“Les Posen, Melbourne psychiatrist, Macintosh fan and expert in treating fear of flying (http://www.flightwise.com.au), read in a Microsoft bulletin somewhere that 30 million PowerPoint presentations occur every day,” Garry Barker writes for The Sydney Morning Herald. “No wonder the planet is in trouble. If, on average, each presentation lasts an hour, and each sends 10 people to sleep or stuns their minds with an overkill of multi-coloured pie charts and graphics that makes them think they have ridden a motorbike into a locust swarm, PowerPoint could be reducing world productivity by 300 million man-hours a day.”
“There is another way. It is called Keynote, now in its third version, part of Apple’s iWork ’06, paired with Pages, the layout and word processing application ($119) [US$79]. Keynote was developed for Apple and Pixar CEO Steve Jobs’ speeches, and has been available commercially for a couple of years,” Barker writes. “Keynote integrates with iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto and Garageband, and material from any of them can be dragged and dropped into any of the themes in the package. This is the age of pictures, audio, video and short attention spans. Most presenters are not designers and they need help. PowerPoint tends to offer the help directly by providing templates that you amend to suit. It is powerful enough, but showing its years. It is also complex and can be daunting. Keynote operates on the Jobs principle that less is more. Its themes are bright, professional and modern.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Want to know how to wow ’em? Easy, use Apple’s Keynote and not PowerPoint. Chances are that most of the room hasn’t seen a Keynote presentation and just by breaking out of the PowerPoint rut, you’ll perk up more than few pairs of tired eyes. More info about Apple’s Keynote application here.
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Clean elegant Keynote: ‘the anti-PowerPoint’ – March 10, 2003
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i also hear you can export keynote as powerpoint file too, ill have to experiment one day.
“PowerPoint could be reducing world productivity by 300 million man-hours a day”
Love that part.
I don’t think the business world has figured out yet how much a compelling presentation can generate more sales. If they did, they wouldn’t keep throwing 30 slides of ppt bullet points at me.
That is so true. I had to use PP recently again and it was just a pain in the backside. You never find the feature you’re looking for and even if – it’s never working the way you want it to. Keynotes is so smooth… 😀
At Andy:
It does but don’t expect to see the slides move as nice. And the *.gifs I used worked with my PP but not the one on the lecturer’s windoze’s one. I actually said “shit” during that presentation because there was this white space and no molecule spinning around…
APPLE IS ALL ABOUT HONESTY, MICROSOFT IS NOT, SO IF PEOPLE SWITCHED TO APPLE THEY’D BE MORE HONEST WHICH MEANS ALL OF THE HYPE WOULD BE KILLED IF HYPE DIES ECONOMY COLLOPSES AND WE ALL BECOME TREE HUGGING IPODS!!!!
You can have the slickest software out there, but idiots putting garbage in only get garbage out.
Wrong Wrong Wrong (in CAPS) I think you should take a bow. For the oddest post ever on MDN. Congratulations!
I agree, the themes/templates provided in Keynote (in Pages and other iLife apps, too) are so professional looking and modern compared to the dreck in MS Office. And generally so much more enjoyable to use. no wonder you see so many bad powerpoint presentations. but that’s only part of the story – too many people simply don’t know what makes an effective presentation. Less really is more.
but whether you use Powerpoint or Keynote, here are some good pointers on design
– a GREAT resource on anything to do with presentation design
Presentation Zen
http://www.presentationzen.com/
contrasting examples, “Gates, Jobs & the Zen aesthetic”
http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html
(LOTS of other blog entries at presentationzen on the topic, too)
and similarly here
http://writersblocklive.com/?p=47
(follow the link to the Flikr photo gallery for more samples of how NOT to do it…)
finally, a little dated but still useful tips on how to give a presentation
The Problem with Presentations
http://www.searls.com/present.html
POWERPOINT MAKES YOU DUMB
Directly responsible for shuttle crash.
http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1040423/posts
Heh, I design PPT presentations on a freelance basis, and it’s a miserable existence doing so. I’ve tried several times to get these stupid company CEOs to buy a PowerBook and do their presentations in Keynote (seriously, to a $15Bn/year company, what’s $2,500 for a computer and some software??), but they refuse. The joke of it all is that I bill them tremendous hours doing the PPT shows, and they _still_ turn out worse looking than my own presentations, where I exclusively use Keynote. I just gave one yesterday, and after the show, I had several folks drooling over what I’d been able to do and asking how PPT could make those shows.
