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.'"

Oh yeah

Google is going to "fucking kill powerpoint."

Re:Oh yeah

I wouldn't say that, but, when people need to be able to collaborate on and share a presentation, this is a fairly cheap way.
Wish is was available around a year ago. Had to do a group presentation for a class, divided it, and got all of the project members on Gmail so we could work on it as a Google document.
The real challenge was American laziness. Punks wouldn't work on it until their backs were against the wall, at which time the old MS Office reflexes kicked in, and we used PowerPuke.
You can lead the horse to the water, but it had better be a fire-hydrant-delivered enema if it's hydration you're after.

Re:Oh yeah

Bingo. Its collaborative, cost effective, and a back to basics. If you want to make something slick for TV/film or a crowd that appreciate unnecessary fluff, fine use PowerPuke. If you want to collaborate on, make and deliver an effective presentation to others (I'm sure 99% of presentations are not made on a plane but back at the office) then it is fast and easy and no nonsense. I love it. I hate the completely pointless features in PowerPoint and similar, enticing you to spend hours on a shaded backgrounds, faded transitions and border combinations. Like I say, unless it needs to be visually slick for a TV audience, that time is wasted time.

Using an online app for presentations a dumb risk.

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.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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...

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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.

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.

Re:Using an online app for presentations a dumb ri

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 [ezworship.com]

Offline Google applications

Wasn't Google getting ready to use its Google Gears [google.com] 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.

Re:Offline Google applications

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.

Re:Offline Google applications

Does OO.org print the slide as it appears?

I know with PP I need to save as .jpeg and drop into another program and print lowres versions of the slides (last known incident was with 2000, so PP apologists need not be rude, just tell me it was fixed). Otherwise I would get lame or no background.

if OO.org prints the final slide as it appears I could actually have a major use for it even though we pay for Office. If I still had some of the troublesome presentations I would jsut test.

Typos == drunk, forgive me.

Just kill presentation software

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

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

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

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

This article [blogs.com] 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

Personally I don't understand why people don't just use html from any of a few hundred WSYWYG web design programs and just throw in a few dozen BLINK tags or flash if they really want to be as annoying as powerpoint. The final grave for any decent presentation is on a web server anyway.

Re:Just kill presentation software

No no, we should just ban bullets

Bullets don't kill presentations, people kill presentations...

Someone had to say it... I still don't know why it had to be me...

Re:Just kill presentation software

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

I do not think so. I am doing a PhD in Multi Agent systems and usually make my presentations in Powerpoint with the Texpoint extension to add LaTex code. In my last two presentations I have used OpenOffice.org Impress with tex2png because I now use Linux for everything in my "work".

However, some of the best presentations I have seen have been done in LaTex using the Beamer class. However when I tried to use it (some time ago) I found it quite complex (even though I write all my papers and am writing my thesis in Latex...).

Presentations are a tool, as any other tool it can be used wisely or stupidly. That does not make the tool more or less useful.

Re:Just kill presentation software

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:Just kill presentation software

I don't consider your post Funny - if I had mod points, I'd rate you as Insightful. I was going to write a post exactly like yours, but you beat me to it. Powerpoint itself is a powerful communications tool in the hands of a skilled presenter. Powerpoint is a dose of sulfur stench which refuses to exit your nostrils even after leaving the auditorium when in the hands of a poor presenter. Unfortunately, far too many people equate "I can create a Powerpoint slideshow" with "I know how to present to a group of people" and "my presentation is ready." Your presentation is not ready when you make that final save to the PPT.

The best presentations I have seen (and given) have pointedly not been ones which used Powerpoint, but used pure speech, speech plus whiteboard, or speech plus drawing on transparencies on an overhead projector. Powerpoint handicaps both the presenter's and audience's thought flow by conforming to a rigid structure, where the next point of discussion is always predetermined, which is completely counterproductive to the interactive learning and discussion a live presentation seeks to encourage in the first place. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of communication problems Powerpoint introduces.

Powerpoint is a bit like an F1 car in that particular respect: Give it to somebody who knows what they're doing in the particular (rare) scenario where it is appropriate, and you may see some incredible feats. Under any other circumstances it will lead to a crash and burn just trying to get off the starting line.

