by Adam Noar

Purchasing a professional presentation template can be a genius move.

As much fun as it can be to do all the heavy lifting yourself, sometimes you just need to delegate it out to a professional.

There are all sorts of reasons to buy a template. Maybe you’re swamped at work and the thought of spending a bunch of time finding images, creating icons, and choosing a color scheme sounds like a nightmare – but you don’t want to sacrifice on quality by going with a default template from PowerPoint.

Maybe you just don’t have much of an artistic eye, but you want it to look amazing. Maybe you just want something high quality, quickly, that’s easy to customize to fit your needs.

Well, a professional presentation template will do ALL of that for you and more!

Of course, like anything, there’s a whole mix of stuff out there, from the incredible to the truly tragic. Lucky for you, we combed through the mess and sifted out only the best!

Today we’re going to go over the best powerpoint templates 2018 has to offer – lucky you.

Let’s get into it!

#1.) Space – the artsy professional

Space is modern, cool, and professionally chic powerpoint template. It strikes the perfect balance between business-y and artsy, with lots of unique layouts and room for beautiful pictures.

Space has a really beautiful take on a professional template. It feels very airy, with smart use of white space and room for full-slide sized images. It’s got some unique angles that make it more visually interesting and features modern white geometric overlays. One overlay ties the look together with a larger white rectangle whose sides overlap on the top right. This is one of those small details that goes a long way – it makes your whole presentation look more smooth and put together, while also being a nice highlighting feature.

This is one of those powerpoint templates that can be dressed up or dressed down, and that versatility makes it a good fit for a wide variety of presentations.

There’s a nice mix of different slide styles in the layout. While it is image heavy, there’s plenty of room for title slides, small text boxes, and some more detailed slides. It has some cool feature slides as well, like a timeline, schedule, and a very minimalist map, plus all the graphs and charts your heart could desire!

What stands out about this template is its ability to let the images do the talking. For a presentation where you want to hold your audience’s attention with what you’re saying but you want slides to give some visual interest and keep you on track, this is perfect. Your slides can complement what you’re saying instead of competing for attention, and it will allow you to be creative in highlighting only the most important stuff.

Finally, this one has some pretty sweet things included. We love the clean light grey look, but if you want something a little more punchy, it comes with 10 other templates with different color themes! It has tons of maps, infographics, and vector icons, which makes creating new slides a breeze. It uses free downloadable fonts, which are perfect for this design already, but unique from the default PowerPoint fonts.

Ultimately, this is an awesome powerpoint template for business presentations in 2018 and beyond.

#2.) Influencer – the home team favorite

Okay, you knew we couldn’t do a template round-up without including our own professional ppt template.

There are some incredible templates out there, so we’re in good company, but I created this template to do all the things that we talk about on this blog that are the best things to have in a presentation! No stone was left unturned in the design process, and I really think it’s got every great feature you could ever want. Let’s get into it.

It has 200 unique slides with every layout a business could need, including the introduction, team, services, devices, customer analysis, business analytics, and so many more. There is not only the option to choose between a dark or light theme, there are also three different color schemes included. Don’t like the color schemes? It’s super easy to edit the colors to match whatever theme you have in mind.

We really tried to think of everything we want in our dream template and make it available for you. Lame fonts? No more. This template has two free fonts that are made for each other. Cheesy stock images – or worse, no images at all? Taken care of.

One of the downsides to a lot of templates is that they show you the slides, and they look stunning with all these high-quality, gorgeous images, so you download the template, and…images aren’t included. You have to go find all those images yourself. Not with the Influencer! I weeded through all the garbage stock photos and picked out only the best, hi-res, free to use images for you. You can edit them however you want or swap them out if you need to.

Of course, what would a template be without over 500 editable vector icon graphics? They come in grouped themes including tech, web, weather, and social media, and they’re easy to edit right in PowerPoint, no Photoshop required.

Finally, the extra touches that really take it over the top. The table of contents is “choose your own adventure” style, where you can click on an icon and it will take you to a specific point in your presentation. No more endless clicking to get to the right place! You can skip to any section you want, and go back to the table of contents to address a new section. This is especially useful if your audience has a lot of questions, because you can take the presentation right where you need it to go.

It also has Parallax scrolling, which is a newer trend for websites but isn’t seen much in presentations. It’s a technique where the background images move down the screen more slowly than the foreground images, which creates a sense of depth as the slide transition. It looks like the background of the slide is physically scrolling! You’ve probably seen this on newer websites, but probably not on many presentation templates. You’re welcome.

