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Can Google Kill PowerPoint?
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.'"
Google is going to "fucking kill powerpoint."
Doing an important presentation that is 100% reliant on perfect internet connectivity is currently a stupid, stupid idea. It might work ok for presentations on your home turf in company meeting rooms but for remote presentations, training and sales it is a totally not yet ready for prime time idea. Someday perhaps, but not today. There are enough things that can go wrong with a presentation without using an on line app.
Wasn't Google getting ready to use its Google Gears plugin to allow offline access to its apps? That includes features like offline storage and resource loading and works cross-platform.
It doesn't sound like this would be a barrier for much longer.
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.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I just wish something would kill Powerpoint, already. It's a worthless app designed around an ineffective method to distribute information. Slide-based presentations are boring as hell and don't help viewers absorb a damn thing. It's a total waste of time. In school, the use of Powerpoint by a teacher/professor usually indicates that they're a crappy instructor.
I wish people would respect their audience's time and make an effort instead of giving half-assed lectures with Powerpoint.
...And when students/employees are given the task of making and giving PPT presentations... UGH. What, you're so lazy that you have to delegate your already-subpar work to your subordinates?
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
Presentation is pretty decent.
At this point I think Google would need a stand alone application to kill MS-powerpoint in particular directly. The two fill different niches, desktop-based applications are mor permanent and generally reliable without a connection while online tools allow the creation/distrobution of information quickly without a need to install or buy software. Very useful in an environment that restricts the installation of software that otherwise is useful for a task.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Personally I am more for the open source experience and the ease of sharing content and use the latex with the prosper package to make my presentations :-)
Since when can't people edit HTML?
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
i agree that this isn't great for showing up at a conference and giving a talk, but the majority of PPTs are given in business environments...where the google docs server appliance could sit on the local network. If you don't have network connectivity, you can't use your smartcard to log into the computer in the conference room anyways...so network availability is a moot point in many of these cases.
I have to say, and this is after using Powerpoint many times over, Keynote blows PP out of the water. It has to be one of the best applications for the Mac when it comes to real-world usefulness.
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.
-nick
why do people have to bitch about every goddamned thing?
if Preso doesn't work for you because you're away from an internet connection, then don't fucking use it. nobody's holding a gun to your head.
and what the fuck relevance is Al Gore getting an Oscar with a presentation he prepared with KeyNote?
this is less newsworthy than anything John C Dvorak has to say, which is quite an achievement.
"a half-baked app that shows how powerful Microsoft's program really is.
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...".
Nobody should use Powerpoint in the first place unless the presentation is tried and true, and the visual stimulus actually adds value to the presentation. I had so many professors in College who sucked at teaching and the fact that they used Powerpoint just made it worse. It was usually just long winded quotes straight out of the text in a font too small to read on the screen. You would have to go over the powerpoint before class or print it out just to be able to read it thus totally defeating the medium.
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.
I'll be honest; I 've never had to do a presentation with it but I could. It's looks easy and full of rich features. Anyways instead of taking sides; people should find a wat to combine the google service and Powerpoint presentation program. It's not about who made the product. It's what it/them/they(apps) can do for you which is either land a sale, drive a point home to the idiot boss, or tell an excellent story. Either way, smart people will use both if they can and compensate when the other fails.
"Paul Boutin finds Google's online presentation tool Preso more like a PowerPoint commercial [CC] -- a half-baked app"
You mean... one of google's beta applications feels... like it should still be in beta! That's astounding. If you think google isn't going to fix retardedly obvious things like "you can't work on documents without an active broadband connection" then you need to see a doctor about your apple fanboy-itis.
Once again... google's month-old beta application doesn't "kill" a commercial product that microsoft has been perfecting for 20 years? How is this at all a surprise, or *at all* indicative of what the field will look like in even one year?
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
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
WeaknessesLawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I don't usually get emails with power point attachments, but my professor sent one today, and it was really nice not to have to download it then open power point etc. This inspired me to look at that program a bit more, and for basic ppt it's quite a nice tool.
