“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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Related articles:
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
I use Keynote for my presentations and there is no comparison to PowerPoint. Like other posters above people in the audience are “WOW ho’d you do that?” In the fall I had to do a presentation for a marketing research class – I created our presentation on Keynote while everyone else used PowerPoint. After people were asking similar questions as above “How’d you do that on PowerPoint?” I just smiled and said “It was Keynote on my Mac.” They all looked kinda sad when they looked down at their WinXp machines.
yes, Keynote is really great et al. but I’m pretty disappointed about the lack of features and updates. Using Flash media is still a joke for example. It’s still pretty impossible to work with sounds – say you want to add swoosh sounds to each transition – forget it. Oh well, If Steve needs it, Apple might integrate it. Also, exporting to .pdf is really crap – lots of transparencies and fxs just aren’t rendered. Zooming is a joke – slow and only via a dropdown menu. It has no layers – selecting objects can be a pain the the arse when working with lots of materials. changing graphics only works per-object – would’ve been nice to have an “update/replace linked objects” organizer kinda menu. These are the things that graphic artists take for granted.