PowerPoint annoyances
These days I tend to prepare talks and lectures using two main bits of software; for lectures to undergraduates, I use beamer (a LaTeX based style for producing PDF presentations), and for seminars on my own work I use Keynote. So, it’s been along time since I’ve had to fire up PowerPoint in anger. However, I’ve recently had to produce a talk in PowerPoint (for boring and complicated reasons), and the experience has reminded me why I fled to Keynote’s open arms.
It’s true that Keynote doesn’t have all the features of PowerPoint. The drawing tools included in Keynote are very simple, but I just use OmniGraffle which works beautifully and is dedicated to producing graphics. You can either copy and paste graphics in, or import them, so it’s very little extra hassle. There are also fewer options for building animations (though this has improved with the latest release), but I can’t say that I find that a problem.
PowerPoint is agonisingly slow on my machine, with appreciable delays when moving between slides during editing, selecting text boxes and so on. When you move a text box it leaves visual debris of parts of the bounding box in place, which remains until you scroll the screen down and then back to that particular slide. Trying to change the size of text is maddening. It tries to ‘intelligently’ fit the text size to the size of the box1. What this means is that you choose 22 pt, and PowerPoint says “I think you meant 24pt” and changes the size. You then growl “No, I really did want 22pt” and change it back. Ad infinitum…
Then there’s the maddening ‘sort of there, sort of not there’ fading Formatting Palette. Why not just make it hide and appear dynamically? Making it fade so that it partially obscures whatever is underneath it, but is too faint to be read properly is no good to anyone. I’ve also never got the hang of the expanding/collapsing sections in the palette either. The rule seems to be that the setting you want will always be in a collapsed section.
It will be a relief to go back to Keynote and beamer, which both manage to work properly without getting in my way.
1 Yes, I know that this is an option in the preferences, but I find it really irritating that it’s on by default. And Microsoft Office applications often develop amnesia about my preferences. I’ve lost count of the times that I’ve told Word that I speak British English, thank you very much.
1
I agree 100%. I love Keynote... I love the clean feel it gives my lectures. I've been out of academia for a year, and I CAN'T WAIT to get back in the fall to teach with version 2.0 and its cool dual-screen feature.
by dr. dave @ 21/04/2005 12:04 am • Permalink •
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dr. dave: Yes, the presenter view is really handy (particularly the timer---I tend to go on a bit
). Writing talks with Keynote is a pleasure, but it's just a chore with PowerPoint.
by bsag @ 22/04/2005 3:04 pm • Permalink •
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Your wording of your Word language settings comment had me in stitches, bsag! Any idea why it does that? It seems to me that Word adopts the language and margin settings of the last Word file that it opened (from a website or an e-mail). Of course, it probably won't change if it's already on the default US English setting, I would imagine.
by David (TEFL Smiler) @ 22/04/2005 3:05 pm • Permalink •
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change version to '98, which is essentially a pre-megachrome port of the windows version, which is excellent. the only gripe i had with the winVersion (other than the OS
was that for some types of graphics/slide setups, you got weird printing disappearances unless you set the Type of the presentation to be black&white;.
post-office98, office appears to have started drowning in actively antiproductive pseudochrome. just as with excel (no functionality upgrade since version5): why bother?
by Saltation @ 26/04/2005 4:05 pm • Permalink •
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I remembered reading this post when it was first published and went back to it today. Reading it again I wondered what the reason why why your use Beamer for lectures and Keynote for research presentations, instead of using the same thing for both ?
by Pascal Venier @ 22/09/2005 4:09 pm • Permalink •
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Pascal Venier: I have several reasons, none of which sound terribly cogent when I come to explain them to other people
. First, lectures and research presentations are quite different in many ways. For a number of reasons, I tend to use more multi-media in my research presentations---particularly movies. This is possible in beamer, but not easy. I also tend to copy and paste slides from previous presentations to start off a new talk, adding and subtracting stuff to make it appropriate for the audience, topic and length of slot I have. Again, this is possible with beamer, but much easier to do visually with Keynote. Lectures tend to be more stable in content. You add to or modify them each year, but the core stays reasonably stable. Beamer also lets me fairly easily generate reading lists (via BibTeX) for the students, and makes it very easy to produce nice PDF handouts, which can have extra text not on the slides. It just seems to suit me that way.
by bsag @ 24/09/2005 4:10 pm • Permalink •
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