Slideware Shoot-Out: Keynote ’09, PowerPoint 2008, & OpenOffice 3 Impress
It was with great joy that last month, I uninstalled Office 2004. The software, PowerPoint 2004 included, were getting on my nerves and there was nothing that suite could do to repair the broken relationship we had. It wore out its welcome.
Since then, I signed up to teach a slide design class through the county's adult & community education program. Having only Keynote on my laptop wasn't going to cut it, so I bought a copy of Office 2008 and downloaded OpenOffice 3.0 for it's slideware "app," Impress. Not only was I prepared to address software-specific questions, but I was also given a grand opportunity: a three-way slideware shoot-out.
In this side-by-side-by-side comparison, I won't be taking the same approach other sites such as MacWorld and their like take. Rather than giving points to the tools that have the most of whatever garbage they may offer, I'll focus more on what is important and not count the fluff or garbage. I'm breaking this comparison down to five different categories:
- Templates
- Interface
- Design Tools
- Charting
- Presenter Tools
I'm also scoring them and will provide each category's scores (out of 20) throughout the article.
Templates
When it comes to templates, what I'm looking for is quality, not quantity. PowerPoint 2004 had quantity all wrapped up. However, it lacked quality templates. What's important is that there are professional-quality templates as well as easy to access options for simple, unobtrusive designs.
Keynote has a great theme chooser that you're presented with when you launch the app. They range from the simple to the business-oriented to the family-friendly. The first four (White, Black, Gradient, and Showroom) are the ones I lean on most heavily as they're simple yet well thought-out. The theme chooser allows you to preview the slides in the themes by moving your mouse over the thumbnails. Creating themes on your own is also brain-dead simple. Of the three, Keynote's theme creation process was the simplest. Since the slide layouts in each theme are not set in stone, there are endless creative ways to design your themes. Even the built-in themes' layouts are all different. If you import slides from another deck, using a different theme, that theme and its associated layouts are available to your deck. I find this useful in limited situations.
PowerPoint's template choices in the 2008 version are light-years ahead of those in PowerPoint 2004. The templates are well designed and thought out. For a moment, I had to do a double-take to make sure this was PowerPoint. There is also a great option, in the palette, to create attractive gradient backgrounds. Creating templates is no different than it has been in previous versions of the application and PowerPoint has a set, defined collection of slide layouts, which are neither complete nor are they imaginative. Like Keynote, you can access more than one template by importing another deck's slides.
The quality of OpenOffice Impress's template choices should be quite familiar to those who have used Office 2004 or Office 2003 and earlier on Windows. They're bad. Very bad. What's worse, when a template got applied to my deck, I couldn't shake it. No matter what I did, I could not get it to switch to a plain white template like that I used in Keynote and PowerPoint. Impress was just as rigid in layout options as PowerPoint and seemingly lacked the ability to use different templates in the same deck.
Scores:
Keynote: 20, PowerPoint 2008: 17, OpenOffice: 5
Interface
This section is pretty subjective, and everyone will probably have different opinions here, especially with Office 2008's ribbon interface. The one complaint that I have with each is that they in one way or another thumb their nose at the long-established Mac's human interface conventions and the metaphors that support them.
Keynote '09's interface isn't all that different than '08, with the exception of a few new toolbar buttons. The fact that they're attached to the document still, in my opinion, fails to make sense. However, with that said, the icons are not crowded and the functionality is quite obvious. The inspector palettes are well thought-out, which is good, because this is where you'll spend most of your time when working with objects.
PowerPoint's ribbon interface is not for everyone. Windows users who have migrated to Office 2007 can tell you that as well. It attempts to bring everything to the front and it does that, though surprisingly not without still requiring a lot of (unnecessary in my opinion) clicks to do what you want to do. The very nature of moving everything forward also has an expted result: a dramatic loss of screen real estate. PowerPoint still has a palettes, but you'll find your time bouncing back and forth between the ribbon and the palette pretty equally. If everything in the palette were in the ribbon, that space up top would be just far too crowded.
