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Why I Chose Gamma Over Keynote and PowerPoint

Creating a presentation feels like starting another project every time. Can we make presentations simpler?

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, 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.

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.

Gamma's cards are designed as dynamic containers, making the division of different cards based on content itself rather than container size — which is obviously more reasonable. It allows each card to perfectly display content regardless of amount.

Impressive Presentation Features

  1. Spotlight: My favorite feature. By highlighting currently discussed content, it focuses audience attention on key points while blurring other content to avoid visual distraction.
  2. Progress Bar: 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.
  4. Edit While Presenting: Gamma supports editing in presentation mode, meaning you can modify content during presentation without exiting.

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.

  1. Fonts: Gamma supports defining font styles for headlines and body text. Font sizes use Gamma's built-in size standards — 7 headline sizes and 3 body text sizes, sufficient for normal needs.
  2. Colors: Uses primary and secondary accent colors to define presentation theme colors. Gamma adjusts these based on contrast and usability to ensure accessibility.
  3. Logo: Supports logo uploads to automatically place logos in the top-right corner of each card.
  4. Cards: You can define background and style for each card.
  5. Images: Supports uploading image sets for use in card layouts.
  6. Background: Background color beneath cards, settable to solid color, gradient, or image.

AI Enhancement

Gamma supports generating presentations from notes, outlines, files, or a single prompt. All images can also be generated through AI. However, the generated text content quality is average — I recommend using it alongside ChatGPT.

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 find yourself troubled by presentation design, Gamma might be a good choice. It lets you focus on content rather than 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.