App of the week: Haiku Deck

Welcome back to our weekly spotlight on helpful apps. We focus on a variety of products that are useful for work, personal use, or both, providing our own thoughts on the apps and what you can do with them. This week we create eye-catching presentations with Haiku Deck.

An intro to Haiku Deck
There may come a time when you want to create a quick presentation that’s appealing to look at but not complicated to put together. Enter Haiku Deck, a free app available for iOS devices. There’s also a web app that works with Chrome, Safari and Firefox.

The app features a database of more than 35 million free images and 20 font and image filter options (and when you use one of their pictures, the system automatically pulls in the correct attribution for the photographer). You can set your presentation – or “deck”, as it’s referred to in the app – to three different privacy settings – public, restricted and private. Public decks can be viewed by anyone and even show up in search engine results, while restricted decks can only be viewed by people to whom you send a link.

Our review
Haiku Deck is especially useful if you need to put together a last-minute presentation while you’re away from the office and don’t have a laptop handy. The slides are visually appealing and very easy to create. If you’re in a real rush, I highly recommend checking out the pre-built deck templates – all you have to do here is change the picture and the text.

The free version limits you to three decks at a time, but you can upgrade to a paid-for pro account to access unlimited presentations and a wider selection of customisation tools. I stuck with the free version for the purpose of this review, but I can see where a pro account would be beneficial – pro users can test out the new Haiku Deck Zuru, and artificial intelligence system that can transform PowerPoint presentations and Evernote outlines into beautiful decks. It also finds images to illustrate your ideas and chooses appropriate colours and fonts. At the end you get a pre-made deck that you can edit and share.

The verdict
I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re big fans of free software at PA Life, and this is one of the good ones. It’s easier to use than PowerPoint and frankly, I think it looks better with minimal effort too (although I know many PAs who are absolute geniuses on PowerPoint). It’s definitely worth a try.

Download Haiku Deck at haikudeck.com