShark includes hyperlinking within presentations so you can jump to slides without leaving your presentation. The plugin supports video, so that you can easily embed .wmv files into presentations and present from your iPad.
HTML5Point converts your PowerPoint presentations into HTML5 presentations you can use on iPad, iPhone and other devices. The particular value of HTML5Point is that with just a click, you can build interactive presentations that are available on other platforms. HTML5Point maintains the quality of animations, transitions and other special effects available in your original PowerPoint presentation. The plugin can be particularly useful to educators, as it enables e-Learning content to be accessible on all devices.
ActivePresentation Designer solves the problem of quickly navigating through various slides in a presentation without losing your audience. Moving back and forth between slides can be problematic if those slides are far apart in a presentation. The plugin adds an interactive menu bar to your PowerPoint presentations, allowing you to navigate intuitively during them. In addition to its core navigation feature, the plugin bundles other functionality such as an Export Wizard and a Confidentiality System. Using the Confidentiality System, for instance, allows you to tag highly confidential slides, which the plugin prevents from being exported.
Available in the online Microsoft Office Store, Web Video Player puts the power of internet video sharing into your PowerPoint presentations, as soon as you click add. The plugin allows you to insert YouTube and Vimeo videos into your presentation slides. Once you add the plugin to your PowerPoint document, you can then insert videos by pasting in the URL. For presentations needing to showcase publicly shared videos or illustrate a point with video, this plugin presents an effective solution. Web Video Player is available for PowerPoint 2013 or later.
PresentationPro’s Advanced Contact Bar adds a shared contact menu to all your slides so that people can follow you or take other action in a Call To Action. The plugin makes it easier for people to follow up with you or reach out in response to your presentation. You can add social networking buttons with hyperlinks to your profiles on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites. When you use the plugin, you can get more likes and social media followers from sharing your slides. Everyone who views your slides will know how to get in touch with you.
QuickAnimator saves you time in setting up animations for PowerPoint presentations. Instead of repetitively setting up an animation afresh for each slide, with QuickAnimator, you can apply an animation to a group of slides. If you have a lot of animations in your presentation that you no longer necessitate, QuickAnimator helps you clear those instantly as well. You can animate slide titles for all your slides or just one slide. QuickAnimator helps you set the transitions. Transition styles include: fade, cut, wipe and blinds.
Slide Show Duo is a plugin that aims to double the impact from your PowerPoint slides by increasing the screen real estate for your presentation. Slide Show Duo enables you to show two slides at the same time. This reduces the clutter that occurs when you crowd too much text into one slide and readers are no longer able to decipher your message. Without changing how you create presentations, Slide Show Duo gives you the opportunity to double your audience engagement and presentation success.
PresentationManager scans your computer files and organizes all PowerPoint presentations in one easy-to-manage window, enabling you to choose slides from any presentation and arrange them into a new presentation in a matter of seconds. In the summary window showing your presentations, you can sort them according to the alphabet or by last modified date. The ability to search by keywords also allows you to find any presentation or slide by simply typing in your keyword or phrase.
Tick Tock Clock is a free PowerPoint add-in that inserts the current date, time and time zone into your PowerPoint presentation. Tick Tock Clock makes getting current time, correctly formatted, into your slides with a single click. The plugin works in PowerPoint 2013 or later, as well as with recent versions of Excel and Microsoft Word, and is available on Windows or Mac.
VisualBee is a plugin for designing PowerPoint presentations. The plugin automatically designs your presentations in a single click. It is capable of creating exciting and powerful showcases. VisualBee derives an effective PowerPoint presentation from your content and its unique PowerPoint templates. The plugin brings with it a template gallery of ready-made professional templates and backgrounds. You can easily edit or modify the templates yourself. In addition, VisualBee gives you exciting animations and transitions to drive home your message.
QR4Office is a QR code generator that integrates with PowerPoint and other Office documents, and generates QR code images and embeds them inside your presentation. You can customize the color, background and size of the QR document. In addition, you can set the QR error correction level according to your preferences. Providing a clean, quick and simple interface, the plugin is a convenient tool for documents that involve QR codes. You can use it with PowerPoint 2013 or later.