GCS/MU d- s: a--- C++ W+++ w+ M-- PS--- PE++ t+ R+ tv b+ DI++ G e- h! !y
Let's see just how many Google articles we can get from Slashdot today.
This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
I couldn't tell you the number of times I've been in conference rooms, hotel kitchens, bathrooms, behind the wall of a tradeshow booth making edits to a deck.
.ppt competition ( Keynote for Windows, pretty please ), but needing the web to edit a deck would not work in my universe.
I'd LOVE some
I've been using keynote since I had to present my masters thesis and I've never looked at powerpoint again. Powerpoint is no where near keynote when it comes to ease of making slides, features, less cluttered look that lets you do your work. powerpoint does have it's advantage at being pretty much ubiquitous. But, I've fund keynotes import-export feature quite adequate. Oh and you can export slides to pdf, flash or quicktime as well.
I don't think the point of it is for professional/important presentations. Throughout high school I would create my presentation "visuals" as websites. They weren't THAT important, and simple HTML with some images did the job perfectly. (I have never created a presentation with powerpoint, and I'm about halfway through college). The last time I used any type of presentation software was in middle school for my computer class... (I think it was called Hyper Studio or something).
Anyone with half a brain will never use an online presentation tool for anything important, unless you're in a very reliable place that you trust (your office, for example... I would trust the office of my part-time job enough to use an online presentation tool... most of my presentations would involve the internet anyway (I'm a web developer there)). Something like this could be useful if you don't want to carry around your presentations on a CD or flash disc... and if you aren't going to show them through your laptop... also useful if the presentation computer doesn't have the software that you need.
This was a review for someone who doesn't read slashdot. There wasn't one subtle point. It's well known that google docs require being online and it's also well-known that google is working to change this. Anyone who has spent five minutes examining the capabilities of any of the Google apps knows they fall far short of Microsoft's software. The "power-point killer" designation strikes me as idiotic for a 1.0 version of a new class of software (browser-based presentation creation).
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*.
google provide us online apps and service but if the net is not so good and even there is no net, we couldn't enjoy it's service. i have been waiting for it's offline app and service for a long time and wish it will release them soon
That's news to me... Where's the Impress comparison?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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.
Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine -- Robert C. Gallagher
That's where the Google Gears technology is supposed to step in and let you bring your content offline. While not yet ready for prime time, I wouldn't be surprised to see it integrated with all the Google Docs applications in the next 6 months.
I wouldn't even trust the local connection at my office (and this is a campus of 5,000 people). Too many times in the past the proxy server array has come to a halt or even - get this - some jacknut on a backhoe cuts all of the fiber into the complex. Yep - multiple providers giving us access to "the cloud", but the bundles of fiber still come in through one entry point and it has been cut in the past.
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...
What you really learned is even more fundamental - it's not done till it's tested. Keep that in mind and you'll go wrong very infrequently.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
PowerPoint is friggin' annoying. You have to learn it in school nowadays even. The so-called business world should really get over PowerPoint! I don't think seeing an ametuerish slide-show would make me want to go with someone's proposal.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
After being bombarded for the past decade with seemingly endless presentations, I'm certain that overall it has brought down the quality of presentations and discussions.
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My favorite presentation software was Aldus/Adobe Persuasion. Easy to use, flexible, never got in the way, and I was always able to get what I wanted out of it.
Powerpoint still isn't as good, and Persuasion was killed off 10 years ago.
Please, Adobe, bring it back, OK?
jh
This whole article is a troll. It's an ad for an Apple product that likely requires Apple hardware. It's a waste for 95% of the world who doesn't use Apple, and isn't likely to adopt one just to replace PowerPoint -- which is hardly a killer app.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I just recently discovered Opera Show... http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/ wish this would have taken off. It's pretty cool.
I'm sure Google is more interested in killing Facebook than they are PowerPoint.
Most people don't even go out and buy PowerPoint: they generally get MS Office, and it's bundled with that. So once again, we see another company making a huge war over something which doesn't matter. Like the browser war, or the document format war, or all these other Pyrrhic battles FOSSies keep waging.
At least read the summary. You can present from a copy stored on your computer.
