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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.
Since when can't people edit HTML?
09:F9:11:02 - 9D:74:E3:5B - D8:41:56:C5 - 63:56:88:C0
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
"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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
> 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"
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.