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Accelerated PowerPoint?
darkjohnson writes "If you're looking for an
excuse to offer your manager to approve that high end graphics card so you can
play Doom 3 at full tilt (on your
'breaks' ;) you might want to check out the Instant
Effects' technology as it
has the first product
(OfficeFX) that justifies upgrading your display hardware so you can do a POWER
POINT presentation of all things. Especially true if you're
the one stuck with the duty of making them look good. I saw this at Siggraph
and was not only impressed with the look but the number of people packed into
the booth to see it demoed, competing side by side with real
time 3D game renders and high-end effects software."
BIG DEMO - 26MB
SMALL DEMO - 13MB
It's hard for me to look at their product. Their site doesn't seem to work in Firefox.
Because purty graphics make yearly losses look so much more exciting! The Red's never been so vibrant!
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
Do the people who make Powerpoint presentations honetly think the sweeps and other effects look good? Because I've seen many presenters getting embarassed about the letter flying around the screen when they're trying to make a point.
And if you just have to use some transition effect, pick one. Do not use a different random one on each page.
Text spiraling in at a million miles per hour! Now if only I can figure out how to connect that 4,000 watt subwoofer, I can add sound effects!
My chief complaint about Powerpoint has always been that while I sit here with a computer capable of rendering Lord of the Rings-style special effects, when I do a presentation it looks like build-your-own-greeting-card software circa 1996. There's just no excuse for it. it's not that hard to make things look nice instead of like crap. That little pixelated "dissolve"? Please. As a Mac user I'm watching for Keynote to become a more mature product. Either that or I use iMovie or - heaven forfend! - nothing at all. (That's right, just talking with maybe only the aid of a whiteboard can be quite refreshing occasionally!)
Anyway, I doubt if getting a new video card is going to make PP look more tasteful. Someone in Redmond would have to get a sense of style for that to happen. I'm not holding my breath.
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Say what you want about people who rely on PowerPoint (I know I do), but the app is actually pretty fun. I'm preparing a few training sessions now and PowerPoint is one of the things staff wants to learn. I've barely delved into it, but I'm finding a lot of Flash-like features. Sure, it's for "business", but it'll probably be the funnest training class I've ever held.
I'm the kind of guy that when I make a PPT presentation, it's black text on a white background made to emphasise what I'm doing rather than what the graphics are doing. However, if you're off selling stuff, this could be 'useful'. Not truely useful, but a piece of eyecandy that some marketeer or executive would want, earning the creators money. It's like a pop-up blocker add-in for IE. None of us are going to use it, but there's still a market for it, for better or for worse.
"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is living in a state of sin." -- John von Neumann
Points of interest:
"Besides a graphics chip like the ATI Radeon, the program requires the .NET Framework (available from Windows Update) and DirectX 9. A pre-installation panel reviews your system and tells you whether you can continue setup."
"I discussed this with Don Brittain, the CEO of Instant Effects, and he said that in his view the product is 18 months ahead of the hardware cycle. This means that you need the very latest laptop to make sure you can show an OfficeFX show. But here's how it works."
-- "I'm not a religious man, but if you're up there, save me Superman..."
"You mean to tell me that you need this $700 graphics card so you can see connection error dialogs at higher resolution?!?!!? Give me a break!"
...is built on the doom3 engine. great, and I thought it was bloating the product when they bundled some version of flight simulator with excel
http://leenks.com check it
As a technical instructor, I give presentations basically 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And let me tell you, a rotating teapot isn't going to improve anyone's presentation. The best way to improve your presentation is to cut out as much as possible. Make yourself the focus of the presentation, not the clip art or whatever fancy crap you've got on the screen.
I'd highly recommend anyone out there who is looking to improve their presentations to check out "Presenting to Win", by Jerry Weissman. Excellent book on giving presentations.
The thinking not done because of the "elevator pitch" approach to business is one of the reasons so many companies are losing so much money.
AT&T is no longer trying to sell residential phone service.
Disney no longer makes animation. Instead, they want to make computers.
and so on. "There's no money in it" they whine. What they really mean is "nobody can explain in a PowerPoint presentation or an elevator pitch (30 seconds or less with no eye-glaze) how we can make hundreds of millions of dollars this quarter with no work or capital expenditure."
Everything formerly valuable is becoming a commodity while attention span is becoming the most expensive luxury in business. Nobody listens any more. Ideas and products that make hundreds of millions of dollars CANNOT BE EXPLAINED PROPERLY IN THIRTY SECONDS.
So, everyone runs from meeting to meeting, conference room to conference room frantically looking for something, ANYTHING that they can borrow to sell and get some short-term cash to the bank so the paychecks don't bounce (well, the paychecks for the half-dozen people who didn't get fired prior to the last quarterly stock-bump layoffs).
And, so business gets what they want. Accelerated PowerPoint so the elevator pitch can be 27 seconds instead of 30. Why, we're TEN PERCENT MORE EFFICIENT! LET'S FIRE SOME PEOPLE TO CELEBRATE!
It's just another icon to click. Another "efficiency token" to impress rooms full of accountants who, in the money-grab economy, are the only people who matter.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Rendering and outputting to video could have the same effect, and instead you burn your presentation to a DVD and use the DVD remote to navigate and cue your presentation. DVDs can already loop video, have basic overlay functions (that you might not even need), and can be used as a presentation medium. After the meeting you can hand out DVDs to interested clients.