..as well. The one argument I've heard against it is that it can't do animations, but honestly, I can't figure out how to add animations to powerpoint 2007 documents either, however that may have to do with the animations I was trying to import [made with Maple]. With that argument gone, Beamer has better support for mathematical formula, makes you organise your document correctly, and looks a lot cleaner, IMO.
We at slashdot are scientists, specialists and kernel hackers. Your FUD will be found out.
Impress serves my needs fully. It also has the added benefit of not requiring an internet connection.
Sorry Google, I love ya, but I think your office products are underpowered and a bit ill conceived. GMail excluded.
OSGGFG - Open Source Gamers Guide to Free Games
While I know it's all the rage to imagine everything from Office to Photoshop as a web app, I simply don't want to rely on having an internet connection for anything that doesn't inherently require it (browsing the web, using ftp, ssh or email, etc). Widespread access to the internet is not universal access to the internet, and connection quality varies so greatly, that I don't want to have my productivity beholden to the whims of the local network (if there even is one) that I happen to be using, and deal with the fact the processing power of my machine has been rendered irrelevant thanks to someone downloading 500 simultaneous HD hentai torrents.
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.
You guys bitching about the presentation software dont understand big picture -- Presentations (that include a powerpoint-like slideshow) are a means to COMMUNICATE an idea or information in general. If used properly these can work to your advantage (remember 1picture==1000 words!) .. imagine trying to explain PageRank to a non-mathematical audience without a network diagram.
Further, IMO, experienced listeners (in the given domain) generally dont have problem in filtering out the "bells and whistles" from the actual CONTENT.
So stop whining, go to your mothers basements and write your kernel code.
That being said, I absolutely LOATHE PowerPoint for this purpose. There are incredibly annoying bugs related to OLE (Object Link Embedding, e.g. pasting in a graph you've created in Excel) that have been there for several versions (i.e. YEARS, probably going on 10 by now).
Then they forced the whole "smart paste" thing on users in the 2003 version. I don't know if they fixed that in the latest version, but it's IDIOTIC. I'm sure it helps some people a lot for certain things they do, but some aspects of how it behaves are just plain dumb and won't help anybody. Sometimes I think the Office people make these changes in order to justify their existence, but in any case, if they're going to introduce a major functionality change that purports to be an improvement, fine- it probably is genuinely helpful for many, but don't leave zero recourse for the rest of us.
Which is why I spent hundreds of dollars on 2 copies of the newest Office and haven't even installed it- I'm not willing to deal with the #%&* ribbon, and so when I get around to it, I'll find a 3rd party application that is solid that will add back the "classic" menus and buttons. I'm all for progress, but customizability is too important if you actually know what you're doing in the software, and this is where they went wrong with the ribbon. For the average office worker who wouldn't have a clue how to customize it, it's probably better in the long run.
But more importantly, just FIX THE $^#! OLE THING!!! Microsoft should be sincerely embarrassed that this problem still exists (unless by some miracle they've fixed this in 2007 and the fix is compatible with the pre-2007 file structure).
I'll quit ranting now, but seriously, I love Excel- it's not perfect, but the level of power, flexibility and programmability mean that I can get it to do almost anything I can imagine. Word has almost always been more than adequate for anything I've ever wanted to do. But PowerPoint just plain sucks. I long for an alternative, but given the market share MS has with PowerPoint I'm afraid this is a pipe dream.
Presentation is the art of persuasion.
It is not a line of code.
The salesman doesn't need to know HTML. He needs to know to reach his target audience.
and whatever it is that might be stopping you will you away faster than you can say Firefox 3.0
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
I have a 7 mbps* mobile internet connection that my boss pays - at 100$/month - for my laptop.
I use online tools very heavily, and I feel I can rely on it. The offices have two lines - copper and wimax - and at home, until recently, had two lines too, copper and "building-installed" internet. I don't really feel unsafe...
*: Allright, it isn't 7 mbps yet. But within a few weeks I go from 3 to 7 mbps...
Your post isn't wordy enough. If you make the font smaller, you can fit in more text.
