Sacred Cow #4: Using {feature} Or {plugin} Will Make Me Look Savvy.
This sacred cow is such a no-brainer that it begs the question of whether it is in fact a sacred cow or that it's just poor amateurish judgement. It's one of the reasons why many people hate slideware. The answer to this isn't so clear-cut. In many cases it is the latter. In those, it's just someone who merely didn't know any better and could easily be talked down from the ledge.
In some cases, though, it's dogma. It's the manager who wants "cool." It's these people that see it as gospel that to wow your audience, you need to wow them with your mad PowerPoint skills. It's these people who are more concerned with you having slides that "look good" rather than slides that get the message across effectively.
You'll also find that people who hold onto these sacred cows get excited about new transitions and animations in the latest version of PowerPoint (or Keynote). Walls of flame, sparkles, anything that glows, glitters, flies, slides, or makes noise is considered progress and essential to that next great presentation.
This sacred cow is even represented by unbridled excitement for upcoming tools like pptPlex and Prezi. While they do have that "wow" factor and they could in fact be used to make highly effective visuals, they'll more often than not be used inappropriately. Not too long from now, we'll see these tools used with the frequency and in a manner such that the daily stream of cursing of PowerPoint that I see in Twitter will also be directed at these tools.
I'm no luddite. I truly believe that these features and tools, if used with restraint and the effectiveness of the message as the prime consideration, can be very powerful tools in our tool box. However, it's those believers in this fourth sacred cow who take it as a given that flash and shock and awe are the keys to great presentations. What these people need to learn is that the secret to this sacred cow is that pig with lipstick is still a pig.
Image credit: emilylt, used under a Creative Commons license.
SlideRocket: A Review
A while back, when Googling for a PowerPoint alternative (competition is good for consumers, and Microsoft too), I stumbled upon SlideRocket. The concept was intriguing. An online service that provided an alternative to PowerPoint and even Keynote, allows you to share your slide decks online, and even deliver them remotely in a meeting. What's more, since it uses Flash and AIR, the decks can be viewed offline. Even better, they offered a 30-day free trial with which to try it out. Given all of this, I felt it would be foolish of myself not to give it a go.
Features
SlideRocket gives you a copious amount of features that you would expect to see in a PowerPoint alternative while also providing features that you would not expect, but after some reflection, fall in the category of, "well, duh!" You can import existing Powerpoint documents into SlideRocket or create your own within their Flash-driven interface. Unfortunately, if you're a Keynote user, SlideRocket doesn't support your documents. Your only option is to export your slide deck to PowerPoint first. With how SlideShare now supports Keynote, this is a pretty glaring omission, in my opinion. Because it's Web-based, you can access your slides from anywhere, as long as you have an Internet connection. Also, as I mentioned before, because they leverage AIR, you can even download a copy of your slide deck and use it offline. The catch is this will not work on the free account.
If you are in the need of stock photography, you can access images from fotolia and flickr directly from within the interface. If you're using other people's flickr photos, you can even restrict your search to those in the creative commons. One word of caution, though. If you intend to use your slides commercially, then the flickr search built into SlideRocket isn't restrictive enough. You'll still have to find the photos you need the old-fashioned way. With that said, this integration with image sources on the Web is powerful and can be a huge time saver. Hopefully, they'll integrate with more stock photography sources in the future. It also appears as though they will be adding the ability to access icons, templates, stock audio, fonts, and cartoons in the future. The only other service online at the moment is to have special printings of your slide deck done through Mimeo.
Taking a page from services such as SlideShare, you can share your slides with the world (found under "Publish," not "Share.") through either a direct link or embedded in a Web page. Graduating from the free to either the individual or business accounts will give you more options, including restricting who has access and removing the SlideRocket branding.
Business accounts give you additional capabilities including the ability to have a team work on the slides with multiple users available in the business account. You can even set permissions for each user. You can deliver your slides to remote members of a meeting as well, with you as the presenter in full control of the slides. Additionally, you can access metrics on you slide decks, seeing how many people viewed your slides and how long they spent on each slide. Now, if you're giving a presentation, the slide can't really stand on their own anyway, so you may find some of the features useful and some not so.
Pricing
For the feature set they promise, the cost of using SlideRocket seems fairly reasonable. You get the basics at no cost with two at-a-cost options. $10/month will give you more features than the free version and $20/user/month will give you the full suite of features.
