Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
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..."
...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.
I totally agree. Just a little tip that someone mentioned a while ago that I'm using until slashdot stops their excessive crack smoking... change the first part of any slashot url to one that you like the colors of.
For example, this one is of the form it.slashdot.org. But if you change just the "it" part to, say "linux" (yielding something like linux.slashdot.org) the color scheme changes to that of the linux section, but keeps the same content of the article you're reading.
AFAIK, this works for all sub-sections.
True believers seek redemption from the sin of death.
"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.
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!
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.