Today, I’m reviewing SlideRocket, an online presentation tool.  My review is mixed.

Let’s start with the good points.

• It’s free.  You can purchase individual or business accounts with more functionality, but the free account is fine for most uses.
• The image quality is superb.
• The user interface is fairly self-explanatory.  PowerPoint users beware.  It is nothing like PowerPoint.
• You can add text, images, flash, video, audio, charts, shapes, and tables.  You can even add some plugins.
• You can animate objects and add effects (shadow, bevel, glow, reflection, etc).
• There are several beautiful slide transitions to choose from.
• You can link to your finished presentations or embed them in your website as I have done below (more on this later).
• There’s a wealth of documentation.
• The support team is very quick to respond to help requests.  I submitted a request at 10:00 PM on Saturday, and they responded within 30 minutes!

The not-so-good points.

• There doesn’t appear to be an option to toggle audio off and on.  (For this reason, I chose to remove the audio from my sample presentation below.)
• Likewise, there is no pause button.  When crafting a presentation, you can have slides progress automatically or “on click”.  My sample presentation below includes automatic slide progression, but you cannot pause it.  This would seem to be a necessary ingredient in future revisions.
• The fullscreen toggle button is not working in my embedded presentation below.  Although SlideRocket’s support team is very fast to respond, they haven’t been able to help me resolve this issue.  Perhaps it won’t plague you…

There’s a lot to love about SlideRocket.  It’s fairly easy to create beautiful presentations for your own learning journeys.  However, the drawbacks are serious enough to keep me from wholeheartedly recommending it at this point in time.  I’m sure SlideRocket will only get better in the future.

Have you used SlideRocket?  What was your experience?