Also, could you make the post fold into view on the side of a cube?
Thanks.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
but it will take a while. I think web based apps are not yet fully ready for prime time. you not only have to make sure your apps are stable, you're also adding your internet connection as a factor to the performance and stability.
I really don't see any web-based application beating stand alone programs. Number 1, although high speed internet is common, some places only have Dial-Up lines and AT&T and other cell brands Wi-Fi cards are expensive and harder to get working then a stand alone connection on OSes other then Windows. Number 2, its harder to find Open Source/Buyable web programs, for example, if a company wanted to use Google's product, they would have to 1. Trust Google's website not to be cracked 2. Trust that the service will be available and 3. That their internet won't fail. With an open source edition the company can download it, rebrand it and deploy it or with a proprietary solution they can pay an outrageous sum of money and pay someone to rebrand it and deploy it. So, that just leaves the average home user, taking out the Open Source fanatic, the companies and people with slow internet, and some home users run a computer with office '97 on a Windows 98 computer because its cheaper. So no, despite all this Web-2.0 is going to kill *insert application here* it just isn't going to happen.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Ok, maybe Google's making this double entendre on purpose?
Preso in Spanish means prisoner. Is this some kind of subliminal message of what our lives are going to become if we use Google's services?
Or maybe they are just having fun of us, poor bastards, of what we are already to them?
Use Google Prisoner! (r)
You keep our freebies, we keep your freedom! (tm)
Or maybe they should use "Adicto" (addict):
Google Adicto! (r)
Once you taste us, you can't leave us! (tm)
I think that they could put a dent in Microsoft Office if they made the version of StarOffice that they're distributing in the Google Pack work more the way that MS Office does with SharePoint: They now have a very good office software package that they're distributing and they have made it very simple to install and update by making it part of Google Pack. If they tied it into the Web so that you could save directly to your document collection that is part of your Google account, and make it queue the save when you're offline, then they would have the best of both worlds (Google Docs-like Web-based collaboration and powerful PC-resident office software).
You may not remember this, but back in the days before wides-spread computer projectors, professors actually used overhead projectors. They treat powerpoint the same way that they treat overhead slides. In fact, some professors *still* use overhead projectors. Even more surprising, some professors even use, get this, BOTH powerpoint AND overhead projectors! It's not the tool that's inherently bad, it's how the tool is used.
A chainsaw, wielded by the wrong person, can destroy a house. Wielded by the right person, it can create a sculpture made of ice.
There are some things like incorrect PowerPoint versions, forgotten files, mysteriously appearing pornography, corrupt PowerPoint files, PowerPoint unavailable, etc, that would actually be better if there was a piece of online presentation software.
Online applications are in their infancy, but it's definitely a worthwhile area to be exploring. I think it'll take a change in JavaScript or some kind of better online scripting platform before it becomes a serious contender, and that'll always be stifled while IE holds a large share, but definitely worth the trouble.
I think (or would like to think) uncertainty about whether or not you'll remain online and have a stable connection will become a thing of the past.
On using Keynote: I've never used Keynote, but I do know that PowerPoint 2007 is a big step ahead of PowerPoint 2003 for easily creating very attractive presentations. No more blue screens with that weird comet thing at the top, no more weird and irrelevant little stick figure clip art. The best new thing in PowerPoint is SmartArt, which can make bullet points so much clearer if not over-used. Also Excel's tables and charts now look much better by default, which makes PowerPoint slides also look much better.
Keynote presentations also look good, I'm just pointing out that there's not that much between them in terms of style and flash as there used to be. Also if you're into XML and (relatively) open standards, Office 2007 has iWork covered there.
Choice is good, competition is good, summaries that use the word "kill " usually aren't good.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
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
For those whoever worked with Lotus Freelance Graphics, it is still a better product then PPT. You could create your own templates, your own layouts, adjust colors easily on the fly. Everything you ever wanted in PPT but just much more flexible. That said, PPT rules the world. Unfortunately its not very good a delivering powerful multi-dimensional information.