.sig: Open Source, Open Mind
Seriously, i know this if off-topic and all that, but light brown links on white and a touch lighter-brown background?
Horrible, guys. Horrible.
Let me guess, does it look like Apple's Keynote?.
Just remove all the animations, gradients, and clipart and concentrate on the message.
"Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."
Though I'm sure I won't be last to reference this, Yale's professor emeritus Edward Tufte has been writing about PowerPoint for a while. This piece in Wired helps explain how the cognative processes encouraged by PP presentations are subtly (and not-so-subtly) corrupting the way we perceive data. And you can purchase his whole essay here.
Whether or not you agree with all of Tufte's work, he is among the seminal thinkers about how we disseminate information. And having sat through too many years worth of PP presentations, I think he's dead right about this. I fact, I do my presentations from notes, using nothing more than dry-erase markers and a whiteboard. It never fails to impart an order of magnitude more information than a static bullet-point presentation ever could.
Yes, it takes some getting used to, but leave it there for a week and see if you don't like it better.
Yeah, right.
If you want to make an impression, do it with your speech, do it with what you're presenting. No one cares if you can use pretty pictures, and no one with a brain will be impressed. Write your presentation well, and they just might.
http://wsulug.org
Sure, a spinning teapot isn't going to seal the deal ... but more powerful tools give an artist more options when creating a presentation to market whatever it is they're marketing. That's not to say that every slide needs 3D crap flying all over the place, but I'd argue that used appropriately and conservatively ... these new tools definitely offer a presenter a more complete toolset with which to convey their message.
Unfortunately, we'll probably suffer the same hell that Photoshop filters have yielded (i.e. overuse of the lense flare, and drop-shadow) but I believe the talented artist will use these new features to build some truly impressive presentations.
Did anyone try and download the demo on a system with XP SP2? It reports my DirectX is out of date and can't install... so I guess the installer doesn't detect 9.0c (from SP2) properly? Cool!
Joe
Where can I find the executive summary?
She loves me: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0 She loves me not: 09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688BF
Then we're all doomed
I recently found out that at my daughter's school, the use PowerPoint to call the role.
There's something deeply wrong about that, but I just can't quite put my finger on it...
Advanced users are users too!
Office already has hardware accelerated PowerPoint, as of, I think it was, Office XP. This lead to silky smooth fades and transitions.
As for OfficeFX, ATI has been giving away free copies for bloody ages: http://ati.com/buy/promotions/officefx/index.html
My chief complaint about Powerpoint has always been that while I sit here with a computer capable of rendering Lord of the Rings-style special effects, when I do a presentation it looks like build-your-own-greeting-card software circa 1996. There's just no excuse for it. it's not that hard to make things look nice instead of like crap.
What I've always wondered is why Word, having been in "development" for around a decade, still by default makes articles that look like crap compared to TeX/Latex, which has been around since 1985!
Yeah, you can say that Word makes a decent job at the typesetting if you haven't compared them much. But after reading a few articles in default Latex typesetting, an article in default Word typesetting is pure horror to your eyes. The text just pops out of an article collection, and not for its benefit.
What many people don't realize is that typesetting is not just about putting words one after another in a line. As Wikipedia says: "Typesetting involves the presentation of textual material in an aesthetic form on paper or some other media" (emphasis mine). Word simply hasn't got a clue when it comes to aesthetics.
A good example is line justification: Word (as far as I can tell) simply crams as many words on a line as possible (and most often even hyphenation isn't on, though this can arguably be blamed on the user). The extra space is put equally between the words and the last line of a paragraph is never justified. Latex, on the other hand, tries to find line breaks which look good on a whole, avoids hyphenating when not needed, adds more space after punctuation marks, and justifies the last line of the paragraph if it's almost as wide as the paragraph. Also for instance a consecutive f and i are combined into a ligature. Simply put: it looks better.
The total is a sum of many small things, that Word just doesn't even try to handle (at least by default, I doubt at all). I'm not saying that I know much about typography, but I sure can tell what looks good and what doesn't, and it sure as hell isn't rocket science.
I doubt, therefore I may be.
You are unclear on the basic concepts involved. A word processor is not a typesetting program, nor vice-versa.
While you're at it, please stop trying to open your mail with a screwdriver.
I write in my journal
Does anyone remember Office Advantage from Metacreations? It was back when Metacreations hadn't sold all of its products.
As I recall, it offered a much better engine for rendering powerpoint slides, complete with drop shadows and improved anti-aliasing (bascially the look that Metacreations was famous for in its interfaces). As well as that, it added a heap of new transitions, like pond rippling between slides (I know sounds dicky, but the ripple was done at 25fps, so it looked really nice).
That was the single best thing I could use to make Powerpoint look instantly better.
Notepad is not Word is not QuarkXPress. You can complain that Quark doesn't have a spellchecker and you can't set anything on a page in a predictable manner in word and that Notepad doesn't have any image options until the cows come home as far as I'm concerned. I use text files out of notepad like postit notes, type up papers in word and use quark to make nifty looking posters and so forth. Although all the before mentioned programs deal with text, each is very different and the three should never come together in one app.