YawnBuster Connect is a PowerPoint plugin whose mission is to involve everyone in your presentations, and is especially helpful for classroom presentations. With YawnBuster Connect, you can capture audience responses in face-to-face as well as in virtual classrooms. The advantage to using the plugin is that students or audience do not need to install any software or procure any hardware. Having a laptop or mobile phone is good enough for your audience to be able to interact with you. This plugin allows the students to interact with the presenter simply by visiting a URL.
The vIcons PowerPoint plugin provides you vector icons to use in your PowerPoint plugins. With over 600 high quality, editable vector icons, the plugin can add a unique style to your presentations. The plugin gives you the ability to quickly search for the right icon from inside your Office ribbon. In its catalog of icons, vIcons contains multimedia icons, communication icons, technology icons and many others. To customize the icons, you can set fill color and outline styles from common web color palettes.
The ShowTime plugin enables you to turn your slideshow into a performance so you can start interacting and engaging with your participants in real time. The plugin enables members of your audience to follow your slides on their mobile phones or other devices as you present. This effectively turns your presentation into a discussion. In turn, you can track the engagement of your audience. You can see how many trainees were engaged over the course of your presentation as well as which of your slides drive the most engagement.
Now you can develop e-Learning content faster and easier in PowerPoint, thanks to the iSpring Suite. This e-Learning authoring toolkit requires no training to start, meaning you can jump right in and begin creating your lessons. The plugin turns your PowerPoint presentations into supercharged e-courses rapidly and efficiently. The courses, video lectures and assessments you create with this tool will work on any desktop, laptop or mobile platform. Interactive assessments like quizzes are among the array of functions available in the tool.
LiveWeb is a plugin that allows you to insert live web pages into a PowerPoint slide. With no coding of any kind, you can have web pages that can refresh in real time during your presentation. Through the LiveWeb Wizard, you can create a list of web sites you wish to add to your presentation. With the plugin’s Real-time Update component, your slides that contain the web browser control will automatically refresh.
Beamium is an online platform that allows you to share your presentations live on the end devices of your audience. You share your presentation via a Beamium link or ID, and your viewers can follow your presentation on their mobile phones. The platform allows your viewers to download digital handouts. Uploading your slide deck is simple, and takes just one click. Once you have a live link from Beamium or an ID, your audience uses that to connect and view the presentation.
Available for download in the Office store online, Office Mix enables you to easily create and share interactive online videos. Office Mix is good for educators, consumers and businesses who want to share videos in their presentations. The plugin takes your presentations and turns them into a video format that you can share online. As an example, the Bill Gates Foundation published a slide deck on Bill Gates’ developmental outlook for poor countries as an Office Mix interactive video.
E-Learning Brothers provides free e-learning PowerPoint templates. A free membership on the site gives you access to over 75 e-learning templates and assets that you can download for your use. The real value of the site’s offerings derives from the expertise and excellent support that E-Learning Brothers provides for members. If you are looking to create a course or a short tutorial, the site is a good place to begin, with free resources that will point you in the right way.
Empower is a content management system for PowerPoint. It aims to put every document your team uses in presentations in one place, instantly searchable, available offline and always up to date. Your slides will be available for the whole team in a unified slide library. All charts, images and other content is also available in one place through the plugin. This means you never need to email slides again, effectively making collaboration more efficient.
The Power-User add-in gives you tools to create still better PowerPoint presentations to impress clients and managers in a competitive business environment. As part of its visual content, the plugin provides more than 65 editable maps for illustrating ideas with a geographical dimension. The plugin brings you 1,000 icons in a variety of categories to illustrate your slides. In addition, the plugin provides you with a slide templates library. Instead of reinventing the wheel, you can use the plugin’s elements to quickly put together a stunning presentation.
Participoll is a plugin for those who want to poll and take responses from an audience during a presentation. The plugin aims to help presenters interact with audiences right inside PowerPoint, even in a webcast from anywhere in the world. You can run unlimited polls with no need for any apps or clickers. You are able to ask unlimited questions. The plugin uses your audience members’ internet-connected devices to enable you to run polls for audiences that are situated in different geographic locations.
The NXPowerLite Desktop software allows you to compress your PowerPoint presentation and other files like images and PDFs. If you have to regularly share presentation files, the plugin can make your shared files much smaller. The plugin attacks file bloat by eliminating excess baggage. It converts graphics into optimized versions that take up less space. When the tool is done, you are left with a smaller file that has the same look and feel as the original.
