To know Beautiful.ai is to know and love Smart Slides. Built for speed, the smart technology baked into every slide does the design thinking for you so you can do more in less time. Smart Slides are wildly popular among our users— and rightfully so— but they can also overshadow some of the other really great tools inside the product.
We have an entire catalog of functions, controls, and features that can (and should) be used in conjunction with the Smart Slides to get the most out of your deck.
7 Features in Beautiful.ai that you should be using (if you aren’t already)
As you dive into your next presentation, keep an eye out for these seven features that can help take your slides to the next level.
Elements
Using Beautiful.ai, we’ve all run into the case where a Smart Slide just didn’t get us exactly to where we wanted our slide to be. Whether it’s some extra text, a call-out or annotation, or another graphic — sometimes you need some way to customize beyond what our Smart Slides might allow. Elements let you position different types of text, shapes and graphics anywhere on a slide, which gives you flexibility to craft your message exactly the way you want.
Elements gives you an escape valve to add that extra piece of information or an additional graphic to better tell your story. But it also gives you the ability to jam too much information on a slide or make things messy and complex. It’s our hope that you’ll use Elements sparingly and try to maintain best practices of keeping your slides simple, clean and on a single message.
Slide Notes
Less is more when you’re creating a presentation slide— which means you shouldn’t include your entire train of thought on the topic. Instead, you should limit yourself to only the most important key takeaways and leave any additional context or explanations for your speech.
Slide—or speaker— notes is a great place to jot down extra information that doesn’t fit in the slide design, but is noteworthy to include in the live presentation. This can help you remember to add color to the information on the slide, without cluttering your presentation with text.
In Beautiful.ai, you can create presenter notes from your slides using AI, ensuring you're equipped with concise, powerful cues. Let our AI assistant transform your slide deck into a compelling narrative with a detailed script, seamlessly crafted to engage your audience.
Comments & Notifications
Whether you’re a marketing team adding departmental updates for an all-hands or a group of executives preparing a deck for a board meeting, collaboration is a big part of presentation design. Instead of going back and forth via email or Slack messages, you can leave comments directly on the slide to provide feedback or sign-off in real time. This helps teams move quickly, and communicate more effectively, while working on a presentation at the same time. When you add a comment and tag a collaborator, they will be notified both in the product and in email so nobody skips a beat. Utilizing comments and notifications with your team helps reduce friction and any unnecessary bottlenecks in the presentation design process.
Video Bubble
Remote work is more common than it was 5 years ago, which means there may be instances where you can’t be there to share your presentation live. Our record functionality helps bridge that inevitable gap.
With video narration, you can pre record your perfect pitch to humanize the deck or provide extra context on more complex slides. You can send a link to your presentation for your audience to view in their own time, or shake up your presentation with a mix of prerecorded and live narration.
A message from the founder? Team updates? Let your audience hear from different voices and subject experts to hold their attention and keep them engaged. Here are five ways you can incorporate this feature into your next Beautiful.ai presentation.
Slide Search
When you add a new slide to a presentation, there’s a function that allows you to search for a slide. For example, if you type “marketing survey” in the search bar it will surface suggested Smart Slide templates, pre-designed slides from our inspiration gallery that match your search query, and relevant slides in your existing Beautiful.ai presentations. The slide search lets you cherry pick from new and existing content to get exactly what you need, when you need it, without having to dig through archived files on your computer hard drive.
Slide Progress
When you’re collaborating on a big presentation project, you likely aren’t finishing the deck in one sitting. Our slide progress feature helps to keep your work moving so things don’t fall through the cracks. Users can track progress seamlessly by selecting a slide status: To Do, In Progress, On Hold, or Done.
This feature helps you stay in sync with your collaborators by receiving notifications whenever your slide status changes. You can customize your notification settings in the collaboration menu for each presentation, and manage your tasks from To Do to Done more efficiently.
Analytics
We know that measuring the success of your presentation can be as simple as tracking views— especially if you’re sending it out to a remote audience. With Beautiful.ai’s analytics feature you can see things like total views, unique viewers, total view time, completion rate, average view time per slide, and how many people shared out the link to your deck. With these metrics, you are able to monitor the effectiveness of your presentation days, weeks, and even months after you first present.
You can use analytics and user behavior insights to craft engaging presentations that capture attention on every slide. Learn more about how to give data driven presentations here.
