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PowerPoint 2004 vs. Keynote ’08 – Part 2

In my last post, I looked at the basic features of PowerPoint 2004 and Keynote '08.  This time, I'm going to take a look at the two applications from the viewpoint of someone preparing to or actually delivering their presentation.  I will also be looking at the various export options should you need to make your slide deck available after your presentation or if your delivery method needs to be a little unorthodox. (Note:  I have corrected in an error in my last post.  Diving into Preferences does amazing things.)

Adapting To Your Audience

If you're someone that delivers the same presentation to several audiences, you might find that you have to customize your deck, either adding or removing slides.  In PowerPoint, your solution is to create a custom show.  You have to choose Slide Show --> Custom Shows --> New and select the slides you want and reorder them if necessary.  The functionality is quite buried and you're forced to go through quite a bit of effort just to exclude one or more slides.

Keynote provides a "skip slide" option that allows you to do just what it says:  skip the slide.  The slide is still in the deck.  Nothing's deleted.  However, when playing the slide show, you won't see the skipped slides.

Rehearsing

Both PowerPoint and Keynote offer options for rehearsing your delivery.  Both assume (correctly for most of us, I presume; myself not included) that when rehearsing, we have just one monitor.  PowerPoint displays the slide, full screen, with a small (and I mean tiny) timer in the bottom right corner.  It's as though you're presenting while looking at the big screen and your back's to the audience.  Certainly not what you would be doing if it were real; at least I hope not.

Keynote takes a different approach.  Keynote displays what the presenter would see if they had their laptop in front of them while facing the audience.  The benefit is clear.  The closer the practice environment is to the real thing, the more comfortable and natural the presenter will be when the heat is on.

Show Time!

When it's time to deliver our presentation, if we can have access to our laptop's screen, then it would be helpful for it to display what we need and only what we need, if anything.  It should be no surprise that both PowerPoint and Keynote offer a customizable display.  It should also be no surprise that both differ in their approach and their depth of customizability.

PowerPoint's customization options are very limited, allowing us to only change the playback options.  There are no options for changing the appearance of what the presenter sees.

Keynote provides more options for the presenter, providing two tabs in the preferences window:  one for the slideshow and one for the presenter display.  There is even an option to edit the layout of the screen that the presenter sees by dragging the various objects around in addition to adding and removing elements.  You even have the option to change the timer display.

Recording Yourself

Both PowerPoint and Keynote offer the option to record your speech as you step through the slides.  Keynote allows you to record your audio or add a soundtrack from within the inspector.  You can add your soundtrack from iTunes, which is more functional than any file system.  PowerPoint has a separate dialog for recording your audio and only allows you to add a soundtrack through the "Make Movie" option in the file menu. PowerPoint doesn't offer any integration with iTunes.

Exporting

Both applications allow you to export your slide deck to a wide variety of formats.  What does seem clear from the options, tough is that while Microsoft's options are mostly just different means to dump output to different image formats, Apple thought about how the audience might want or need to consume the content.  Below are the options:

All in all, you'll probably find PowerPoint 2004 could still work for you if you need to use it once in a blue moon and if you already have it.  However, if you use presentation slide software with any regularity or if you're choosing between PowerPoint or Keynote, save your money and use the less expensive tool that the pros apparently have good reason to use:  Keynote.