European alternatives to Microsoft PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is the presentation application in Microsoft 365 and the reason .pptx is the format decks are handed over in. It runs on Windows, macOS, the web, iOS and Android, and a free tier exists: PowerPoint for the web gives you editing, real-time co-authoring and the mobile apps against 5 GB of OneDrive, provided files live in OneDrive.

What a subscription buys is the desktop application and a layer of features on top of it. Morph animates an object smoothly between two slides and is Microsoft’s own answer to why modern decks move the way they do; Designer generates layout suggestions from the content as you type it; cameo places a live camera feed on a slide and formats it like any other object. Microsoft documents all three as requiring a Microsoft 365 subscription.

The lock-in is the handover, not the editor. A deck is a visual artifact passed to a colleague, a client or a conference AV desk, and it is opened in PowerPoint at the other end. That makes .pptx fidelity — fonts, master-layout inheritance, animation timing — the thing that decides whether an alternative works, and it is harder to satisfy than .docx fidelity because the failures are visible from the back of the room.