ActivePrez (formerly Active Presentation Designer)

While perfectly suited for most users' needs, Microsoft PowerPoint, as with all things in this world, can be still improved, especially in the presentation navigation department.

ActivePrez is a useful and interesting piece of software that aims to improve your PowerPoint presentations by making them a lot more interactive with the help of menu bars.

It may seem like a basic concept, but PowerPoint struggles a bit when it comes to working with large number of slides, because it lacks an efficient nonlinear method of navigation between slides.

In a few words, ActivePrez is here to improve your overall experience by providing you with a fast solution to jump to preferred slides, regardless of their number, with just a few mouse clicks.

Considering Microsft Office is already installed on your computer, the addin is smoothly integrated with PowerPoint's ribbon toolbar, more specifically, in the Insert tab. From there, you can access various number of menu styles, link paths to slides and create a form of nonlinear navigation that intertwines your slides.

By far the most powerful feature is the Menu Wizard that takes you step by step and saves you a lot of time in creating the basic structure for the interactive menus. Despite what you might initially think, ActivePrez is actually a very versatile and capable addin as it enables you to get really creative when it comes to menu bars.

You can customize elements such as fonts, sizes, colors, attributes, effects for your menu item texts, as well as height and width for your menu bars, for menu item separators and for menu show and hide buttons. The addin also enables you to link slides, custom shows, and URLs or local files to your menu bars.

As an ending note, ActivePrez is a specialized PowerPoint addin that smoothly integrates with the aforementioned Microsoft-vetted utility and builds upon its strong features to make it even more powerful.

While it may be a bit of an overkill for most users (who do not work with large presentations), it might be a lifesaver for those who often work with numerous slides and need to jump from one to another in an instant.