“I still believe Apple’s competitor to Microsoft’s Powerpoint elicits within me a flow of ideas and concepts which its competitors can’t – just trying to manage their layout and mechanics interferes with my creativity,” Les Posen writes for Presentation Magic.
“I must say that for many people the thought of putting Jobsian efforts into their presentations feels very unnatural, especially those time-poor, such as teachers,” Posen writes. “There’s a story of Steve Jobs being in hospital for treatment scolding his treating doctors for their poor presentations, and offering to coach them in Keynote. Jobs clearly believed that providing presenters with better tools might assist them with better presentations. I’m guessing he would not brook the argument that it’s not correct to blame the tool, but the carpenter for a poor job. For me, a poorly balanced and blunt saw will interfere with an accomplished carpenter’s efforts. Similarly, even the most expensive and exquisite Stradivarius will not make a mediocre violinist anything more than mediocre.”
“Apple made some major changes to its iWork suite, even though it named these as just point changes. It took the cloud based offerings out of beta, added new features, and improved iWork apps’ abilities to open old files created from previous versions,” Posen writes. “For Keynote 6.6… I want to focus on and illustrate the new build animation, Line Draw.
Read more and check out the video here.
MacDailyNews Take: If you’re still wasting your time with PowerPoint, STOP! Start using Keynote today. You, and your audience, will be glad you did.
SEE ALSO:
Physicists, generals and CEOs agree: Ditch Microsoft’s PowerPoint – March 17, 2014
NY Times reviews ‘Jobs’ bioflick: ‘All the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation’ – August 16, 2013
Microsoft’s answer to iPad: Clueless PowerPoint slides – January 27, 2011
Forget PowerPoint, enliven your presentations with Apple’s Keynote – October 11, 2007
Apple’s Keynote frees presentations from ‘Death By PowerPoint’ fate – November 15, 2006
Grab the room’s attention by using Apple’s Keynote and dumping Microsoft’s PowerPoint – April 12, 2006
Apple’s Keynote makes better-looking presentations than Microsoft’s PowerPoint – December 06, 2004
Clean elegant Keynote: ‘the anti-PowerPoint’ – March 10, 2003
Keynote cleaner and better organized than PowerPoint – February 18, 2003
Bill Gates on Apple’s ‘Keynote’ app: ‘I doubt what they’ve done is as rich as PowerPoint’ – January 09, 2003
Keynote is a joy to use and is a powerful tool in the right hands. When it was first released it was many years ahead of PPT. PPT is just now catching up on usability…My god..how long did it take for PPT to have transparency? Auto fitting an image when dragging it into a slide wasn’t enabled until this year, lol!
When Keynote shipped, I called a friend that worked on it, and I told him he just saved my life, because if I’d had to use PowerPoint for another WWDC talk, I’d have shot myself.
The only other presentation app that was ever close to the quality of Keynote was Concurrence, the NeXSTEP app that Keynote was modeled on.
-jcr
IS there a place to download a digital manual on Apple’s Apps and how to work some of the finer points of each? I am an aging Apple user and apps are not as intuitive as they used to be ( because they are more powerful). I sure would like to use the full power of many of Apple’s apps such as Mail, Contacts, Keynote, Pages etc. Thanks for your understanding.
Good question!
iWork for Dummies is about $20 at Barnes & Noble.
I’m partial to the Take Control Books series at https://www.takecontrolbooks.com/. These are the same folks that run TidBITS, the online newsletter/website that started in 1990.
I love Keynote and use it for any presentation that matters. But, Powerpoint is still on my MacBook Pro because:
Sometimes you have to hand a copy of your presentation to a conference organizer, either for loading into the auditorium system, or for distribution to the attendees. PowerPoint, like it or not, is the standard for that.
(Side note: Keynote’s export to PowerPoint is still hit-or-miss on anything but the most simple presentations.)
Sometimes I need to bang out a quick drawing to illustrate a problem or its solution. Keynote simply doesn’t work very well for that. “PowerPoint engineering” is a bit of an insider’s joke, but for me it is a critical part of the project management process.
One last note: Just yesterday I was giving a presentation with the new Keynote and had a hell of a time assigning a screen for the show and another for the notes. This used to be easy – where the heck did they put the toggle?
Ralph, I use PPT for the same function. I primarily open my Keynotes saved in PPT format to verify that they are OK in PowerPoint or slightly change them.
This is a cool effect. I hope there are some more like it. I wish Apple would make ads that highlighted the use of iWork. I know a lot of people who say they only use their computers for email and the web. I tell them that’s because no one has shown you what it can do. This can be a great way to show pictures at a party, wedding, reunion, or funeral.