When a lowly college prof’s presentations blow away those by huge corporate CEOs, there’s something seriously wrong. But hey, at least I make lots of money since they stick with MS products. I guess that’s why the IT world like Windows so much
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Yeah, the biggest problem with Keynote is all the work you have to do to dumb your presentation down so that it can be exported as a PowerPoint.
Wish I could avoid that, but I have to turn them in as PowerPoints in order to satisfy college class requirements.
I gave a presentation last week using Keynote. After the round of questions about the subject (animation), I got about 10 questions about my presentation.
It was pretty funny… “How did you get the text to appear that way?”, “What PowerPoint setting is that?”, etc.
I ended up showing about 6 people what you can do in Keynote and they were blown away with how easy it was and how clean the interface is. At first they didn’t believe you could do all that stuff because the Keynote interface is so sparse compared to PowerPoint.
iWork is $79 U.S.
Anim8tr’s post sounds about right…
I gave a presentation a couple weeks ago, and consciously copied SJ’s presentation style.. minimal text on the slides… big symbolic images.. very clean… Needless to say, it was a huge success.
I didn’t go overboard with it, namely because i had to EXPORT to Powerpoint… since I don’t have an iBook. 🙁
LOOK AT EUROPEANS THEY ARE HONEST AND THEIR ECONOMY IS IN VERY BAD SHAPE.
EUROPEANS THEY ARE HONEST???
Where did you get that whacky idea?
Europeans are delusional.
Germany, France 12% unemployment. Sales tax in Germany 16% going to 19% next year.
Giant strikes in France against govt.
Doctors in Germany on strike – want 30% pay raise.
In Italy Prime Minister won´t admit he lost the election; claims fraud.
Only place there are Apple stores in Europe are Great Britain.
Chancelor Schroeder lost last election.
A couple of months before election he signs a big billion Euro natural gas pipeline deal between Germany and Russia. Also Gives pipeline company a billion Euro loan guaranty.
Chancelor Schroeder lost election. A couple of weeks later as private citizen he announces he is now CEO of the new Russian-German pipeline company that he gave the pipeline contract to. He´s Making 250,000 to million Euros a year, plus extras.
Honest European?
If I were a CEO, I’d BAN PowerPoint in my company.
Keynote might be allowed on a limited, as-needed scale.
Everyone hates endless bore-blank presentations of bullet points and pie charts. What’s the point of any presentation if puts your employees to sleep and dumbs down your company? When was the last time anyone slept through one of Steve Jobs’ presentations?
I won’t get into wondering how much of Windows Vista’s direction has been set by PowerPoint…
@old school: “When was the last time anyone slept through one of Steve Jobs’ presentations?”
Bet lots of Apple employees could have lots of interesting stories about that….
The biggest and best feature of Keynote is dual screen presentation.
Powerpoint sort of does it too, but with keynote I have a timer, clock current and next slide at any size I like along with notes.
My Notes are detailed and my slides are simple, I am always one step ahead and the best thing is a monkey could do one of my presentations if I am ever sick;)
Never were truer words spoken! I give several Keynote presentations each year and invariably after each, I have about half a dozen people who come up to me and ask me, “How did you do that in PowerPoint?” When I tell them that it’s Keynote, which costs only $40 (half of iWorks’ cost), their jaws hit the floor. I then tell them it’s only available on the Macintosh platform. They always ask me where they can buy a Mac. I’ve converted a few people already that way and a few others are swearing that they’re buying a Mac within a year!
Don’t shoot the messenger. Most presentations are dull and boring because of the (lack of) skills of the presenter and their desire to cram 30 bullet points onto one slide. Bear in mind that most users of Powerpoint or Keynote have to apply a corporate background and use a corporate font anyway, which suddenly makes all those pretty Keynote templates redundant anyway. And although both Powerpoint and Keynote provide various animated eye candy options, some of the worst presentations I’ve sat through are when the presenter applied pointless animations and effects to slides, which simply served to distract from the message. Indeed, some of the best presentations I’ve seen had no animations and no effects, and very simple slides. The slides should not get in the way of a good presenter. Keynote and Powerpoint both encourage eye candy over content.
You can instantly spot Keynote a mile away. The templates are fantastic and transitions are very unique.
How about reliability??? There could easily be a PowerPoint department where I work. There are constantly problems with making sure video plays. Powerpoint is a TOTAL crap shoot and it’s presentations look like crap.
I just bought iWorks ’06 yesterday for the business I’m starting. Where can I find tutorials and such on Keynote? Just looked at it briefly so far.