VisualBee (Premium)

What's black and white and hardly read at all? An ugly PowerPoint presentation.

If you've ever suffered through a PowerPoint presentation crammed with text and lacking any hint of an image, you know just how important looks can be. A good-looking slide deck, filled with images that pop or make you giggle, can help capture your audience's attention and keep them tuned into your ideas. VisualBee Premium (from $9 per month; free light version available) is a plug-in for Microsoft PowerPoint that handily adds design and flair to your files. It can even insert images based on keywords it finds in your text.

Some of what VisualBee offers, namely the applied styles, is already included in PowerPoint in the Design tab. But VisualBee's artistry is grouped by theme, like Business, Finance, and Education, and it asks less of you, the user, to apply the style. Where Microsoft PowerPoint gives you too many options for colors, fonts, and effects (the combination you choose could go disastrously wrong at any turn), VisualBee simplifies the tasks by providing polished themes that already look good enough that you won't mess with them. It's quick and easy to use, and the results look clean and modern.

Benefits of a Plug-In
Because VisualBee Premium is a plug-in tool, it works directly within PowerPoint. Download and install the application, and you'll be able to access it from the PowerPoint toolbar. The program will turn up in your computer's list of applications, too, of course, and you can create a desktop shortcut to VisualBee if you like. But the simplest way to access it is from PowerPoint's own interface.

After you install VisualBee, a VisualBee tab appears on the far right of PowerPoint's toolbar. Clicking the tab reveals an entire menu for VisualBee: a slide-enhancement button, a folder of icons at your disposal, ways to share your presentations to Facebook, Twitter, and SlideShare, and more. Having all these tools easily accessible from within PowerPoint makes VisualBee worth using. It takes almost no work at all to use the tools and see them implemented on your files.

Automatic Images
One of VisualBee's signature features is that it can add images to your deck with a single click of a mouse. When you open or create a new presentation, the "enhance" button does all the work for you, applying styles, aligning your text appropriately, and scanning your text to find words that VisualBee uses for clues as to what kind of images it should add to your file.

When I first tried the plug-in, I set my expectations pretty low for the automatic image feature. I didn't have much faith that a computer program could pick out the right keywords, and then find images that not only matched the word, but matched its use in context.

I ran the software on four PowerPoint presentations from two different professors, one who teaches composition, literature, and poetry, and the other who teaches psychology. All the presentations contained a variety of both abstract and concrete words, everything from "facial symmetry" to "rhythm" to "gefilte fish."

VisualBee did slightly better than I thought it would, but not good enough that I would have used more than one or two of its suggested images. Luckily, you always have the option to generate a new image at random, or cherry-pick one from VisualBee's bank, or swap out VisualBee's image for your own. The interface is simple to navigate and use, so even customizing images doesn't take very long.

VisualBee May Save Face
VisualBee Premium isn't going to save your presentation from being a total flop?only good ideas can do that. But it may help keep your audience' attention if you have no knack whatsoever for making an attractive and well-designed presentation. Its templates are more useful than its suggested images, but the templates are better looking than what Microsoft offers out of the box. VisualBee has a free version, which is worth trying if you're interested in the product. Its only limitations are that you can't use any designs or images marked "Premium," although you can see them, giving you a clear idea if they are content you'd be willing to buy.

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