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Really depends on the audience/situation, but generally I would say don’t worry about transitions and appearance and focus instead on the flow of your presentation. To demo the features, just demo the features and let the software speak for itself. When I do a software demo I either eliminate slides entirely or do a really short slideshow (2 or 3 slides only) and then just jump into the software from there. I have done hundreds of software demos at this point and this is by far the best way I have found.
That said, to your actual questions I have done great presentations using Powerpoint but generally those are rare. I don’t think that Keynote is substantially different tbh so just pick what you have. I haveused them both and they seem much of a muchness. Googles presentation thing is kind of terrible because it just makes it really hard to keep a consistent set of fonts and sizes. I find it constantly just deciding to make text really small for no reason if I cut and paste.
I once had to do a round of multiple deep-dives into a complex model to a mathematical/quantitative audience. For that I used jupyter notebooks and reveal.js. This was great because if I had to field questions I could just jump straight to code, make changes, rerun and show the effect. It also meant showing beautiful code as well as equations just worked and didn’t require the sort of hideous messing around that say Powerpoint would.
I’ve used reveal-md often for internal talks and it’s been very effective with very little effort put into slide appearance - Just one css file to tweak and then write everything in markdown. https://github.com/webpro/reveal-md . It has a nice system for altering the slide ordering (you can go up/down as well as left/right) so it’s good for taking quick detours or going in-depth about a topic if you want to.
HedgeDoc. Which you can self-host to have all your notes online as markdown docs. Comes with collaborative editing if needed. And there's a Presentation mode with which you can markup rich slide decks.
https://hedgedoc.org
I've seen a few others mention it, but another shoutout to reveal.js[0] I can make a simple presentation in basically no time at all with markdown, or I can customize as much as I'd like, even embed a video or throw another site in an iframe. There are tons of plugins that do different things if you have a specific use case not being met.
[0]: https://revealjs.com/
