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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.'"
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.
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.
Since when can't people edit HTML?
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
Perhaps an online presentation app is for those PHBs not bright enough to be able to download and install Openoffice? (Impress)
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.
"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.
"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?
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 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*.
I find that using a chalkboard/whiteboard usually makes for much better presentations. Having to write things out forces the presenter to explain more thoroughly and be conservative about how much is put up on the wall versus how much he/she actually explains. It holds the audience's attention better.
Overhead projectors are generally well-used, too, but not when they're just a substitute for PowerPoint. They're good for solving problems and adding to pre-printed graphics (like a graphing plane, for instance), especially in larger lecture halls. I've also had professors who use overheads (or just Word and an LCD projector) to scroll along concise notes to help both the listeners and lecturer to keep on-track without relying on a display to actually convey the information. This also provides an easy way to add visual aids without resorting to PowerPoint.
Yes, the presenter is at fault for bad PP presentations, but the PowerPoint "model" makes it much easier to screw things up.
One of these days, I'm going to cut you into little pieces.
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.
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.
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.
..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.
The individual apps are powerful, no question. They've got a lot of gotchas though. In the case of Powerpoint vs. Keynote, lack of features is a GOOD thing. In the case of some of the other apps it's not, as much, which is why unfortunately I can't use Pages full time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Use latex
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.
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
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
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.