Uh, OpenOffice.org?

Presentation is pretty decent.

Beamer

..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.

niches again

At this point I think Google would need a stand alone application to kill MS-powerpoint in particular directly. The two fill different niches, desktop-based applications are mor permanent and generally reliable without a connection while online tools allow the creation/distrobution of information quickly without a need to install or buy software. Very useful in an environment that restricts the installation of software that otherwise is useful for a task.

latex + prosper

Personally I am more for the open source experience and the ease of sharing content and use the latex with the prosper package to make my presentations :-)

Wait what?

Since when can't people edit HTML?

Keynote

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.

Re:Keynote

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.

Re:Keynote

Yessss. I can help you there, I think :). After giving quite a few presentations in powerpoint, I switched to keynote, because:
    - It handles video much better. I use POV-Ray movies to illustrate the technique I'm using. Powerpoint just can't display it without hiccups.
    - It has a smooth transition called "dissolve" which fades in and out the items and slides in your presentation. I find that this is the least obnoxious of all effects, and doesn't quite "shock" the audience like the effect of having a slide suddenly appear (i.e. when having no transition).
    - It has sane templates, with a sensible colour scheme (i.e. no more than a few different colours, don't make it look like a circus).
    - It gives me a useful "presenters display" in which I see on my laptop screen the slide as it will look like when I click, the current slide, the presentation time and my notes. This prevents me from having to see what's on the slide by turning my back to the audience.
    - Animations in slides are handled much better, I can have much more of them in a slide than in Powerpoint. Editing the sequence is also quite a bit simpler. Thus, I can have a bulleted list of keywords on the left, and an appropriate supporting picture or graph appear on the right of the slide.
    - It supports true transparent images, and vector graphics. I can copy, paste and scale anything from a suitable PDF for example.

But most of all, it allows you to quickly make slides a la Steve Jobs. I can advise this to anyone: aim for having your slide contain no more than one word, one image, one movie or one graph on a suitably unobnoxious background. Let bulleted lists appear one item at a time, and talk about only the item that is highlighted (the one that appeared last). And remember: the slides are not there for you. They are for the audience.

B.

Oh, please...

"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...".

Maybe Presentations aren't for you

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.

Beta vs 20 years of new comercial versions

"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?

Summary

Powerpoint

Strengths

• Standard
• Multiplatform
• Powerful

Weaknesses

• Microsoft=Evil
• Somewhat Expensive

Preso

Strengths

• Free
• Works OK
• Google=Good

Weaknesses

• Sucks
• Only Online
• No Animation ,li>No Image Tools
• Can't Bet Company On It

Keynote

Strengths

• Better than PowerPoint
• Lickable
• Apple=Good
• Finer Control
• Create LOL Cats in Record Time

Weaknesses

• None. That Shalt Not Question the One and Holy Jobs

Re:Summary

Keynote ... Create LOL Cats in Record Time

And on reflective black glass surfaces! Ooh!

They're in ur presentation, eating ur clipartz!

I think I need a shower now. (shudder)

Happy Google Day.

Let's see just how many Google articles we can get from Slashdot today.

Web connection to edit is a non-starter

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.

I'd LOVE some .ppt competition ( Keynote for Windows, pretty please ), but needing the web to edit a deck would not work in my universe.

meh

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.

Totally uninsightful review

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*.

offline app

google provide us online apps and service but if the net is not so good and even there is no net, we couldn't enjoy it's service. i have been waiting for it's offline app and service for a long time and wish it will release them soon

Hopefully!

PowerPoint is friggin' annoying. You have to learn it in school nowadays even. The so-called business world should really get over PowerPoint! I don't think seeing an ametuerish slide-show would make me want to go with someone's proposal.

I don't get presentations...

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.

Adobe Persuasion, please come back

My favorite presentation software was Aldus/Adobe Persuasion. Easy to use, flexible, never got in the way, and I was always able to get what I wanted out of it.

Powerpoint still isn't as good, and Persuasion was killed off 10 years ago.

Please, Adobe, bring it back, OK?

jh

Opera Show

I just recently discovered Opera Show... http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/operashow/ [opera.com] wish this would have taken off. It's pretty cool.

