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Thoughts and impressions of happenings in the world of PowerPoint and presentations, continuously updated since 2003.
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Apple Keynote and Microsoft PowerPoint: you can hear raves and rants about both of them, and comparisons are inevitable. Also inevitable is that you end up hearing stories of which one is better from people who are actually using just one of these programs. Needless to add, those verdicts are biased and one-sided. That’s why I bring you opinions from Rob Griffiths of Macworld, who uses both the programs, to get you a balanced opinion in this Indezine exclusive conversation.
Rob Griffiths founded Mac OS X Hints in 2000; since mid-2005, the site has been part of MacPublishing, publishers of Macworld magazine. Rob serves as a Senior Editor for Macworld, responsible for content on Mac OS X Hints, as well as regular articles and reviews on Macworld’s site, and a column in the print magazine each month.
Geetesh: How do you find Keynote compared to using PowerPoint. Give us both your rants and raves, and what is that you really like about Keynote.
Rob: Keynote’s strengths are its interface and the professionalism of the bundled themes. I love the way the program works, though there was a definite learning curve in migrating from PowerPoint. The concept of a master slide is completely different between the two programs, for instance.
In Keynote, I love the way you can work with transparency and shadows, and I find the Inspectors to be a logical way to work on objects in my presentation. The inclusion of a new “light table” in the 2006 version of Keynote solved one of my long-standing grudges (no easy way to sort large presentations), but it still needs some work (I’d like to be able to choose the size of the slide images on the preview table).
The way Keynote handles tables and charts also seems to work much better for me; I always struggled to get just the look I wanted in PowerPoint. In Keynote, I spend much less time trying to “design” my presentation than I do just creating the slides I need. I find the default color schemes for each template work quite well, so I seldom spend time tweaking things.
PowerPoint is still more powerful when it comes to doing animation and builds, though Keynote has more options, and more ways of using those options, than does PowerPoint. The 2006 release of Keynote added the ability to build individual bullets, and have activity build between bullets, which was a welcome addition, but PowerPoint still does more.
Geetesh: How easy is it to co-exist in a Keynote-PowerPoint world, for tasks like exchanging presentations.
Rob: In theory, it’s transparent. In practice, things like alpha-channel graphics and embedded movies don’t carry over well at all between Keynote and PowerPoint. As such, I have both programs on my machine, and I no longer try to view one’s slides in the other. If someone sends me a PowerPoint presentation that I need to work with, I’ll just do it in PowerPoint (that way, I won’t accidentally add something that doesn’t work in PowerPoint).
I have, however, created presentations in Keynote and exported them as PowerPoint slides. I then open the converted presentation in PowerPoint, tweak as necessary, and send to friends who use PowerPoint on their Macs or PCs (being careful to stick to cross- platform fonts). This lets me use some of Keynote’s nice themes in PowerPoint presentations.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog post or content are those of the authors or the interviewees and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of any other agency, organization, employer, or company.
Filed Under:
Interviews
Tagged as: Interviews, Keynote, Office for Mac, PowerPoint, Rob Griffiths
authorGEN has released authorPOINT 3.6 with some new updates. authorPOINT is a content authoring tool that includes a PowerPoint to Flash converter. The most significant feature of this release is that the trial version can now be used to create full-length multimedia presentations in Windows Media and the Real Media formats; there is no limit to the size of the presentations in the free version and the outputs are without watermarks. You would need to buy the software though, if you need to output your presentations in the Flash format.
Read more on the eCoustics.com site.
Filed Under:
Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, authorSTREAM, PowerPoint
Do you work on PowerPoint for the Mac and receive presentations created in PowerPoint for Windows? And do you hate seeing that graphic metafile conversion dialog box all the time when you are working with such files?
Rob Griffiths from Macworld shares some workarounds here.
Filed Under:
PowerPoint All Versions
Tagged as: Office for Mac, PowerPoint, Rob Griffiths
PowerPoint is almost a synonym for the word presentation these days, and presentation file sizes can be huge. True, you could convert your presentation to another format like Flash SWF, but that brings its own share of problems, like losing the ability to make any changes in the future. That’s where PowerPoint compression software like PPTminimizer steps in. This product lets you optimize multiple presentations into different compression levels without changing the format.
Filed Under:
Add-ins
Tagged as: Add-in, Balesio, PowerPoint
The timing could not have been better. More than a month ago, we heard that Microsoft would drop support for PDF in the upcoming Office 2007 suite since Adobe might have sued them. And now, Microsoft is headed towards an entirely different direction by embracing the ODF Open Document file format. Granted — comparing PDF and ODF is like the apple and oranges story — but they are both easily distributable file formats.
Microsoft has given in to pressure from several parties including some governments and announced that they are to offer new free open-source software which will make it possible for the Office suite to handle documents in rival formats. The company will develop tools that will enable conversion between its Open XML formats in Office 2007 and OpenDocument. This will allow Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to handle documents in rival technology formats.
Microsoft had been leaving it to ODF supporters to add ODF support to Office 2007, and a group from OpenOffice.org has been working on a plug-in for more than a year. It’s not clear why Microsoft has changed its mind, but it has now organized and funded some third parties to do the job. (The schedule shows that Microsoft wants the plug-in finished by the end of this year, to meet Massachusett’s January deadline, so this may be a factor.).
Today’s announcement is not native support for ODF, but rather a translator, that will let users open and save in the ODF format. That’s important for organizations that want to adopt this standard, such as the state of Massachusetts. But, if the idea is to come up with universal file formats, we’re still not quite convinced this is a big step forward. From a legal standpoint, it’s good that no company owns ODF. But from a practical standpoint, we already have file formats that are used by just about everyone — and those are the Microsoft Office formats, such as DOC and XLS.
Filed Under:
Microsoft Office
Tagged as: Microsoft Office, ODF, PowerPoint 2007, PowerPoint All Versions
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