Tome takes on PowerPoint 👩💻
Tome is a new presentation app challenging traditional tools like PowerPoint and Google Slides. Read on for strengths, limitations, examples, and alternatives, along with suggested uses and a video demo.
Four of Tome’s best features
Embed multimedia. Most presentation decks include screenshots or links. Some allow video embeds. With Tome, you can include not just YouTube videos, but also Tweets, Airtable pages, Miro and Figma boards and more.
Change slide sizes. Most presentation apps, from PowerPoint to Google Slides, have a fixed canvas size. With Tome, each page can be a different size. You can stack multiple pictures, Tweets, or videos on a page.
Use clean-looking templates. Tome decks have a clean, organized look and feel. Pick from a handful of color themes and backgrounds so your slides match your brand.
Capitalize on AI. Give Tome a prompt or paste in text from a document and you’ll get AI-generated slides, like this pitch deck for an imaginary flying taxi company. Or use AI to redesign a slide or create an image for it.
Four ways to use Tome
Share a mini portfolio. Showcase your best work. Add videos, Tweets, links, images, or anything else. Tell a visual story of what you do best.
Start with AI. Use Tome’s AI capabilities to generate a quick draft deck. Collaborate on customizing the slides rather than starting from scratch.
Explain an idea. Use Tome’s video narration, as Reid Hoffman did with “You’re more ready than you think.” Then share a link to the presentation instead of holding a live meeting.
Mix and match content. Put a sales table above a Miro board. Place Tweets next to a diagram or a video. Unlike PowerPoint or Google Slides, a Tome slide is a page that can include as many blocks as you want.
📺 See me build a Tome deck 👇 Video demo
Caveats 😒
Text-heavy default styles. The AI-generated slide decks feature lots of small to medium-size text. You can create Tome decks with large text manually.
No Unsplash or other image libraries. Most other modern slide services like Pitch, Beautiful.ai, Gamma, and Canva let you bring in Creative Commons-licensed images through Unsplash, Pexels or other services. Tome doesn’t yet. You can add your own images or generate them with Tome’s AI.
Beta phase quirks. Tome can embed sites but that hasn’t worked well.
No mobile app yet. Works best on laptop browsers.
Limited export options. Because Tome slides can each have their own dimensions, it’s hard to translate them directly into PowerPoint, Google Slides or other presentation tools.
Examples: Four Tome slide decks
Supernormal’s Series A Fundraising Deck (raised $10M)
How-to guide on fixing a bike tire | AI-generated
Children’s story about an 🐙 octopus | AI-generated
Good alternatives 😒
For traditionalists: Pitch.com preserves the traditional rectangular slide dimensions of PowerPoint and Google Slides but adds gorgeous templates, plus image, gif and sticker libraries and helpful collaboration features. 💭
For chart and graphic-driven presenters: Beautiful.ai has terrific templates for timelines, data comparisons, matrix slides and other such visuals. It also has a unique feature I rely on: when you add something to a slide or edit it out, the slide’s content smartly reflows so you don’t have to manually redesign it. 📊
For those aiming for a simple workflow: Canva’s slide tools keep getting better. Canva can now show you a bunch of alternative looks for any slide, and its Magic Write AI feature can rewrite text anywhere in your deck. You can create your own brand guidelines and if you use Canva to design graphics, you can easily pull in materials you’ve already created. 👩🎨
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I've ignored Powerpoint since its inception. I've always been more interested in data manipulation, so I used Access and Excel. All that aside, I'll be glad to see dynamic presentations emerge from the swamp of fixed-size, text-heavy slides.