In our last post on this, we hit on the 7 “essential” features you should look for in PowerPoint alternatives. Now that we’ve got the meat and potatoes out of the way, lets look at the 7 “smart” features that an alternative to PowerPoint should boast:

#1 Analytics
Presentation analytics tell you how many views your presentation receives each day. And the insight into how much time your audience spends on each slide helps you understand which messages and creative are working, and what’s not. It’s not easy to find an alternative to PowerPoint that’s this smart!

#2 Alerts
Your sales team will love you for setting them up with presentation email alerts. This lets them know the moment a prospect opens a presentation, which slides they look at, and for how long. What more could Sales ask for?

#3 Stock Photos
Images are a critical part of presentations. So, integrations with the likes of Flickr and Fotolia make it that much easier to be awesome. Just click a button and you’re shopping for new images. Click your favorite and it appears on your slide. No uploads, no downloads, and nothing stored on your computer. Pretty slick.

#4 Security Controls
When you send out a presentation it often contains time-sensitive or confidential information such as pricing, strategic plans, or competitive information. To keep control of your information, a great alternative to PowerPoint will enable you to set a password, set a time limit during which it can be viewed, and controls that prevent recipients from sharing or downloading your slides.

#5 Inspiration Gallery
Staring at a blank slide with a deadline looming can be disheartening. But if you have access to a gallery of presentations and templates that you can “borrow” with just a click – well, creating presentations just got a whole lot more fun.

#6 Comments
Version control hell. We’ve all been there and nobody wants to go back. Rather than send out 3 versions of the same presentation for review, why not have everyone place their comments right on the slides so you can see them in one consolidated view? Presentation tools that are online can often let you do just that.

#7 Social Sharing
The best presentation in the world won’t get you the notoriety you crave unless you can get it in front of the right people. If your audience is on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn, (which I’d find it hard believe they’re not) you’ll want to be able to easily share your slides in all of these places. Further, a really smart alternative to PowerPoint will let you drop a “Tweet This” or “Like This” link on to your slides to make sure your presentation is highly shareable.