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Can Google Kill PowerPoint?
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Oct 31, 2007 06:34 PM
from the fight-it-out-with-pretty-colors dept.
from the fight-it-out-with-pretty-colors dept.
theodp writes "Far from a PowerPoint killer, Slate's Paul Boutin finds Google's online presentation tool Preso more like a PowerPoint commercial — a half-baked app that shows how powerful Microsoft's program really is. But if you have your druthers, Boutin suggests ditching both and opting for Apple's Keynote, which helped snag an Oscar for Al Gore and inspired this Dear-PPT-Letter. 'The first hurdle ... You can't use it on a plane. Google Preso only works if you've got a live, high-bandwidth Internet connection. You can save the finished product to an HTML presentation on your laptop, but you can't edit the saved version or upload it back. The Splunkers would need to finalize their presos early in the morning in a rented conference room, where both Wi-Fi and Verizon wireless cards have been known to fail. That would kill the presentation.'"
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Oh yeah (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
Wish is was available around a year ago. Had to do a group presentation for a class, divided it, and got all of the project members on Gmail so we could work on it as a Google document.
The real challenge was American laziness. Punks wouldn't work on it until their backs were against the wall, at which time the old MS Office reflexes kicked in, and we used PowerPuke.
You can lead the horse to the water, but it had better be a fire-hydrant-delivered enema if it's hydration you're after.
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Re:Oh yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Using an online app for presentations a dumb risk. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just stupid to rely on an internet connection, but also to use BETA versions for anything serious - I can attest to that. After forgetting my DVI converter for my MBP, and borrowing my professor's windows laptop to do a presentation, IE barfed on it, and I had egg on my face during the presentation. Words were cut off, text boxes jumbled, some slides didn't even show. He didn't have FF.
A fellow colleague offered me her (earlier version) MacBook, but it didn't work in Safari at all. All I got was a blank screen. She didn't have FF either.
It is a stupid idea to use BETA versions for something even remotely serious. I've learned my lessons: never rely on an internet conncetion, never use BETA software, and never assume that just because it works in Firefox, it works elsewhere.
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Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if everything works 100% of the time, it is still an unnecessary layer of vulnerability, and not just from a security perspective, but from a "I can never know for sure that the experience will be the same each time I run the app."
On my machine, I know a crap app will run poorly each and every time, and that a well-done app will most likely perform as it should each and every time.
Anytime, anywhere access with predictable performance is something that no online app developer can offer, and I'm not going to move to any of their products because of that.
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Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Interesting)
It's even worse since everyone seems to be copying a second rate product in the first place.
Powerpoint is the wrong way to do presentations that are in any way more complex than a slide show. Want to skip back? Hit the back arrow twice or remember the slide number and punch it into the keyboard. Even with dual monitors you don't get much more than the ability to see what's ahead of behind.
Proper presentation software would give you a proper click able control screen where you can click back and forth.
I find it somewhat sad that the best way to view power point presentations is actually via Software designed to run a church service [ezworship.com]
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
So what do you do if the power goes out? Your laptop runs on batteries; does the projector?
What do you do if your laptop's hard drive dies? Or your RAM slowly starts to go bad?
Hell, what if your video card does this thing my old ATI started to do -- as it overheats, slowly start having a random checkerboard effect in various onscreen elements?
You even seem to admit this yourself:
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The liklihood of power going completely out such that a projector cannot be powered are quite a bit less than an Internet going dead. Or worse just slow. Ever tried giving a presentation when the network requires say 10 secs to load a slide? That's dead time.
>What do you do if your laptop's hard drive dies? Or your RAM slowly starts to go bad?
Been there done that, have a backup pen USB device. And if that dies
Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri (Score:5, Interesting)
If I was going to do a presentation at all, the whole thing would be local and have absolutely no dependency on a network. I actually DO presentations frequently in front of small audiences (so far up to 300 people) and you always want to have the thing work no matter what. This means multiple notebooks, a couple of memory keys, maybe a copy on CD, and anything that is going to be demo that requires the network should have slides that have a canned copy (or a movie) of the demo. Otherwise you risk leaving the audience not only underwhelmed with your lack of foresight, but also not getting the full benefit of the materials you intended to show them.
Online only presentation? Not gonna do it; wouldn't be prudent...
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Offline Google applications (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't sound like this would be a barrier for much longer.
Re:Offline Google applications (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not Powerpoint.
OTOH, it's not Powerpoint, and doesn't rely on web access, and is probably 95% compatible with Powerpoint, likely 100% for the most commonly used features.
I have assembled bit of existing PP presentations into one in OO.org with only minor issues.
