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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 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/
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*.
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.
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..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.
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
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