For a good article on PowerPoint and its lack of information density, check out Edward Tufte's discussions on the subject http://www.edwardtufte.com/. PowerPoint while not evil itself is evil in its execution mainly due to its inability to fit more then a few information elements on the page.
viva la hypercard.
Presentation software powerful enough that several games (including the original myst) used it as their engine. *that's* what I want to use for presentations. Way niftier than anything currently on the market.
So how do I install this Ubuntu-thoingy into my Vista again?
I guess I fall into the dumb category described above. I did use Google docs for a presentation at a conference. A few points in my defense however. You typically check out the machinery ..before.. you give the presentation. Also, if you save the presentation (unzipped) to a pen drive (as I did) the presentation works fine disconnected. You can have a backup plan.
I think the original article was building a straw man. Neither Google nor anyone using the software for a few minutes would confuse it with a "Powerpoint Killer". If you are in marketing don't even look at it. But if I am trying convey information, then I prefer simple themes. There are some features that are compelling. My collaborator on the presentation lived 6 time zones away. Because of Google Docs there was never a problem for either one of us determining the state of the presentation at any time before a "drop-dead" date. The publishing, sharing and chat facilities can probably be used to good effect in different situations. That being said, there are things that would be appreciated for even information-oriented presentations, like primitive drawing capabilities.
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.
That sounds like exactly why you can export your presentation to plain HTML. That's just common sense.
Sure, if you tried to run the presentation straight from Google's web servers, you could be in trouble. If you tried to show your Powerpoint file straight from an Exchange server you could be in trouble, too.
That's the analogy to use. The old way was, say, Outlook for collaboration and Powerpoint for presentation. The new way is Google for collaboration and HTML on your hard disk for presentation. An online presentation-specific web app is better for this kind of collaboration than email, and I think a set of HTML files is better than relying on Powerpoint. I feel safer with my data in an open text-based format which just happens to have reader apps on every machine in the world.
Of course, if you don't need the collaboration part of Google's web app, just use S5.
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:
I realize that, in many places, you're going to need an offline version. That's in TFS -- while you can't edit it, you can download a copy to play. While you may have to make last-minute corrections, you really shouldn't be in that situation anyway -- and let's look at TFS:
Keep in mind, you can always save one copy when you think you're done, then, if you get a chance to make last-minute changes, you can download a new version. If not, you still have the old one.
This actually sounds a lot like how I've seen many people do PowerPoint -- they'll always have some old version burned on a CD somewhere, or saved on a flash drive, just in case they have to borrow a computer.
I'll acknowledge that most Internet is less reliable than a given hard drive, but I think it's gotten to where it's reliable enough. After all, if you wanted the best possible reliability, you'd use a dedicated device with a video out, a couple USB ports, and some flash, not a full computer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
First of all, you can already download presentations so that you can show them off-line. With Google Gears, I expect you will be able to work on them off-line ("on a plane") as well in the future. And it's just the first version; give it 6-12 months, and you'll probably be able to draw and animate as well.
Why not break Microsoft's and Google's chains and stick to an open format like S5?
Right. Making a presentation in a web browser is a supremely bad idea.
So how is that fundamentally different than doing word processing or spreadsheets or anything else except surfing the web in a browser. It's not. It all sucks in oh so many ways. So many ways.
Maybe someone can explain to me all the excitement about moving everything inside a browser. The only advantage I can see is that it makes things OS-independent. But that is one high price to pay for a sucky experience. And whose to say that Microsoft or somebody else won't exploit users' ignorance and make a monopoly of _that_.
Amen Brother. I still carry foils with me. Why? Because all too
often, the damn projector fails, and you have to go back to viewgraphs.
I love technology, but I also believe in concrete backups.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
You are correct, PowerPoint 2007 is immensely improved over 2003 or earlier versions. I personally think that it makes the case for adoption of Office 2007 on its strength. I have used Keynote (the last version) extensively. It is good, but lacking in some features and functionality. Perhaps the version I received with iWork08 will be closer.
