Comments on: What’s Better Than Microsoft PowerPoint?

By: Gary Bing

Gary Bing — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:17:13 +0000

Technology is having a way of bogging us down unnecessarily. I have seen so many sing song boring PowerPoint presentations in expensive hotel ballrooms that I puke on the rubber chicken being served. ( I’ve learned to get out of the latter feigning I’m vegetarian, to get something freshly edible) I talked next to a woman saying ” I think there are some eight year old out there that are not only more adept at the task at hand, but could run circles around presentations with elementary school supplies, knowing how and when to use them along with when and how to use PowerPoint.” As it turns out the person I was talking to was a CEO of a Fortune 500. She has literally taken her daughter to board meetings and she is on the payroll as a part time employee, saving her company countless hours of boredom and dollars. I told her that child labor laws might preclude her daughter from doing the hotel junket thing fortunately not having to endure the endearing rubber chicken. She is now reevaluating her entire meetings finding they are not cost effective and some don’t even need to be done at all that teleconferencing is the wave of the future. Sorry hotels and airlines, you’ve been let go. I had to exchange two sets of shoe laces for shoes whose eyelets differed from each other, a transaction that should have not taken over a half hour. It did, and I have the requisite parking ticket that cancelled out the price paid for one pair of shoes all in the name of “faster’ technology. “All I ever learned was in Kindergarten.”

By: Antony

Antony — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:26:20 +0000

I have PowerPoint on my Windows computer and keynote on my mac :)

By: bradleybradwell

bradleybradwell — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:40:40 +0000

I remember a while ago that you talked about another alternative to Powerpoint…. I believe it was called 360 slide or something like that. I thought that was a fantastic alternative to other presentation software that’s available.

By: Derek K. Miller

Derek K. Miller — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:32:47 +0000

You might find my rants at penmachine.com/powerpoint informative. My general message is that a presentation should work without any slides, and that any visual accompaniment should be (a) a bonus, and (b) not duplicate what you're saying. The worst thing to do is have a bunch of bullet points on screen and read them. The software you use is largely irrelevant to that.

By: Will Farris

Will Farris — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:34:25 +0000

Well, it really all depends on the context of how PowerPoint is being used. For lightweight use, pictures and such are fine and the speaker should basically just ad lib. But if I am teaching a class on configuring security parameters on a firewall, then the details MUST be shown up there and I MUST go over them verbatim and then some because of the importance of being exact and complete for it to be of value to the watchers in the crowd. For that PowerPoint is perfectly suited. What may be boring is the material itself (sometimes), or the presenter himself (usually). For that, PP can’t overcome, nor can any other presentation package.

By: E. Douglas Jensen

E. Douglas Jensen — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:45:12 +0000

This claim that a good PowerPoint presentation should be all words is made by people who don’t give much in the way of highly technical presentations. Put your PowerPoint where your mouth is and show us a presentation of of a proof of a non-trivial mathematical theorem, or a presentation of a non-trivial C++ program.