Create Presentations Online, for Free

PowerPoint is the application everyone loves to hate. Now it can be the application no one uses: Spresent is a free presentation tool created entirely online in Flash.

As with any web-based service, there's nothing to download, just a URL to remember. Just visit Spresent, register, and you can immediately begin creating a presentation. The interface is very much like the one in Office or OpenOffice. If you're at all familiar with the mechanics of creating slides, adding text, building charts, and importing graphics (you can even bring in photos from Flickr, and a Flickr browser is integrated into the app), you'll have no trouble getting started with the tool. A few things are different, but Spresent works well enough in helping you locate the odds and ends you aren't familiar with in its user interface.

When you're done with the presentation, Spresent lets you save it on its servers, or you can send it via email or embed it on any web page. The model is a lot like YouTube: You never receive an actual file. Everything exists online. That may be Spresent's only real failing: There's no way to export the file to your PC or edit it offline, which must frustrate the many of you who spend entire flights editing PowerPoint documents. (Don't try to deny it, you're always sitting across the aisle from me.) You can, however, print out presentations.

With similar tools like Google Docs & Spreadsheets taking off, Spresent completes the third piece of the business applications puzzle quite handily. Give it a whirl, and let me know what you think.