@ Luke Maciak:
Yes, that’s a valid concern :/ I stumbled upon Sozi, an open alternative to Prezi – it doesn’t even need Flash. Haven’t tested how easy it is yet (it’s a plugin for Inkscape, AFAICT).

I am admittedly ignorant when it comes to PPT, but I find it at least as over used and disappointing as word. I generate a monthly “report,” which is basically updating a graph and three high level data points. Everytime I would import the graph into PPT I had to adjust the size and position on each page. So eventually I just made a beamer template and a script to generate the required directory structure. Anymore I spend zero time on the layout portion of said report, I only have to analyze the data and enter the points.

While it sounds like you have other legitimate reasons for sticking with PPT, your printing worry is irrelevant. Adobe Reader, which is likely what most of your audiences uses to view PDFs, gives the option to print multiple slides per page. So from beamer you could just create two outputs from the same source – one with blank slides between for notes and one without.

@ IceBrain:

Good point on the Powerpoints. I guess it wouldn’t be that much more work to print them in two different formats. The real workload would be to convert them to non-powerpoint format and then manage the assets (pictures, animations) seeing how frequently I edit them (before each lecture usually).

Chris Wellons wrote:

It suffers from the typical problem of being incompatible with source control — you can’t automatically merge two variations of the same presentation.

Very true. This is one of the annoying things about it.

@ klimeryk:

Doesn’t Prezi lock you into a proprietary platform?

@ Sheriff Fatman:

OMG, I have killed so many kittens. :(

‘Every time you make a PowerPoint, Edward Tufte kills a kitten.’

(Source.)

Personally, I usually use Beamer or google docs depending on whether I am collaborating with other people (everybody else uses WYSIWYG, but I don’t like it). Other people use Prezi, but I flat out refuse to. With Prezi, the animations are usually overdone, and I always get seasick.

If you’re looking for ultimate eye-candy, try out Prezi. Unfortunately, it’s in Flash, but the management seems to love it, so I tend to use it for my presentations to “the big guys”. Actually, everyone seems to like those presentations, unless overdo the transitions/rotations ;)

At work I usually end up using Powerpoint because I’m collaborating with someone else, but I feel it’s just another inferior WYSIWYG product. It suffers from the typical problem of being incompatible with source control — you can’t automatically merge two variations of the same presentation. There’s also a lack of convention and good practices.

When working alone I use deck.js. Awhile back I integrated it with Jekyll (way out of date now) so that I can sometimes write slides in Markdown. It’s still far from perfect. While having JavaScript as an extension language for a presentation has been really handy, doing anything non-standard with a slide is usually a spike in effort (CSS tweaking, etc.). Sharing is an issue: I don’t want to hand someone a pile of files as my presentation. There’s a tool for exporting deck.js to PDF, but the result is poor quality — each slide is a screenshot of the page taken using PhantomJS. Plus it loses any JS fanciness.

Still looking for a great solution in this area. If my needs ever become high enough I will end up writing my own — probably Emacs-based.

Well, the only such tool I know is Reveal.js, which makes for some useless flashy eye candy, but I haven’t used it.

With regard to the PDF printing problem, what my college teachers did was to simply pre-generate two or three PDFs with different numbers of slides per page. That said, I perfectly understand if that’s too much work when publishing ppt works fine for you.