Regardless, I work in a windows world (lone mac user in my company) so I must use Office. Office 2004 on the mac is OK, but the non-native intel binary drives me to distraction, and there are enough peculiarities with Powerpoint2004 to drive one to drink. So that means Office 2007 under VMware Fusion. Works great.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
We want the best possible reliability within limits. This program provides the same (or less) functionality as existing software, with the additional vulnerability of the internet. While you may think it's "reliable enough", my own experience tells me that internet connections can and will go out [b]far[/b] more often than RAM spontaneously going bad or overheating video cards. That's a straw man argument.
Heh, oops. Too much forum posting for me. Replace those []s with s.
The major argument here seems to be that online access is unreliable... That may well be the case, but you people DO realize you can save the presentation in HTML format to your computer - right???
True, Google's "Presentation" isn't anywhere close to PowerPoint; in fact, it doesn't need be. It's a free tool that promotes collaboration and offers some continuity with Google's online 'office' tools. I'm betting 'Presentation' will be a sweet piece of software in several years when online apps hit the mainstream, but for now, its just meant to be a basic tool for basic presentations... basically.
The Internet software model may never be appropriate for a critical environment, but I can see these tools being useful for groups, companies, schools and individuals in the coming years. It's just going to take some polishing.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
The only thing that can kill PowerPoint is real speaking skill. Unfortunately, being a good enough presenter that you can succeed without visual aids is beyond the reach for most of us. Not to mention, most of us really don't have anything that interesting to talk about.
-- $G
...when I am working on a presentation. Because that gives me time to read Slashdot in the meantime.
Really, presentation software is a scourge, so what does it really matter which one is better?
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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I would buy and use Keynote if it could open/save my presentation as an ODF file. Keynote is an impressive tool, but it does not accommodate my work pieces.
PowerPoint 2007 is much better than 2003, but the equation support is still crap, so I still use LaTeX (like many others in the economics department at my university). If the new equation support in Word 2007 is added to PowerPoint in the next version, it might be enough to convince me to switch to PowerPoint for good (I sometimes use it for presentations without equations). If Microsoft's new equation editor was 100% compatible with LaTeX syntax, instead of 90% or so (Leslie Lamport has been at Microsoft for years now, so there's no excuse for not going to 100% if they want to), it would be even more compelling. Even so, the differences are small enough to be only a minor annoyance to those of us accustomed to LaTeX.
Really, are you willing to stake your presentation on it?
I actually do give presentations and if things can go wrong they will. Thus I would never trust an online connection. ESPECIALLY now with all conferences having WiFi and attendees having notebooks the Internet comes to a crawl...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Not Wifi, cell based. Plus I don't go to conferences... And I know, always have a backup plan handy. But I never need it, except of course in those few instances where I don't have one...
> So what do you do if the power goes out? Your laptop runs on batteries; does the projector?
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 have backup materials on a second drive.
If my computer goes dead the conference ALWAYS, and I mean ALWAYS has a second computer that you can use on a temporary basis. And if the computer dies you buy another computer. I have had a computer die and I went to a super store and bought a new one. The conference was nice in that they drove and helped me get everything I needed. Some speakers even carry around two notebooks.
>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?
If it is a slow dying of the device then you don't take the device. I am not kidding here. If my notebook shows any signs of flakiness it's gone! I don't ever take it, and buy a new notebook.
>I'll acknowledge that most Internet is less reliable than a given hard drive, but I think it's gotten to where it's reliable enough. After all, if you wanted the best possible reliability, you'd use a dedicated device with a video out, a couple USB ports, and some flash, not a full computer.
No the Internet at conferences and places is not reliable! It is flaky, and what is even WORSE is that it is often slow... When you are giving a talk in a room of people many will be using their notebooks and at that time the network is often the slowest in the room where you are giving the talk.