This template was created with hard work, love, and did I mention hard work? I really wanted to created my dream template – I talk all the time here about what you should strive for in a presentation, and I wanted to bring that vision to life. The Influencer is that vision. With over 1,600 downloads and counting, this is one of the best templates in 2018 and beyond.

#3.) Verzus – the editorial spread

You know by now we’re a sucker for white space. It fits in with a modern, minimalist theme, and makes your presentation feel so much more clean and light – so it’s no shocker the Verzus presentation template made the list! It’s a great example of how white space can be used to its full potential.

While we do prefer presentations with more images that let the visuals do the talking, sometimes that’s not possible. For a lot of entrepreneurial presentations, you need the text to sell your business model, your team, and your pitch. Images just aren’t going to cut it! Instead of getting lazy with a super simple template filled with text, opt for Verzus – a classy, professional template with room for your upsell and for some style.

The layout features slides that are ideal for startups. It’s got cool, greyscale images that create visual interest on half the page where the other half can do the talking, it’s got a lot of options for highlighting timelines, values, and team pages.

What makes it different? This is a feature we really like when it’s done well, and it’s the magazine look. The slides of this presentation almost look like the pages of a magazine, with smaller features and short articles. Of course, you don’t want anything too lengthy in a presentation, because you’re going to lose your audience’s interest. But making it visually like an editorial spread in a magazine will anchor them, and you can get away with a bit more text without it getting boring.

Of course, it also has all the bonus features that we basically consider essentials. It has thousands of vector icons, unlimited theme colors, and easily editable elements. With over 200 unique slides, with many versions of the big ones to choose from, you’re bound to find what you need here!

#4.) Startup X – the perfect pitch template for 2018

As you might have guessed, this is a start-up business’ dream come true. The creators of this template used Forbes guide to building professional presentation slides…and built professional presentation slides from that guide. Easy peasy. So what does it have?

It has the essentials for any start-up pitch: vision, timeline, market, problems and solutions, service, revenue model, marketing, team, portfolio, competition, and investment. It also has multiple versions of each of these, so you can choose the style that suits your business.

If that was it, though, it wouldn’t have made the list.

It also has a lot of cool extras that really make it stand out. Each photo has color gradient variations you can include to punch it up and make it match your color theme. It has bonus offerings like really unique graphs you won’t have seen anywhere else, lots of map options, and all the customizable charts you could want. Finally, it has some special slides like business elements, business timeline, and marketing that have great little avatar icons that beat out Clip Art far and away (to be fair, that’s not hard to do).

In addition to all this: it has a dark feature! Personally, while we do love clean white backgrounds, there is just something about a dark slate grey we really love. It makes the colors pop, and their unique designs really shine here.

Finally, it has thousands of editable vector icons, animated and non-animated, unlimited color themes, and all graphics are easy to edit in PowerPoint (no photoshop required). It has almost 500 slides, so you’re spoiled for choice.

#5.) Motagua – the wearer-of-many-hats

Marketing professionals, SEO and social media, accounting and finance, corporate, management – all these companies and more will find a home in this template. We also love the clean, bright, and fun vibe this one gives off – the warm-toned colors and cute but simple icons and graphics make it more cheerful and less serious than some of the previous options.

This has an excellent business-forward layout that can work for a lot of different purposes. They have slides for social media, services objectives, market analysis, project schedule, support team, portfolio, you name it and they probably have it.

They also have layouts for when you want to have a large image as the background – we love this feature. The layouts are more simple and easy to read, so that they work well with image backgrounds and don’t look too busy or cluttered. Of course, they have tons of slides for diagrams, infographics, and charts.

This is also another one with a dark version! This comes in different colors as well, which all look great with the dark background.

With 606 unique slides, this one is high in choice and in quality. They have 60 different color themes, over three thousand editable vector icons, and animated and non-animated options. They even have data charts that are editable in Excel, so when you update the Excel spreadsheet, the changes automatically appear in the chart on your slide. Pretty cool!

In the end, this is a really versatile template for lots of different business needs. It’s modern and clean, not too trendy, and allows for a lot of customization.

Conclusion

A lot of these cool powerpoint templates focus on business, but these are all fairly easy to make work for you. If you love the idea of purchasing a template but don’t quite fit into these categories, don’t fret! Check out the templates anyway and see if you like them – they can be customized to work for a lot of different purposes.

Ultimately, that’s the thing we love most about templates. They’re created and designed by professionals, so you know they are high quality and will have everything you could need. At the same time, they’re so easy to customize and make your own.

Do you opt for presentation templates, or do you like to do it the old-fashioned way and make your own? Do you have a favorite 2018 template we missed? We would love to hear from you in the comments!