Tired of slogging along with the same old PowerPoint presentation, boring your audience to tears, emailing gigantic attachments, managing a version control nightmare, and agonizing over presentations that are outdated the minute you send them? Time to look at PowerPoint alternatives?

This is post #1 in a series of 3 intended to give you both a checklist of features to evaluate a new presentation builder against, and to perhaps stretch your mind a bit about what is possible. In post #2 we’ll discuss 7 really smart features of PowerPoint alternatives that you should look out for, and #3 will be truly surprising features you never even thought to ask about.

Here are 7 essential features to help get you on track in your evaluation:

#1  Links

Sharing presentations with links instead of file attachments is a fundamental game-changer. Links enable you to email huge presentations with tons of images and video, easily share them on social media sites, and update them no matter if you’ve already sent them out or posted them to your website.

#2 Accessible Everywhere

Whether you’re on your work or home computer, a Mac or PC, Firefox or IE, a computer with or without PowerPoint, a plane or a train, you should always be able to work on your presentation. And just the same, your audience should be able to view it regardless of machine, browser, or location.

#3  YouTube

Your audience likely loves YouTube so shouldn’t you have the ability to easily embed YouTube videos into your presentation with a simple copy and paste of the video URL?

#4  Cool Transitions & Effects

If you stumble across PowerPoint alternatives that are bare bones creatively, just keep on moving. You gotta have a bit of sizzle in your presentation!

#5  Slide & Asset Library

You’ve got to have a place to store all your amazing new slides, images and videos other than your computer. Why not store them in the software you’re using? And because there’s a good chance the software will be online, you should be able to access all your stuff no matter where you are, or what machine you’re using.

#6  iPad

If your audience can’t play your presentation on the iPad, you’re missing out on showing off your presentation to tens of millions of people. Make sure they can see it.

#7  Collaboration

If you’re working with at least one other person, you need to be able to collaborate. This way you’re always both working on the same deck. Put an end to the nightmare of PowerPoint version control! Take it a step further, and you should both have access to all the same great images and videos housed in your slide and asset library (see #5 above), which will enable you to create better presentations, faster.

My initial list of cool features of PowerPoint alternatives blew through 20 pretty quickly. This blog series will break them into digestible categories so you can separate the essential from the nice-to-have features. But be careful, those luxury features can quickly become addictive.