(Being able to simply dump the whole thing to a PDF for the dead tree version is a nice feature as well)
I have also FIXED borked PP presentations that had crashed powerpoint every time.
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Re:Offline Google applications (Score:4, Interesting)
I know with PP I need to save as
if OO.org prints the final slide as it appears I could actually have a major use for it even though we pay for Office. If I still had some of the troublesome presentations I would jsut test.
Typos == drunk, forgive me.
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Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else think all presentation software should be banned, on the basis of services to humanity?
Conclusions: we should just abandon the concept, and save zillions of hours of wasted office time every year.
(But it won't happen, because it would expose managers who suck.)
Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Insightful)
Whoever sets up the presentations for Steve Jobs, for example, tends to do a pretty good job for his keynotes.
I personally use presentation software not to present information to others, but as "cue cards" for myself.
Presentation software has its uses, although I would agree with you that most of the time, it's used very, very poorly.
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Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it.
You're right of course, and my post was meant to be humorous rather than entirely literal.
However, presentation software is like word processors, only worse: it's one of those things where businesses expect everyone to be able to use it effectively, yet never provide any training. As a consequence, those businesses get information being poorly presented and therefore lose time due to inefficiency. Good presentation style is like good graphic design and typography: the audience doesn't even notice it, they just take in the content efficiently and come away with the intended impression.
Steve Jobs is, as you noted, an excellent presenter. Most corporate people aren't, as you can tell by the number of insanely overcomplicated diagrams, extensive bullet points, clip art "jokes", and transition effects they manage to cram into what should have been a simple, concise presentation.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the very reason why I've got a couple of books from Edward Tufte [edwardtufte.com] on my shelf in my office. Beautiful Evidence, for example, is not only a very good book (sometimes a smidge dry), but is also quite pretty to flip through as a coffee table book.
I do a lot of presentations (and enjoy it actually!), and really try to
Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Insightful)
This article [blogs.com] comparing the presentation styles of Jobs and Gates is quite relevant here. (And quite entertaining.)
Most people treat their slides as a sort of scratch pad. They don't figure out what information they're going to present, then figure out what they have to say and what should go on the slides. They figure out what they're going to say by writing it on the slides. Then they go in and read the slides.
Doing really first-rate presentations is hard. The vast majority of business types who are expected to give presentations don't remotely have the graphics design or (more importantly) information design skills to do it well. Even when you have first-rate people doing it, it takes quite a lot of time. Supposedly a Steve Job keynote takes weeks to prepare, and there's probably an entire team involved.
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Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:4, Insightful)
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Keynote (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Uh, best to ban text too, just in case. Or at least text boxes. Maybe leave the non-text box, single line option for labels and things.
Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Funny)
Bullets don't kill presentations, people kill presentations...
Someone had to say it... I still don't know why it had to be me...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:4, Interesting)
I do not think so. I am doing a PhD in Multi Agent systems and usually make my presentations in Powerpoint with the Texpoint extension to add LaTex code. In my last two presentations I have used OpenOffice.org Impress with tex2png because I now use Linux for everything in my "work".
However, some of the best presentations I have seen have been done in LaTex using the Beamer class. However when I tried to use it (some time ago) I found it quite complex (even though I write all my papers and am writing my thesis in Latex...).
Presentations are a tool, as any other tool it can be used wisely or stupidly. That does not make the tool more or less useful.
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Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen some really good presentations, created by professionals, that incorporated various visual cues, OLE objects (to render some sort of object in real time), etc. I envision presentations that are somewhat interactive -- for example, embedding a 3D rendering object that allows the use of a mouse to rotate the object and zoom in, so that you can answer questions from the audience and show the 3D model in whatever way is necessary to explain some detail. Or an embedded web page, so that you don't have to stop, pull up a web browser, go to the web page, then switch back to the presentation program, and go back to full screen mode.
Really, embedded charts are a good start, but don't go far enough. We need to embed objects that can be updated in real time. Sadly, that requires the skill of a professional presentation designer, and like I said, who wants to pay for someone like that when you can just make a bunch of bullets? Seems to be the solution to everything these days: bullets.
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Re:Just kill presentation software (Score:4, Insightful)
The best presentations I have seen (and given) have pointedly not been ones which used Powerpoint, but used pure speech, speech plus whiteboard, or speech plus drawing on transparencies on an overhead projector. Powerpoint handicaps both the presenter's and audience's thought flow by conforming to a rigid structure, where the next point of discussion is always predetermined, which is completely counterproductive to the interactive learning and discussion a live presentation seeks to encourage in the first place. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of communication problems Powerpoint introduces.
Powerpoint is a bit like an F1 car in that particular respect: Give it to somebody who knows what they're doing in the particular (rare) scenario where it is appropriate, and you may see some incredible feats. Under any other circumstances it will lead to a crash and burn just trying to get off the starting line.