This reliablity problem does not need to be. Conferences could fork over more money for more bandwidth and conference halls can charge less for Internet access. Internet access costs are outrageous! And the thing is that the conference must use the facilities of the conference hall. They cannot bring in their own pipe, or use their own external Wireless. Part of this problem is because these days everybody carries notebooks with WiFi. As a speaker it is actually more reliable (slightly) to use a cellular network.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
My experience with PowerPoint 2007 and Keynote
Think about it, Churchill, FDR and Hitler mesmerized whole nations by simply talking alone, without any other fancy aids. Ross Perot had just a couple of printed pie charts and elected Clinton in 1992.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I have a less powerful computer than either a Mac Mini or the AMD machine you used, and I don't experience those problems. It might be worth taking the PC to your local tech center before splashing out on a brand new Mac
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Jobs, of course, doesn't use PowerPoint, but Apple's own Keynote. I've switched from PowerPoint to Keynote a few years ago, and I think my presentations have gotten a lot better. I'm not entirely sure why; I think Keynote kind of encourages you to use large type (thus you have less space for filling up pages with bullet points) and images. It's also fast and easy to create lots of slides without missing what's going on, which further encourages people to create more slides, but put less into each slide, which automatically turns slides into a tool supporting your narrative instead of repeating it.
Also, it's just a pleasure to use, unlike PowerPoint.
If you have a Mac, you owe it to yourself to give Keynote a try.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
What do you do if your laptop's hard drive dies? Or your RAM slowly starts to go bad? And what do you do if *you* die midway through the presentation ?
Did you make sure your corpse could be carried off stage with a minimum of fuss and someone could carry on without the audience noticing ?
Come on, grab a paperboard and a pen and get on with it. jeez.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
So I'm pretty much covered in case of loss, lack of software, broken LCD projector, or even power failure
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Maybe because more computers have an HTML viewer pre-installed than an ODF presentation viewer?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...or, make sure you have all your equipment with you, before you leave the door. It is nobody elses fault that you forgot your passport and they wouldn't let you on the plane, either.
And you didn't know about Firefox Portable?
Change your name to Homer Junior! Your friends can call you Hoju
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
All the "PowerPoint" you really need: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/
(Assuming you're not trying to distract the audience from the fact you have nothing to say.)
-=Maggie Leber=-
Remember how the 37signals guy said that "you're not on a fucking plane, and if you are it doesn't fucking matter", take some fucking time off from work? Then he went on to say, as usual, that web apps would take over the world? Well, he's fucking wrong.
You can compare the technical features of PowerPoint with other presentation software all you want. And while that makes all the difference that most people care about, it's not all that I care about.
My initial gripe with PowerPoint was its closed proprietary nature. You needed to buy a shrink-wrapped binary piece of software to create and to read your presentation. Then, MS fiat could revise the format of ".ppt" to something NewAndBetter but that, in effect, holds you hostage. A few years, another computer, a different OS, a better version of Powerpoint later you'd need to buy another box of shrink wrapped software.
But I don't want to simply move from the MS HostageWare business model to the Google BigBrotherWare business model where, let's face it, all my data is viewable by them. The demographic knowledge they gain by combing through people's presentations, their sent and received email, and their accumulated searches is sufficient to fund the development of technically adequate reasonably functional software that they can afford to offer for free use.
I'd love to have presentation software with the best features of PowerPoint and Keynote, with the accessible from anywhere features of Google, but implemented in GPL'd code so that I could keep my presentation private on my server, work on it in private and show it private and be able to pull it up again in 12 years.
That's all.
Given that you can download a read-only copy of the presentation ahead of time, what is the likelihood that:
I still think that Internet could be reliable enough -- certainly is in the board room -- but if I understand it, the biggest weakness here is that you can't work on it while on a plane. I'd still use some other, open source client-side app (probably KPresenter, maybe write my own), but I don't think Google's spreadsheets are so completely a bad idea as to never be feasable -- and being able to easily share docs online is a very nice feature, too.
Hell, anything I'd present in front of a crowd now probably doesn't fit that anyway.
And again, suppose this happens for the first time in front of an audience?
