Why I Chose Gamma Over Keynote and PowerPoint

I remember once needing to give a presentation to my team. I opened Keynote, initially planning to organize my thoughts, but found myself constantly interrupted by details like font colors, spacing, and alignment. I promptly closed it and opened Notion instead. Looking at the blank page gave me an inexplicable sense of peace.

This made me wonder - why isn't there a presentation tool based on document flow? Something as simple as writing a document, where you only focus on content rather than layout. That's when I discovered Gamma.

Using a Markdown Editor

Gamma simplifies traditional presentation creation through its Markdown editor, using a more intuitive, structured editing approach that quickly organizes content while maintaining natural alignment of text and elements. This document-flow-based editing approach eliminates the need to spend significant time adjusting element positions and alignments, greatly improving efficiency.

Rich Built-in Templates

Gamma's content is divided into cards, smart layouts, and blocks. Cards are similar to slides in traditional presentations, smart layouts are like templates, and "blocks" are the smallest element units. Gamma provides rich card templates and smart layouts to handle different scenarios. You simply choose the appropriate template and fill in content without worrying about layout. Additionally, through "blocks," you can insert many elements like text, images, videos, tables, web pages, and more. It also has built-in charts, which is very convenient.

Unique Card Design

This is one of my favorite aspects of Gamma. In traditional presentation tools, each slide is a canvas of the same size and ratio. When a slide has too much content, you're forced to either cram everything in or split it into multiple slides. To make content appear seamless, you usually need to think about how to use animations for better transitions.

Gamma's cards are designed as dynamic containers, making the division of different cards (slides) based on content itself rather than container size - which is obviously more reasonable. Some content simply cannot be fully displayed in a fixed area, like long web pages.

Since displaying web pages requires scrolling to show complete content, why can't regular slides scroll to display longer content? Gamma achieves this - it allows each card (slide) to perfectly display content regardless of amount, eliminating the need to rack your brain solving problems of too much or too little content.

Impressive Presentation Features

If Gamma only had unrestricted card design, it wouldn't be enough to replace Keynote and PowerPoint. But Gamma also provides excellent presentation features:

  1. Spotlight: This is my favorite feature. By highlighting currently discussed content, it focuses audience attention on key points while blurring other content to avoid visual distraction. You can use up/down arrows to switch highlighted elements and left/right arrows to switch between cards. Even when card height exceeds screen height, the page automatically scrolls with animation transitions during up/down switching, ensuring presentation smoothness and continuity.

  2. Progress Bar: In traditional tools, such functionality might require custom design, but Gamma has a built-in progress bar that shows current card progress, letting audiences clearly know presentation progress.

  3. Animation Effects: Gamma automatically handles animations between cards and entrance animations for elements within cards, making presentations more vivid without requiring additional design.

  4. Edit While Presenting: Gamma supports editing in presentation mode, meaning you can modify content during presentation without exiting presentation mode. This is very useful when you need real-time adjustments based on audience feedback or when you need quick preview effects during creation.

Of course, Gamma has other features like speaker mode, but for more advanced features, you might still need Keynote and PowerPoint, such as using iPhone remote control for presentations.

Theme System

Gamma's theme system is brilliantly designed. It defines an entire presentation's style using only fonts, colors, logos, cards, images, and backgrounds, with very flexible modification and usage.

  1. Fonts: Gamma only supports defining font styles for headlines and body text, supporting weight and color modifications. For headlines, it also supports gradient colors, and Gamma automatically fine-tunes font colors based on background colors to ensure text readability. Font sizes can only use Gamma's built-in size standards, which is an excellent idea since we usually don't need too many font sizes - this only brings more modification and selection costs. Gamma has 7 headline font sizes and 3 body text font sizes, sufficient for normal needs.

  2. Colors: Gamma uses primary and secondary accent colors to define presentation theme colors. Primary colors are used for important elements like buttons, links, and blockquotes, while secondary colors are used for decorative elements like dividers and timelines. Gamma also adjusts these colors based on contrast and usability to ensure accessibility. When you modify these two colors, all non-text elements in the presentation including buttons, links, charts, etc., automatically adjust - very convenient.

  3. Logo: Gamma supports logo uploads to automatically place logos in the top-right corner of each card, but currently doesn't support adjusting size and position.

  4. Cards: You can define background and style for each card, choosing from built-in styles.

  5. Images: Usually in presentations, we use images that match current slide style or theme as backgrounds. Gamma supports uploading image sets for use in card layouts.

  6. Background: Refers to background color beneath cards, which can be set to solid color, gradient, or image. Usually visible in edit mode, while visibility in presentation mode is affected by card styles.

AI Enhancement

In the current era of rapid development in large language models and text-to-image models, presentation tools are naturally among the first to be empowered. Gamma supports generating presentations from notes, outlines, files, or a single prompt. All images in presentations can also be generated through AI.

However, I'm not sure what built-in language model it uses - the generated text content quality is average. I recommend using it alongside ChatGPT.

Cross-Platform Collaboration

Gamma is a web application, so cross-platform and multi-user collaboration advantages are naturally essential. Since I use it personally, I haven't deeply experienced this, but feel free to try it if interested.

Limitations

Enjoying convenience naturally means sacrificing freedom. Gamma's flexibility is relatively low, which means it can't satisfy some special or advanced needs like complex animations, custom graphics, and more comprehensive presentation modes.

Final Thoughts

If you also find yourself troubled by presentation design, experiencing decision fatigue, or lacking design experience, Gamma might be a good choice. It lets you focus on content rather than various details, focus on thinking rather than design, focus on expression rather than creation.

Because ultimately, presentations serve to assist speeches, helping audiences better understand your viewpoints rather than showcasing your design skills.