Rip PowerPoint

PowerPoint has been dead to me for years.

Impress serves my needs fully. It also has the added benefit of not requiring an internet connection.

Sorry Google, I love ya, but I think your office products are underpowered and a bit ill conceived. GMail excluded.

Its the CONTENT stupid

You guys bitching about the presentation software dont understand big picture -- Presentations (that include a powerpoint-like slideshow) are a means to COMMUNICATE an idea or information in general. If used properly these can work to your advantage (remember 1picture==1000 words!) .. imagine trying to explain PageRank to a non-mathematical audience without a network diagram.
Further, IMO, experienced listeners (in the given domain) generally dont have problem in filtering out the "bells and whistles" from the actual CONTENT.
So stop whining, go to your mothers basements and write your kernel code.

PowerPoint as a Desktop Publisher? Anyone?

While PowerPoint's intended purpose was for creating presentations, in my line of work it's as much or more often used in a quasi-desktop publishing role. That is, you create a bunch of canned slides with information which others in the company (e.g. sales staff) can use to create semi-custom presentations that are virtually always printed.

That being said, I absolutely LOATHE PowerPoint for this purpose. There are incredibly annoying bugs related to OLE (Object Link Embedding, e.g. pasting in a graph you've created in Excel) that have been there for several versions (i.e. YEARS, probably going on 10 by now).

Then they forced the whole "smart paste" thing on users in the 2003 version. I don't know if they fixed that in the latest version, but it's IDIOTIC. I'm sure it helps some people a lot for certain things they do, but some aspects of how it behaves are just plain dumb and won't help anybody. Sometimes I think the Office people make these changes in order to justify their existence, but in any case, if they're going to introduce a major functionality change that purports to be an improvement, fine- it probably is genuinely helpful for many, but don't leave zero recourse for the rest of us.

Which is why I spent hundreds of dollars on 2 copies of the newest Office and haven't even installed it- I'm not willing to deal with the #%&* ribbon, and so when I get around to it, I'll find a 3rd party application that is solid that will add back the "classic" menus and buttons. I'm all for progress, but customizability is too important if you actually know what you're doing in the software, and this is where they went wrong with the ribbon. For the average office worker who wouldn't have a clue how to customize it, it's probably better in the long run.

But more importantly, just FIX THE $^#! OLE THING!!! Microsoft should be sincerely embarrassed that this problem still exists (unless by some miracle they've fixed this in 2007 and the fix is compatible with the pre-2007 file structure).

I'll quit ranting now, but seriously, I love Excel- it's not perfect, but the level of power, flexibility and programmability mean that I can get it to do almost anything I can imagine. Word has almost always been more than adequate for anything I've ever wanted to do. But PowerPoint just plain sucks. I long for an alternative, but given the market share MS has with PowerPoint I'm afraid this is a pipe dream.

you can't use it on a plane

and whatever it is that might be stopping you will you away faster than you can say Firefox 3.0

yes it can

but it will take a while. I think web based apps are not yet fully ready for prime time. you not only have to make sure your apps are stable, you're also adding your internet connection as a factor to the performance and stability.

I don't see any web based application winning

I really don't see any web-based application beating stand alone programs. Number 1, although high speed internet is common, some places only have Dial-Up lines and AT&T and other cell brands Wi-Fi cards are expensive and harder to get working then a stand alone connection on OSes other then Windows. Number 2, its harder to find Open Source/Buyable web programs, for example, if a company wanted to use Google's product, they would have to 1. Trust Google's website not to be cracked 2. Trust that the service will be available and 3. That their internet won't fail. With an open source edition the company can download it, rebrand it and deploy it or with a proprietary solution they can pay an outrageous sum of money and pay someone to rebrand it and deploy it. So, that just leaves the average home user, taking out the Open Source fanatic, the companies and people with slow internet, and some home users run a computer with office '97 on a Windows 98 computer because its cheaper. So no, despite all this Web-2.0 is going to kill *insert application here* it just isn't going to happen.

Google Preso?

Ok, maybe Google's making this double entendre on purpose?
Preso in Spanish means prisoner. Is this some kind of subliminal message of what our lives are going to become if we use Google's services?
Or maybe they are just having fun of us, poor bastards, of what we are already to them?

Use Google Prisoner! (r)
You keep our freebies, we keep your freedom! (tm)

Or maybe they should use "Adicto" (addict):
Google Adicto! (r)
Once you taste us, you can't leave us! (tm)

Google Docs, et. al., vs. Open/StarOffice

I think that they could put a dent in Microsoft Office if they made the version of StarOffice that they're distributing in the Google Pack work more the way that MS Office does with SharePoint: They now have a very good office software package that they're distributing and they have made it very simple to install and update by making it part of Google Pack. If they tied it into the Web so that you could save directly to your document collection that is part of your Google account, and make it queue the save when you're offline, then they would have the best of both worlds (Google Docs-like Web-based collaboration and powerful PC-resident office software).

For the trolls complaining about professors:

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.

Freelance Graphics...after 10 yrs, still better

For those whoever worked with Lotus Freelance Graphics, it is still a better product then PPT. You could create your own templates, your own layouts, adjust colors easily on the fly. Everything you ever wanted in PPT but just much more flexible. That said, PPT rules the world. Unfortunately its not very good a delivering powerful multi-dimensional information.

For a good article on PowerPoint and its lack of information density, check out Edward Tufte's discussions on the subject http://www.edwardtufte.com/ [edwardtufte.com]. PowerPoint while not evil itself is evil in its execution mainly due to its inability to fit more then a few information elements on the page.

screw power point

viva la hypercard.

Presentation software powerful enough that several games (including the original myst) used it as their engine. *that's* what I want to use for presentations. Way niftier than anything currently on the market.

it's just the first version

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.

Desktop apps in web browsers _all_ suck

Right. Making a presentation in a web browser is a supremely bad idea.

So how is that fundamentally different than doing word processing or spreadsheets or anything else except surfing the web in a browser. It's not. It all sucks in oh so many ways. So many ways.

Maybe someone can explain to me all the excitement about moving everything inside a browser. The only advantage I can see is that it makes things OS-independent. But that is one high price to pay for a sucky experience. And whose to say that Microsoft or somebody else won't exploit users' ignorance and make a monopoly of _that_.

No net access? JUST SAVE IT...

The major argument here seems to be that online access is unreliable... That may well be the case, but you people DO realize you can save the presentation in HTML format to your computer - right???

True, Google's "Presentation" isn't anywhere close to PowerPoint; in fact, it doesn't need be. It's a free tool that promotes collaboration and offers some continuity with Google's online 'office' tools. I'm betting 'Presentation' will be a sweet piece of software in several years when online apps hit the mainstream, but for now, its just meant to be a basic tool for basic presentations... basically.

The Internet software model may never be appropriate for a critical environment, but I can see these tools being useful for groups, companies, schools and individuals in the coming years. It's just going to take some polishing.

PowerPoint is Unkillable

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.

newsflash: Malaria better than Birdflu!

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.

ODF?

I would buy and use Keynote if it could open/save my presentation as an ODF file. Keynote is an impressive tool, but it does not accommodate my work pieces.

Not the fault of presentation software always.

People, please don't lay all the blame for lame presentations on the software. Sometimes, the material presented is so boring, there is nothing you can do about it. Sometimes the presenters are such morons, they would have screwed up any software. Sometimes, it is NOT worth the effort to produce a dazzling presentation. Given all the possible causes for dull or lame talks, it is unfair to blame the software for all of it. May be all presentations should not be dazzling. The purpose of lame and dull presentations are to make us sit up and take notice of really good ones. After all, we did not make all the courses of a dinner dessert right? So why should every presentation be eye candy?

Think about it, Churchill, FDR and Hitler mesmerized whole nations by simply talking alone, without any other fancy aids. Ross Perot had just a couple of printed pie charts and elected Clinton in 1992.

we don' need no steenking...

All the "PowerPoint" you really need: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/s5/ [meyerweb.com]

(Assuming you're not trying to distract the audience from the fact you have nothing to say.)

Remember..

Remember how the 37signals guy said that "you're not on a fucking plane, and if you are it doesn't fucking matter", take some fucking time off from work? Then he went on to say, as usual, that web apps would take over the world? Well, he's fucking wrong.

Bad form to quote myself, perhaps, but...

I don't want my apps delivered over the 'net. Primarily because:

        * I don't want Google/Adobe/MS to "own" my work because of some crappy TOS
        * I don't want my work to be unavailable if my 'net connection goes down
        * I don't want my work to be unavailable if Google/Adobe/MS goes out of business
        * I don't want Google/Adobe/MS searching my work to decide what ads I need to see
        * I don't want the NSA/FBI/DLC searching my work to determine if I'm a terrorist/on the wanted list/threat to Hillary
        * I don't want to be locked into paying "rent" to Google/Adobe/MS so I can see stuff later
        * I don't want to be forced to "upgrade" to some new version that I hate because that's what's on offer over the 'net

I want my bits, on my box, in my possession, available when I want them.

Content is king

I hate all "presentation" software. But presentations are a necessary evil for most of us at times. My rebellion used to lead me to creating a lightly formatted, bulleted text file; but too many PHBs complained about this "style". Still I refuse to lock up my content in some unsearchable, unusable binary format that no one will ever find. I agree that the best presentations often have no slides, but the problem is that there is no way to recover the content in those presentations unless they are recorded (whether A/V or text). So videos like those on Google-talk are okay since they're repeatable, mostly lossless, and widely available (though not searchable). But most often with presentations too much information is lost (even if is buried somewhere in "speaker notes"), and the audiences are small.

I tend to find that the best technical presentations (chickens) are based on white-papers (eggs). So that's the place to start preparing the content. It's going from the white-paper to the presentation that's painful. I use wikis for most content creation these days, so it makes sense to be able make a useful informational page (like a white-paper) double as a presentation. So far I've had pretty good success with MoinMoin's SinglePageSlideShow . The speaker notes are implemented in an unreleased version, but it looks promising. I love being able to keep all the benefits of wiki (light-weight, searchable, etc) as part of a presentation.

Re:If only...

As an Interactive Multimedia Instruction (IMI) developer, I warmly accept your post :-) Death to amateurs! Leave it to us pros!

In all seriousness, it isn't PowerPoint's fault that the masses have been given a decent tool to get their (mostly lousy) message across. It's the message that sucks, and the lack of basic design and instructional design principles that makes them suck so hard...oh and the fact that any nitwit thinks they are suddenly a designer just because they "know" PowerPoint. There's a reason there is a career field called "graphic design", and it ain't because anyone can use PowerPoint. In this arena, Keynote wins hands down, because at least the boring and poorly designed presentations will LOOK a little better while boring you to tears.

But in all, I'm glad these unskilled people exist using these mediocre tools, because it keeps me fully employed. I bet this statement has been said a million times by html programmers in the late 90s as well. Hmmm, maybe I should start a PowerPoint repair service..fix up those lousy slides and put a good instructional design principles to otherwise awful presentations.

Re:If only...

Any tool in the wrong hands is innefective if not dangerous. Take a circular saw...ever see someone who doesn't know what they're doing try to cut a straight line? Doesn't work. PowerPoint is somewhat similar. I have seen many PowerPoint presentations that we're well put together and did a good job of supporting the presenter. But as someone else pointed out above, many if not most presenters are weak and rely on the PowerPoint too much to make their...points. I say ban PowerPoint for dolts and make them write a real report. Everyone else can use it within limits.

Re:If only...

I know a professor that was very critisized for his bad use of PP. His long and boring PP presentations are still legendary at my university. After several claims from the students, he doesn't use PP anymore. Instead, he just prints his lines on some overheads and.. well, I've heard that the students are secretly screaming to get back his PP presentations.

My point is: PP is not worse than old good overhead presentations, or stenciled copies, or lines on a blackboard. It's just that, when the presentation sucks or it's boring, people seem to blame the program...but guess again, the same boring and poor presentation would be boring and poor on some other medium as well.

Re:This is Just a F***ing Apple Ad

Keynote is barely, BARELY mentioned except in a off-hand remark in the beginning and at the end.

That's why it's so devilishly clever! In fact, I think it may actually be a commercial for the LaTeX beamer, simply because it is not mentioned in the article at all!