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.'"

Comments

Using an online app for presentations a dumb risk.

[VidEdit]

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.

Just kill presentation software

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Does anyone else think all presentation software should be banned, on the basis of services to humanity?

• Slideshows can support effective presentation styles well
• Most slideshows don't do this
• Instead they're full of bullets
  • and sub-bullets
  • which don't really add anything
  • and are hard to read while listening to the speaker
  • and often just say the same anyway
• Instead, we could just go back to explaining things orally
• Slideshows should be reserved for useful supporting graphics
• That doesn't mean random clip-art! :-) :-/ }:-)
• In fact, almost everything promoted and supported by presentation software like Powerpoint is widely acknowledged by communications trainers as a bad thing

Conclusions: we should just abandon the concept, and save zillions of hours of wasted office time every year.

(But it won't happen, because it would expose managers who suck.)

Re:Just kill presentation software

[SpeedyDX]

That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it.

Whoever sets up the presentations for Steve Jobs, for example, tends to do a pretty good job for his keynotes.

I personally use presentation software not to present information to others, but as "cue cards" for myself.

Presentation software has its uses, although I would agree with you that most of the time, it's used very, very poorly.

Re:Just kill presentation software

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

That's not so much a critique of presentation software so much as a critique of how people USE it.

You're right of course, and my post was meant to be humorous rather than entirely literal.

However, presentation software is like word processors, only worse: it's one of those things where businesses expect everyone to be able to use it effectively, yet never provide any training. As a consequence, those businesses get information being poorly presented and therefore lose time due to inefficiency. Good presentation style is like good graphic design and typography: the audience doesn't even notice it, they just take in the content efficiently and come away with the intended impression.

Steve Jobs is, as you noted, an excellent presenter. Most corporate people aren't, as you can tell by the number of insanely overcomplicated diagrams, extensive bullet points, clip art "jokes", and transition effects they manage to cram into what should have been a simple, concise presentation.

Re:Just kill presentation software

[znu]

Whoever sets up the presentations for Steve Jobs, for example, tends to do a pretty good job for his keynotes

This article comparing the presentation styles of Jobs and Gates is quite relevant here. (And quite entertaining.)

Most people treat their slides as a sort of scratch pad. They don't figure out what information they're going to present, then figure out what they have to say and what should go on the slides. They figure out what they're going to say by writing it on the slides. Then they go in and read the slides.

Doing really first-rate presentations is hard. The vast majority of business types who are expected to give presentations don't remotely have the graphics design or (more importantly) information design skills to do it well. Even when you have first-rate people doing it, it takes quite a lot of time. Supposedly a Steve Job keynote takes weeks to prepare, and there's probably an entire team involved.

Re:Just kill presentation software

[betterunixthanunix]

Seriously, it's not presentations that are the problem, it is a combination of:

1. Presentation software that offers little more than bullet points and a picture here and there.
2. Users who have no real training or skill in creating a presentation, but can't find an art department in their company because the manager decided that, with so much presentation software available, why continue paying for people who know how to make a presentation?

I've seen some really good presentations, created by professionals, that incorporated various visual cues, OLE objects (to render some sort of object in real time), etc. I envision presentations that are somewhat interactive -- for example, embedding a 3D rendering object that allows the use of a mouse to rotate the object and zoom in, so that you can answer questions from the audience and show the 3D model in whatever way is necessary to explain some detail. Or an embedded web page, so that you don't have to stop, pull up a web browser, go to the web page, then switch back to the presentation program, and go back to full screen mode.

Really, embedded charts are a good start, but don't go far enough. We need to embed objects that can be updated in real time. Sadly, that requires the skill of a professional presentation designer, and like I said, who wants to pay for someone like that when you can just make a bunch of bullets? Seems to be the solution to everything these days: bullets.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

[heinousjay]

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.