OpenOffice's interface will probably be the most familiar to those using PowerPoint 2003 or earlier. It seems the developers didn't try to build different and better slideware application, but rather to mimic PowerPoint as much as they could. The same menu and function names are used and the interface looks a lot like a PowerPoint 2003 knock-off. As a Mac user, this type of interface is not what I would expect or want. It shows either a lack of understanding or caring on Sun's part.
Scores:
Keynote: 17, PowerPoint 2008: 12, OpenOffice: 4
Design Tools
This is where we get our hands dirty. In this section, I'm taking a look at some basic tools presenters would need for engaging visuals.
Keynote '09 had one improvement over its predecessor that really shines here: guides and rulers. If there's a reason to love Keynote it's this. You can have as many guides as you want in Keynote, all of which help snap your text and objects into place. When placing objects, even when you don't have guides on your screen, Keynote helps you space objects evenly. The ruler is logical (x-axis is 10 "inches") as well.
If there's an Achille's heel in Keynote, it's shapes. Keynote's shapes options is abysmal. It has the basics and that's it. If Apple wants to make Keynote more attractive to the business community (do they?), they need to beef up this part of the application.
Adding video and other media, on the other hand is another area where Keynote shines. In addition to importing media from your file system, you can add media directly from iTunes, iPhoto, and GarageBand. Cropping images and using masks is incredibly simple and effective. Cropping makes sense in Keynote. Videos playing on the screen give you on-screen controls when you move the mouse, which gives you an incredible amount of control when it matters. There are a healthy amount of options when placing images with some basic options such as shadows, reflections and what's called "Instant Alpha." This allows you to specify a color to make transparent, making it simple to get rid of pesky backgrounds in your images.
Build and transition options are quite healthy in Keynote, the newest of which is "Magic Move." If you have spent any time learning Flash, you'll recognize this as essentially "tweening." With Magic Move, you can have a transition between slides where an objec that exists on both slides can move, making it seem not so much as though you're moving to a new slide, but rather as though it's an on-slide build.
PowerPoint 2008 stumbles, in my opinion, where it stumbled in 2004: guides. I was completely unable to add any more than two guides (one horizontal, one vertical). Mapping out the power points (rule of thirds) was impossible except by one point at a time.
While PowerPoint stumbles on guides, it absolutely shines when it comes to its built-in library of shapes and collections of shapes. Though many of the collections are of the overused and improperly used types I see often, at least they're there for those who need them.
Importing media to your slides hasn't changed much since 2004 with no apparent effort by Microsoft to integrate with the iLife apps. This is quite unfortunate. Cropping images is fairly confusing and can be quite complicated getting the crop you want. Though the same effect can be obtained as with Keynote, it takes far more work and time to do so. This process is not intuitive. The video I added did not include the controls when I rand the slide show, even when I selected that option. The option to play the video in full screen mode was welcome. In addition, the video was not included in the file. This keeps the file size down, but it needs to be something you're aware of if you try to share the slide deck. To share the file, be sure to save it as a "PowerPoint Package," however, when I did this, it created a folder that contained just the .pptx file, but no movie. Also note that if you change the file name of your movie, PowerPoint will be unable to find it and play it.
As with Keynote, PowerPoint's collection of transitions (which should be used sparingly and purposefully) are pretty deep and easy to access. There is one exception: no Magic Move equivalent.
Impress, in its effort to emulate Office 2003, really shows how bad it can be as a slide design tool. Like PowerPoint, it falls flat on its face with the guides and rulers. However, in an attempt to outshine PowerPoint as a failure in this area, the ruler is 11 inches long along the x-axis. Now, this surely appears to faithfully represent an 8.5 x 11 inch document, but it makes using the guides to help with the rule of thirds an unnecessary hassle.
OpenOffice has a very good collection of shapes. Larger than Keynote's but nowhere near PowerPoint's offerings. With Impress, you can even turn your two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional shapes that you can rotate. This was pretty impressive.