That's not only dead time, it looks stupid, too. You have to explain how you didn't mean for it to look that way, etc etc.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't want my apps delivered over the 'net. Primarily because:
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS to "own" my work because of some crappy TOS
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if my 'net connection goes down
* I don't want my work to be unavailable if Google/Adobe/MS goes out of business
* I don't want Google/Adobe/MS searching my work to decide what ads I need to see
* I don't want the NSA/FBI/DLC searching my work to determine if I'm a terrorist/on the wanted list/threat to Hillary
* I don't want to be locked into paying "rent" to Google/Adobe/MS so I can see stuff later
* I don't want to be forced to "upgrade" to some new version that I hate because that's what's on offer over the 'net
I want my bits, on my box, in my possession, available when I want them.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
I don't know where you work, but in the real world, net connections regularly fail. In the office, in the conference rooms, wired, wireless... they fail. And when you have your laptop and projector all set up to give a preso to some big account with a Google application and your net connection goes, you're toast.
I don't have anything against Google and I despise the (mis)use of PowerPoint, but I am opposed to on-line apps where there's no way to work on, save, and use the output locally without a net connection. That's just adding an additional point of failure, about which Murphy has something to say.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
While I know it's all the rage to imagine everything from Office to Photoshop as a web app, I simply don't want to rely on having an internet connection for anything that doesn't inherently require it (browsing the web, using ftp, ssh or email, etc). Widespread access to the internet is not universal access to the internet, and connection quality varies so greatly, that I don't want to have my productivity beholden to the whims of the local network (if there even is one) that I happen to be using, and deal with the fact the processing power of my machine has been rendered irrelevant thanks to someone downloading 500 simultaneous HD hentai torrents.
Not to mentioned, what if the company providing your Internet service decides you are a bad customer because you are using your internet too much? They terminate your access and where are you with your presentation then?
Yeah I know it sounds stupid but that's a strong possibility. I've spoken with many people not just in Utah but in many other states who have experienced this. It's sux and needs to be addressed.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
I feel I must point something out.
Keynote did not win Al Gore a Nobel Prize.
Al Gore won a Nobel prize for alerting the public about changes that need to be made to stop society from damaging our environment, not because he animated a graph or made a cool flippy slide transition.
Like PowerPoint in 'Presentation Mode'? Where the preso goes to the projector screen, and a control panel with notes and clickable forward/back buttons goes to your laptop screen?
Not even close.
With EZWorship I can click on any of the slides of the presentation and that's something powerpoint just doesn't do. It also lets me sort slides into smaller groups (import multiple powerpoint presentations) and let me select the next slide from the middle of another presentation.
The example I gave above wasn't hypothetical..it happened at a major conference. I also give presentations and know that things could go wrong. To be more secure, I could have started from the downloaded presentation. As it was, I had it as a backup. Google docs allows you to download your presentation as a bunch of pages and some control scripts, so they run perfectly disconnected. The way you run it is to simply load the main page of the presentation from any browser.
Regardless of the 'limited' risks I undertook in the presentation, the collaboration feature was very hard to beat in this scenario.
I hate all "presentation" software. But presentations are a necessary evil for most of us at times. My rebellion used to lead me to creating a lightly formatted, bulleted text file; but too many PHBs complained about this "style". Still I refuse to lock up my content in some unsearchable, unusable binary format that no one will ever find. I agree that the best presentations often have no slides, but the problem is that there is no way to recover the content in those presentations unless they are recorded (whether A/V or text). So videos like those on Google-talk are okay since they're repeatable, mostly lossless, and widely available (though not searchable). But most often with presentations too much information is lost (even if is buried somewhere in "speaker notes"), and the audiences are small.
I tend to find that the best technical presentations (chickens) are based on white-papers (eggs). So that's the place to start preparing the content. It's going from the white-paper to the presentation that's painful. I use wikis for most content creation these days, so it makes sense to be able make a useful informational page (like a white-paper) double as a presentation. So far I've had pretty good success with MoinMoin's SinglePageSlideShow . The speaker notes are implemented in an unreleased version, but it looks promising. I love being able to keep all the benefits of wiki (light-weight, searchable, etc) as part of a presentation.
Besides, I regularly give presentations to hundreds of folks spread across a half-dozen locations. I already depend on a reliable Internet connection to share the audio and presentation content in real time. No, I don't do this in a hotel.
A big duh to you, sire, for not remembering that one should Use What Works, and that What Works for you is not the same as What Works for others.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower