Brendan Dawes writes in his tasty new blog, that PowerPoint must die, being guilty as it is, for crimes against good design
. His point being that it’s hard for any designer to make PowerPoint turn out anything that looks decent. Fonts look dreadful, the colour palette is very limited and [there are no] guides.
Brendan implies that a contributing factor is the lack of competition to PowerPoint, and so he leads us gleefully to Keynote, Apple’s recently released PowerPoint rival.
Perhaps with the likes of Brendan Dawes at the helm, Keynote could indeed be a powerful tool, but in the hands of John-the-middle-manager, would Keynote really produce better presentations than PowerPoint? Consider how Apple introduce their software:
Keynote makes it a snap to create cinema-quality presentations with professional-caliber themes, razor-sharp text and beautiful charts and tables. Make layered images with transparent graphics and text, and adjust the transparency of each layer as you choose. Move from one slide to the next with 3D transitions. Control the pace of your presentation with stunning animations.
It’s clear which market they are aiming for. And judging from the examples Apple have splattered over their Keynote pages, the end results will be the same old embellished graphs and vacuous bullet points, but with more colours and better rendered text. Having said that, I know which software I’d rather use.
Simon Jessey wrote:
It is probably worth noting that Flash MX 2004 (and even plain old MX) can be used to create powerful presentations, with all the tools lacked by PowerPoint. Combined with Macromedia Breeze, you can go even further.
Sander van Dragt wrote:
Try Opera webbrowser..
Opera 5 for Windows introduced an exciting new feature – code-named OperaShow – which turns the browser into an advanced presentation tool. If you give presentations from your computer, this feature is for you! The document you are reading explains how to use and author OperaShow documents.
Compared to other popular presentation tools (e.g. PowerPoint from Microsoft), OperaShow has several advantages:
It’s a standard part of a small and fast Web browser
It uses HTML as the document format – HTML files are lightweight compared to proprietary formats used by other tools
You can easily publish your presentation on the Web
Opera is inexpensive compared to other presentation tools
Your audience is not annoyed by tacky animations