Media handling was quite difficult. Cropping was just as bad as PowerPoint in what seems to be yet another case of copying Microsoft rather than trying to come up with a better way. Adding a video was as easy as PowerPoint, but lacked the options that either Keynote or PowerPoint offered. Like PowerPoint, the video is not included in the file, so changing the file name or moving the file will confuse the application.
Scores:
Keynote: 16, PowerPoint 2008: 15, OpenOffice: 8
Charting
I looked at each application's charting abilities by looking at the default design it gives you, using a bar chart and pie chart and then I try to eliminate the chart junk and evaluate how each gets you there, if it can.
Keynote's charts are, no doubt, attractive. They give you a lot to avoid (crazy textures), but when staying two dimensional, as you should, you get decent charts right out of the box. Moving to the next step is where Keynote shines as I was able to create attractive and easy to read charts with minimal effort.
PowerPoint's edges out Keynote, in my opinion, with the default charts. This is an area that Microsoft put a lot of effort into and it shows. When you ignore all the 3D chart offerings (3D charts lie), you get some half-decent charts. Where it fell flat for me was the attempt to get to a low chart-junk chart. If you look at the final documents, you can see I couldn't get there fully with the bar chart. The pie chart could only be exploded one slice at a time, which only makes it more difficult to make it look well proportioned. At least Keynote gives you a more universal explosion as well as the ability to slide the slices out one at a time.
With charts, OpenOffice shows what can happen when you put your effort into emulating the previous version of Office. The charts were abysmal out of the box and the process of reducing chart junk was painful. There was a nice feature where you can move bars to the left or right without editing the data table. However, all of the detailed customizability made the editing process very time intensive as there was no global option that seemed to work.
Scores:
Keynote: 14, PowerPoint 2008: 14, OpenOffice: 6
Presenter Tools
In this last section, I cover not just those features you use when it's showtime, but also those that are helpful when practicing your presentation or even sharing your deck.
All three allow you skip slides in your deck. By doing this, you can use the same large deck for all of your presentations, while triming it in a nondestructive manner as needed for each presentation. PowerPoint and OpenOffice do this by putting the slide number (in the sorter view) in a box with a line through it, not a very visible indicator. PowerPoint takes this one step further by fading out the slide in the slide sorter. Keynote makes the skip more obvious and easy to implement. The skipped slides are flattened and can be skipped and unskipped by right-clicking on them. PowerPoint and Impress make you go to the SlideShow menu. Not very intuitive. This is actually a draw between PowerPoint and Keynote, despite this because for all of the benefits of this approach, it becomes harder to know which slides to unskip since you can't see what they look like when they're skipped.
Rehearsing the presentation in Keynote gives you the same view as you get when presenting. If you have the presenter view enabled, this a great help in that you are practicing in the same technical environment as what you will have at show time. PowerPoint doesn't give you the presenter view when you rehearse. It seems as though Microsoft is assuming you won't have those tools available to you when you're presenting live. Where I work, that's the case, probably because the meeting organizers don't know they exist. The thing that PowerPoint has over Impress in this case is the ability to make your rehearsed times available to you when presenting with the presenter view.
Open Office's List of Supported File Formats
The presenter view in Keynote just eats the others for lunch. It's completely customizable and provides far more valuable information. PowerPoint gives you the next two slides and a separate window with the next slide (the same information twice), slide notes, and the current duration. By contrast, Keynote gives you the current slide, the next slide build (rather than the next slide, though it could be the next slide if that's the next build), slide notes, the duration and current time. Keynote also gives you a way to skip ahead and back several slides by moving the mouse cursor to the top of the screen.
Lastly, if there's one thing OpenOffice will beat Apple and Microsoft at, it's file format support. I was going to list the supported formats side-by-side until I saw OpenOffice's list.
Scores:
Keynote: 16, PowerPoint 2008: 14, OpenOffice: 8
Summary
In summary, Keynote, in my opinion holds the edge over PowerPoint, though Microsoft has produced a worthy adversary. Hopefully, the competition will continue to benefit us users in the future. The OpenOffice developers, on the other hand, need to stop imitating old products and start innovating.
Scores:
Keynote: 83, PowerPoint 2008: 72, OpenOffice: 31
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