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Anti-PowerPoint Party Formed In Switzerland
angry tapir writes "Many people dislike sitting through a meeting being driven with presentation software. Microsoft's PowerPoint is perhaps the best known and most hated of the slide presentation programs out there, but few would take a political stand over it. However, that's exactly what Switzerland's Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP) seeks to do. From the article: 'According to the APPP, the use of presentation software costs the Swiss economy 2.1 billion Swiss francs (US$2.5 billion) annually, while across the whole of Europe, presentation software causes an economic loss of €110 billion (US$160 billion). APPP bases its calculations on unverified assumptions about the number of employees attending presentations each week, and supposes that 85 percent of those employees see no purpose in the presentations.'"
I'd imagine that their meetings are quite short. Hell, anyone who has sat through an inane PowerPoint presentation (which is likely all of us) can sympathize, however I think it's a matter of using PowerPoint effectively and using good public speaking skills that is the core issue, not PowerPoint itself.
No, Stalin; because nobody can make bullet points like him.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
It's not the software. Just about any presentation software can be used to create valuable, compelling presentations. The problem is most untrained/inexperienced presenters are satisfied with showing people a bunch of stats and clip art, without addressing any concrete topic, and concluding without actionable items.
The real problem is human behavior. Good luck opposing that with a political party.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
I guess when you have a 3% unemployment rate, and only a 35% (of GDP) public debt, these are the kinds of things you can worry about.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
.. I wonder if they would mind visualizing that with a nice presentation?
Maybe if they could put this into a PowerPoint presentation and make it a little easier to digest? Some pie chart graphics would really clarify things, I feel.
If you are doing science and research that involves math, the Beamer class in LaTeX is the most widely used tool. It allows for nice and consistent slides and easy integration of math, without the hassel of formatting.
Keynote is WAY better than Powerpoint. Even PP can be okay though (if frustrating to actually use) if you use it properly. Unfortunately MS seems to design it to encourage abuse, rather than the opposite.
Having read Tufte and seen many good and bad presentations in both Keynote and PP, I disagree that one is better than the other. Bad presentations come from bad design principles and poor communication choices, not from software. Also, many of the problems associated with digital presentations are simply a case of the wrong people being invited to a meeting, or the meeting format being poorly suited for the content (10 minutes of ideas expanded to fill a 1 hour time slot, for instance).
GP: As for your red Xs, I suggest you paste special any content that isn't coming from an image file and select Picture (enhanced metafile).
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I have used Keynote and especially like the presenter view. Find it far superior to PowerPoint.
I have also used the beamer class for LaTeX (from the TeX Live distribution), using R for data analysis that needed to be included. I have also used Inkscape to draw SVG graphics to be included - typically as PDF (saved as EPS, converted to compressed PDF using epstopdf.) This latter approach has the advantage of being completely Open Source. All the packages are well-supported and have active user communities that answer well-posed questions. This is not a WYSIWG approach, but can make a good presentation. The approach follows Donald Knuth's planned workflow: the author concentrates on the content of the presentation and leaves the typesetting to the computer. The software encourages a well-structured presentation.
As others have noted, any presentation software can be used thoughtlessly (without regard for the audience) to make a horrible presentation. I admit that I am drawn to Knuth's approach of concentration my efforts on what I want to communicate to my audience and trying to give them a good return on their investment of their time and to let the software help to help achieve that goal./PP
aka PowerPoint Costs Too Damn High Party
For *nix, try: Impress!ve
Works on any deck of pdf / image files in a directory that you throw at it. Uses OpenGL effects... effectively! Not just as useless eye-candy (though the transitions available are posh), but to help visualize, highlight, and zoom into parts of your presentation as you go.
It won't actually help you create content, though. You'll still need some tools for that. Open/LibreOffice is still kinda squishy, but works (though still too PPT-like). Inkscape is worth the time investment for learning to create reasonably involved diagrams... I've more or less switched to it from xfig and Dia.
I'll second that. Just a few additional recommendations:
Look at some of the other themes. I think the default one is quite ugly. I prefer the Singapore theme, which is pretty minimalist and leaves most of the slide for your material, without using loads of it for distracting stuff.
I use the pdfmarginpar package for annotations. With a little conditional macro, I can generate one version of the PDF for display and another for download. The download version has a load of notes on it that summarise what I'm going to be saying while the slide is up. I think this is really important, because quite often people will miss the presentation and will only have the downloaded slides to work out what you were saying. The downloadable version should contain 90% of what they'd get by attending the presentation, but you probably don't want anything like that much information on the slides themselves or people will be distracted reading instead of listening.
Oh, and if you're doing anything involving code snippets on slides, you need to mark your frames as [fragile] before you use the listings package in them. Took me a while to work out why mine were failing to compile...
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GP: As for your red Xs, I suggest you paste special any content that isn't coming from an image file and select Picture (enhanced metafile).
I definitely would NOT use Enhanced Metafiles (EMFs). Use Windows Metafiles (WMFs) instead.
My experience with writing latexEMF/WMF conversion a decade ago was that no applications had a really good grasp on EMFs -- on their dimensions, scaling factors, colors. Even today I observe that pictures copy/pasted from R into Excel2003 as EMF get their colors and cropping messed up when moving to Excel2010.
Sure, EMFs are new and 32bit while WMFs are boring old 16bit, and EMFs have some extra capabilities, but it's not worth it.
My biggest problem with PP presentations at my company is that the vast majority of people put all of the relevant information directly in the PP and then read it word for word at the audience. If they're going to do that they should just write it up as a document and publish/email it instead. If they're just going to read the screen to you (while you're allegedly reading along with them) and not add any information that's not already displayed then people completely lose interest quite fast and when someone does finally wise up to this fault and tries to change the status-quo nobody will be listening anyway.
On the other hand it has enhanced my skills at reading the slide quickly so I can do other work while they read it slowly aloud. Hopefully this will make me better at Jeopardy! if I can manage to get on the show.
PowerPoint is on Macs too. It is an equal opportunity offender.