Slide Dynamic enables you to easily jump anywhere in your presentation without exiting from the running slideshow. The tool creates a pop-up menu navigation in slide show mode. You can make bookmarks of slides and be able to go back in any order. While presenting, you can mouse over or click to reveal the navigation menu. In addition, you can search PowerPoint in real time while in slideshow mode.
TeamSlide provides a PowerPoint library for your slides and visuals. With the plugin, you minimize the time you need to spend flipping through decks to find content for your presentations. TeamSlide gives you the ability to upload or download content with a single click from within PowerPoint. The types of content you can manage with the plugin include slides, charts, templates and images. When you need a common repository of slide assets for your team, TeamSlide will be a huge help.
Office Tabs brings tabbed interfaces to PowerPoint and other Microsoft Office applications. This means you can now work on multiple documents in the same window. The plugin includes powerful convenience functionality, enabling you to save all documents, close all documents or close other open documents in just one click. Furthermore, you can customize the colors of your tabs for an easy visual cue to differentiate your open documents. You can also easily move tabs and rearrange the order of tabs in your window.
For creating bold and visually-appealing mind-maps, the Mind-O-Mapperplugin is an outstanding recommendation. The plugin helps you in the idea-generation phase, providing a way to visualize the relationships your ideas form. You can get started by defining your single beginning idea. Mind-O-Mapper then presents you a red circle, which you drag away from your main topic to create a branch and add a new or related idea. Before you know it, you have more ideas on the page and a beautiful visual of your mind map.
Todo List Pro is useful for keeping to-do lists inside your PowerPoint slides. The plugin can also be used inside Excel. The real value of the plugin is that it gives you lists that remind you of action items you might want to follow up on as well as ideas that come to you in the course of working on your presentations. The list interface is well designed and easy to use. It sits on the right side of your slides, and persists between sessions. This means that the next time you open your file in PowerPoint, you’ll be able to see your remaining to-dos and continue where you left off.
For a collection of advanced PowerPoint functions available in one pack, you will want the G-Tools Advanced PowerPoint Toolbar. This toolbar plugin adds one jam-packed ribbon to your PowerPoint interface. Its list of functionality includes tools like Export to Outlook, Split Picture, Popup Creator, Magnifier and more than 20 others. The toolbar aims to give you improvements on what is available in PowerPoint as well as to make easily accessible those tools which are hidden deep in PowerPoint.
ActivePrez makes non-linear navigation possible in Microsoft PowerPoint. With this plugin, you can jump to any slide in your presentation without skipping a beat during your slideshow. An easy-to-use design interface enables you to build menus in a snap. You can jump to a slide, to a custom show or to another file entirely. In addition, you can have up to three levels of navigation. To give you a jump start, the plugin includes more than 40 free style templates.
Given how much time making a good looking slide deck can take, QuickSlide is valuable, since it does away with some of the repetitive work. QuickSlide lets you quickly assemble your slides from custom-made elements. The plugin prepares your slides to use your predefined corporate colors, as well as images and assets you have curated in advance. That means your slide decks will share a distinct look that resonates with your brand’s design values.
For a more efficient and organized PowerPoint design experience, you can turn to the Efficient Elements plugin. Efficient Elements gets you creating more professional slides in no time, improving both the visual impact of your slides and the speed with which you can pull together your PowerPoint designs. The plugin uses a mix of step-by-step Wizards that walk you through all the steps to design your deck, along with smart elements and templates that provide the base of your designs.
The INPRES PowerPoint service adds interactive functionality to your presentations. With INPRES, you can run polls, ask your audience questions, receive their feedback or share files. Your audience members use their smartphones to interact with your presentation and give you their input. As such, this plugin can turn your presentations into a real conversation, with active participation from your audience. Activities that directly involve your audience can raise engagement rates for your presentations.
With a Slide Master slide formatter to help you edit slides, pptXTREME More Editwill save you precious time preparing your slides for presentation. The plugin makes formatting and editing slides easy, especially when pulling your information from files with different formats. It includes handy editing features such as one-click alignment and element resizing. Working with gradients, images and other visuals becomes simpler, as the plugin includes functionality to handle these for you out of the box.
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