Visme – A New Presentation Software I Actually Like

A few weeks ago, I got an email from a company called Visme.  They wanted to give me a premium account on their website and just asked if I could write about my experience with the platform.  I said sure!

Visme is a presentation tool that I think iss sheeker than Powerpoint or Google Slides.  They offer slides but also templates to make banners on social media and infographics.  So far, I’ve spent more time on the slides and infographic.

THINGS I REALLY DUG:

It’s a super clean user interface for starters.  Tools you need appear whenever you click on your text, object or picture.  The left side panel is intuitive with picking images, icons, text, backgrounds, music, etc.

I liked that when I searched for images, it wasn’t just a widget that did a Google search, but the images I was finding were really high-quality.  I anticipated their image library to be fairly small but I found an image for almost everything I was looking for (robots, classrooms, drones, fortune cookies).  Also, whenever you’re choosing colors for background or text, the color palette is full of these really beautiful earth tones, all of which can fit with your project’s theme.  I know in previous presentation software, I’ve had about 4-8 colors that matched the theme.  On Visme I had over 250.  The icon selection is really extensive as well.  All the icons can be changed to whatever color you want so everything feels really consistent.

My experience in the past with YouTube videos in slides has always been hit or miss.  Even when putting them in Google Slides, when you push play and then try to go to the next slide, it thinks you’re trying to pause the video and you have to refresh just to go to the next slide…it’s a hassle and you’d think it’d work out a lot better since YouTube & Slides are both Google.  YouTube videos played nicely in Visme and I didn’t have any issues with pausing or ending the video and going onto the next slide.

I didn’t have a need to create a graph when I was working on my projects but their graph tool is really simple.  For pie charts, you just drag to the percentages you want and with the bar graphs, it pulls up a mini spreadsheet that you can put data in and it pops a super clean graph out.

When it came to making an infographic, I loved that there were TONS of excellent starting templates.  I don’t even know where or how I would start if I had a blank infographic so having a lot of options to go from was super helpful.  I remember a year ago I was looking for infographic tools and there just didn’t seem to be a ton of them available online.  The ones that were seemed to be pretty complex to put together and were a bit pricey.  Was super glad to finally make my first infographic with Visme!

AREAS OF IMPROVEMENT:

Some of the things I tried to do weren’t the most intuitive.  I tried using the animation feature, which is based on how many seconds you want to wait until the animation happens, but couldn’t get it to work with a group of items.  I would highlight text, an image, and an icon and want them all to come in together.  I would click on ‘animate this object’ and set the time for 2 seconds after the slide shows up, but it wouldn’t animate.  I may have been doing something wrong and I know I could have been able to apply the animations individually to each object but that would have been a lot more time consuming so I just opted against it having animations for that given presentation.

**10/6/16 edit- Visme reached out to let me know they ran a few updates and the grouped animation feature now works!**

I wasn’t able to figure out how to resize a YouTube video that I brought into my slide.  Not a huge deal, but was surprised I couldn’t just drag the corners out.  Also wasn’t able to make the video full screen when presenting.

**10/6/16 edit – Visme reached out to let me know that they ran few updates and I was able to resize the YouTube video easily.  While you can’t put it in full-screen when presenting, being able to resize it to the size of your slide is an easy fix for that.**

A few workflow improvements that would be awesome to see are the ability to use Command-Z to undo (as opposed to clicking the undo button), as well as Command-C/V to copy and paste.  You can currently right click – duplicate to copy and paste.

FINAL IMPRESSIONS:

I’m really glad Visme reached out.  For a while, I got pretty tired of the same templates in Google Slides and don’t like that Powerpoint isn’t really web-based.  Visme pretty much solves both of those problems.  In my advisory, students will be doing presentations soon and I told them that if they wanted an alternative to Google Slides, to try making a Visme presentation.  Some of them took me up on that offer.

There’s a free version as well as a couple premium options.  You’re limited in to just creating slides in the free version (no infographics or banners) and many of the templates are unavailable.  You’re also limited to saving just three presentations under the free account.  I think to get more teachers on board, they’d have to have unlimited presentations in the free account.  There isn’t much motivation to learn a new software if you won’t really be able to use it much.  The basic premium plans start at $7/mo and you basically have unlimited access to everything on the site with that plan, but are still limited to 15 projects.

I ended up using Visme to create a presentation to my administration about the possibility of getting a drone at our school.  You can check it out HERE.

I also am participating in their ‘Visualize Me‘ presentation competition.  They’re giving anyone who participates in that competition free access to all the premium features until October 5th, which is when the competition ends.  You can see my infographic titled ‘How To Propose To Your Girlfriend’ below.  You can vote for it by sharing it on social media 🙂

**Disclosure – Visme did give me a free premium account but I did not receive any other compensation from the company for this review**