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niches again (Score:2)
Keynote (Score:5, Interesting)
Google's online apps are crap (except Gmail.) I don't want to have to be tethered to an internet-enabled computer all the time, much less use everything inside of a web browser. Word & Excel are great applications (well, the 'ribbon' thing kinda pisses me off) and have really set the bar for office applications. I've tried OpenOffice, NeoOffice, Pages, Omni, etc, etc, etc and I keep going back to Word and Excel. And I don't want to consider myself a Microsoft (or Apple) fanboy at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My dynamic database driven Excel sheets mail merging into Word would like to speak with you. Word and Excel are quite excellent and 2007 in particular is very friendly to use. The only problem I've encountered with it is finding where things moved to because I was already familiar with previous versions. People I've introduced it to that had no realistic prior experience found 2007 to be open and very simple despite it's extremely powerful feature set.
This same database driven Excel sheet can feed into a
Re:Keynote (Score:4, Insightful)
Office is definitely powerful, but it lacks polish. For example, I'm writing a paper and I want to make a figure that consists of four graphs. Okay, text box, stick in figures, no problem. But now I want to label them, A, B, C, D. Grab the text tool... oh, can't put text in a text box like that. You used to be able to put it in a frame, but MS decided we don't need frames anymore. Okay, I don't want my figure labels to go wandering off whenever I edit my paper, so I'll take everything out to a layout program like Omini Graffle and make the figure as one big image there. Done. Copy, paste... what? Word decides my figure should be resampled to about 20 DPI. That's not going to work. Save to a file and then insert? Nope, same thing. The only solution I could find was to save a several hundred DPI version then let Word downsample it to a reasonable level. Yuck.
I'm sure Office is just great for doing things that you absolutely can't do any other way. But for the day to day, common tasks? It always turns into a fight for some reason.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, you can use a section break. UNLESS you have a footnote. Then Word decides that your continuous section break MUST be accompanied by a page break. I don't know why. But it does.
Yes, it sounds like an unusual situation. Unfortunately it's a situation required for submission of a paper to IEEE journals. IEEE's own official solution is to use a text box. I guess they couldn't figure out a way to do it
Re:Keynote (Score:4, Interesting)
- It handles video much better. I use POV-Ray movies to illustrate the technique I'm using. Powerpoint just can't display it without hiccups.
- It has a smooth transition called "dissolve" which fades in and out the items and slides in your presentation. I find that this is the least obnoxious of all effects, and doesn't quite "shock" the audience like the effect of having a slide suddenly appear (i.e. when having no transition).
- It has sane templates, with a sensible colour scheme (i.e. no more than a few different colours, don't make it look like a circus).
- It gives me a useful "presenters display" in which I see on my laptop screen the slide as it will look like when I click, the current slide, the presentation time and my notes. This prevents me from having to see what's on the slide by turning my back to the audience.
- Animations in slides are handled much better, I can have much more of them in a slide than in Powerpoint. Editing the sequence is also quite a bit simpler. Thus, I can have a bulleted list of keywords on the left, and an appropriate supporting picture or graph appear on the right of the slide.
- It supports true transparent images, and vector graphics. I can copy, paste and scale anything from a suitable PDF for example.
But most of all, it allows you to quickly make slides a la Steve Jobs. I can advise this to anyone: aim for having your slide contain no more than one word, one image, one movie or one graph on a suitably unobnoxious background. Let bulleted lists appear one item at a time, and talk about only the item that is highlighted (the one that appeared last). And remember: the slides are not there for you. They are for the audience.
B.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
People who use Keynote often end up with tons of slides with few things on them. People using PPT often end up with few slides with tons of stuff on them.
Oh, please... (Score:4, Insightful)
The main issue w/PPT, in all seriousness, is how it teaches users to haplessly mangle modern communication, ignoring brevity, sowing wordiness, giving birth to new definitions of redundancy...nearing the point of celebrating mediocrity, just because it can.
PPT makes it soooo easy to generate content - a good thing? Not when 18 slides would do and the user gleefully churns out 32 more. "Can I borrow that ppt template you used to draft a brief for the stockholders..? I have to write up the company picnic announcement..."
MS has never introduced that concept into PPT authoring, and again, such mindless encouragement is the main issue tossed around when you hear moans from a crowd forced to sit thru all the unnecessary verbiage they knew was coming when the presenter said "Ok, let's take a quick look at the powerpoint I brought along...".
Maybe Presentations aren't for you (Score:5, Insightful)
The Point is that people shouldn't be using Powerpoint or anything like it unless they have the time beforehand to make it something usefull.
