Microsoft PowerPoint is a presentation software designed to allow users to create slide-based presentations including video and images, as well as slide transitions and animations.
$139.99
Piano Activation
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Piano Composer, from Piano Software in New York, allows users to design, test, deploy, and manage audience experiences based on scenarios, rules, triggers, and conditions, all without IT. It presents out of the box loyalty and engagement solutions, and allows users to engage customer segments on the content they find most interesting and valuable - based on page attributes, metadata, or URL conditions.
The learning curve with Microsoft Powerpoint is not too steep, and most everyone can create really nice-looking presentations. The thing I like most about the new advancements in Microsoft Powerpoint comes to formatting. If you are creating a newsletter, don't get bogged down by all of the annoying formatting rules and issues you would have if creating in Publisher or Word. Microsoft Powerpoint makes it very simple. You can add text boxes and move them anywhere on the page. The templates are a nice touch, but they could use more, as most of these are outdated. I believe there are many free websites for downloading more templates.
Piano Composer is well suited to news publishers in particular currently, but in theory this tool could be used by any organisation that relies on a paywall or advertising to generate revenue. Their increasingly powerful segmentation tool would also be very useful to many companies, as you can target particular users very easily or rely on their algorithms to do it for you and learn to optimise over time. I also think that if you have a sales pipeline/funnel that you want to nurture users through, Piano Composer can help you to do that.
It’s great overall! I can think of a few improvements that would make it a 10, for example: better Smart Art graphs, automatic distribution of columns and rows in tables, and being able to more easily save templates for graphs. For example, if I could determine that a same brand name in all graphs would have a specific color, it would be great
I've never had any issues with its availability. As it is installed on my machine, it's ready when I need it, online or offline. Creating large slide decks with complex elements like video and audio doesn't affect its stability. The only limitation would be the capability of your own computer, as far as I can tell.
The performance is very strong. It loads reasonably quickly. Large presentations load relatively quickly too, given their complexity, and once loaded each slide is readily available. It's easy to scroll up and down through your slide deck and go to the slide you want. Videos, pictures and music all load on demand, controllable by clicks.
I have never had to use the actual support. Most of my questions are "how to" questions and there is a rich internet full of users sharing their tips and tricks with this application. Sometimes I find the answers on Microsoft support site but often I don't
Adobe Illustrator is an excellent software but it's not easy to use for [everyone without] having any training or previous experience in working with illustrator. Microsoft Powerpoint is very easy to use and it's fantastic as it saves time more than illustrator. Another thing is it takes small space while illustrator takes a significant amount of space in the business machine
Optimizely is a great platform for A/B testing with multiple variants and across a range of devices, browsers etc. What makes Piano Composer different is that you can add tests within your flows - specifying exactly where and why you want things to happen, whilst still building the rest of your experiences around this. The other huge benefit to Piano Composer is that it contains their Customer Segmentation engine and processing this data with their proprietary algorithms, so it is taking everything it knows about your users and including this in the segmentation process, which I think it much more powerful.
Scaling up use of Microsoft Powerpoint would be a simple case of buying further licences. The software is intuitive and therefore training demands from scaling it to more departments or more individuals would be relatively straightforward. Google Slides may be easier to share among those organisations that use Google's suite of apps, however.