Summary (Score:5, Funny)
Strengths
- Standard
- Multiplatform
- Powerful
Weaknesses- Microsoft=Evil
- Somewhat Expensive
PresoStrengths
- Free
- Works OK
- Google=Good
Weaknesses- Sucks
- Only Online
- No Animation
,li>No Image Tools
- Can't Bet Company On It
KeynoteStrengths
- Better than PowerPoint
- Lickable
- Apple=Good
- Finer Control
- Create LOL Cats in Record Time
WeaknessesRe:Summary (Score:5, Funny)
And on reflective black glass surfaces! Ooh!
They're in ur presentation, eating ur clipartz!
I think I need a shower now. (shudder)
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Web connection to edit is a non-starter (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd LOVE some
Totally uninsightful review (Score:4, Insightful)
Moreover, suitability is all about what you're presenting. Suppose the reviewer had asked a mathematician to do a comparison of these three presentation packages on the one hand with LaTeX/PDF on the other, for the purposes of giving a mathematical talk. I can tell you from experience that Powerpoint is a joke for this purpose. (I'm not a mathematician but I do include a lot of equations in my slides. LaTeX/PDF rocks.)
Just a few months ago I watched a colleague give a powerpoint presentation and stare in horror at his projected slides because, without realizing it, he had rendered them totally unreadable by using his tablet PC to add last-minute graphics to them (supposedly using the tablet feature as it was intended). You can screw up with Powerpoint too.
This is the very beginning. The interesting thing to speculate about is what the office suite arena will look like three years from now. I'm betting that Google will, at the very least, shake things up a *lot*.
I don't get presentations... (Score:3, Insightful)
The first obvious problem is if people think they need lots of 'features' in presentation software (i.e. effects), they are 100% doomed to make a useless piece of trash. The core of the presentation if it must be done should be simple and clean, not Myspace-style crap. Some font selection and subtle bacgrounds can assist, but any intra-slide animations (text sliding in or appearing bullet-point-by-bullet-point) are killer and inter-slide animations if used generally are horrible, long, and cheesy. I could see some subtle, hypothetical sub 200 ms transitions being less jarring than simple screen replacement, but I never see such things happen.
A more critical flaw is people begin intrinsically worrying about the presentation file itself rather than being more broadly prepared. It's a fixation that leads them to the path of more or less parroting the slides, perhaps with some emphasis.
Further taxing things, is I've started to see presentation files used as the medium of choice for more general transaction. I get information files and product summaries as a powerpoint file too often. It's the worst of all worlds. On the one hand, the medium is targetted at large-font display, so content is limited, and thus they omit important information to fit the format. On the other hand, they truly cannot trim enough information, and as such end up with unpresentable crowded pages despite trimming useful information. Additionally, breaks between slides always are awkward. It's just bad.
Not to mention the effect it has on the nature of discourse. Without a presentation for the general audience, the discourse can be bidirectional and free-flowing. The presenter may have private notes that can be consulted at will, but it doesn't constrict the nature of the discourse. With a presentation, by and large people feel obligated to follow the flow dictated by the big screen, rather than engaging in more constructive methods.
For the trolls complaining about professors: (Score:3, Insightful)
A chainsaw, wielded by the wrong person, can destroy a house. Wielded by the right person, it can create a sculpture made of ice.
it's just the first version (Score:3, Interesting)
PowerPoint is Unkillable (Score:3, Insightful)
newsflash: Malaria better than Birdflu! (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the usual MS phenomenon - you make something apparently easy, so everyone does it, and everyone does it horribly.
Business letters used to be a lot better in both quality and looks when they were done by secretaries. Today, too many CEOs write them themselves, ignoring that a) their time is too expensive for that and b) they aren't the CEO because they are good at writing letters.
Some problem with most windos servers and networks - they're owned and broken because you can be hired as a "windos admin" with zero real-life experience at age 20. And many corporate networks are run by people you wouldn't trust to drive a bus.
And again, same problem with Powerpoint. Because it's so "easy", people who have no clue about how to build a good presentation are doing so. And, not surprisingly, what they build sucks. I've seen business/sales presentations done by high honchos that I would've hit any of my people over the head for.
So for 99% of the people who use powerpoint, it really doesn't matter. No matter what tool you give them, they'll create crappy presentations with it.
And the other 1% don't use powerpoint anyways.
Beamer (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3)
Most of them can barely edit a MS Word document. In any event, the essential functionality of the software is disabled when away from the internet. Which is a bad idea.
leave sales to the salesman (Score:3, Insightful)
Presentation is the art of persuasion.
It is not a line of code.
The salesman doesn't need to know HTML. He needs to know to reach his target audience.