The Test Drive
For my evaluation of SlideRocket, I created a PowerPoint document to serve as my control in this little experiment. I encourage you to look at the original document so that you can get a clear glimpse of what they're supposed to look like. If you've read my earlier post on chart design, then you should recognize many of the slide and the subject matter I used to come up with them. I then created two slide decks on SlideRocket. One was an import of my PowerPoint slides and the other was an attempt to recreate those slides as faithfully as possible with only the SlideRocket tools. The slides are generally how one should not design slides, though my intent was to look at features used quite often in slides that either I create or I am subjected to. Among the features & effects I included in the test are:
- Blocks of text
- Bullets (gag)
- Gradual build of bullets
- Shapes
- Bar charts
- Pie charts
- Charts with an alternative background color
- Embedding images
- Embedding images full bleed
- Embedding video
- Multiple shapes, including varying fill options
Importing A Slide Deck
Epic Fail
The process for importing a slide deck was easy enough. They even give you two options for importing. One is to import the slides as images and the other is to convert them from PowerPoint slides to SlideRocket slides. When attempting to import them as images, I was greeted with an error message when the process failed. I'm not sure what in the slide it couldn't handle, but when you look at the original deck, there's nothing outrageous.
I next imported the slides to be converted into the SlideRocket format. This type of import as a little more successful. That is, I didn't get any errors. What I can't say, however, is that it went without a hitch.
The first thing I noticed is that the font sizes were not respected. This seemingly simple effect, font size, was too much for the import. Everything on the title slide was shrunken down to 18 (point I assume). It also had difficulty with text inside drawing objects. Though the font was preserved, it too was reduced in size.
SlideRocket handled JPEGs well, at least those used as slide backgrounds. Additionally, it did give provide one feature I wish PowerPoint had: the ability to extract a slide background for use elsewhere.
Drawing objects were a mixed bag. SlideRocket converted the thought balloon and donut to rectangles and the pattern fill (which I wish people wouldn't use) used in one rectangle was lost. In the last slide of the deck, I threw a lot of drawing objects at SlideRocket, with the intent of uncovering redrawing of the diagram should it have any issues. With the exceptions just mentioned, it handled the import fairly well.
Charts were a mixed bag as well, though more risky, it seems, than the drawing objects. The bar charts were converted to images that didn't appear to be the right size and/or scale because the text and numbers show signs of disproportionate scaling. With these charts imported as images, all hope is lost of editing them without reimporting a replacement slide or recreating the chart within SlideRocket. The pie chars fared much worse with text labels being cut off, and the legend getting carved up. The pie charts themselves were also skewed oddly and moved to the far left edge of the slide. The line chart fared much better, though the legend in this chart was sliced nearly in half, just like the others. The moral of the story: if you have charts that you want to import, don't. If the charting capabilities of SlideRocket doesn't give you what you need, then save your chart as a graphic first and then import that.
PowerPoint 2004 has a nasty habit of flagging PNG files as needing QuickTime and a decompressor. Every other software package and project that uses images can support these files. However, in true Microsoft fashion, they fail to support open standard they themselves don't own (MPEG-4 video is another). My question during this evaluation was, "can SlideRocket see this PNG for what it really is and display it?" The answer: no. If they're using Microsoft libraries on the back-end, then this result should come as no surprise. With the color depth of JPEG, the losslessness of GIF, and transparency support far superior to GIF, there is no good or justifiable reason for Microsoft to not support PNG properly.
PowerPoint has the same problem with QuickTime movies (MPEG-4). Again, a standard they don't own, and thus don't support. Now in this case, Microsoft isn't the only one to blame. It's at this point that I stumbled upon a limitation of SlideRocket. All video that you import needs to be Flash Video (FLV). I'll cover this some more later.
Builds within a slide also did not make it through the import. On the slide with the iPhone screenshot, the two bullets are supposed to appear one at a time. This was not preserved.
In summary, when importing PowerPoint slides, you do so at your own risk. Expect to redo elements of most of your slides and the entirety of many others. Lack of Keynote support is also a huge downer.
The final imported product:
Creating A Slide Deck From Scratch
One of the selling points of SlideRocket is how it is an alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote altogether. Thus, the next part of my evaluation was an attempt to recreate the slide deck from scratch. Though SlideRocket bills itself as an alternative to Keynote, my using it as an alternative requires more than just copying some build effects and slide transitions. If it's not as easy (or easier) to use as Keynote, then it's got a hard sell.
As a design tool, SlideRocket lacks a lot of what the standard tools have, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Presenters need to show more restraint anyway and tools that force a little bit of that restraint are doing a service (think Keynote's chart palettes). However, ease of use should be something that's just nice to have, but rather it should be a functional requirement. This is where I feel SlideRocket comes up short. The toolbar to the left is a nice touch, but the properties panels to the right took quite a bit of getting used to. The library link on the bottom isn't your asset library (which I can't seem to learn), it's your slide library. Keep in mind that you don't have any slides in there unless you explicitly add them to your library. The menus at the top are particularly annoying to me. As a Mac user, I have certain user experience expectations. The design of the menu system, however, has its own expectations: that I'm a Windows user. To be on a Mac and forced to deal with Windows user interface conventions was quite jarring. The copy and paste keyboard commands that I expect to work don't. I have to constantly remind myself (they think I'm using Windows. It's Ctrl, not Command. Worse yet, the copy and paste was not responsive many of the times and I often found myself pasting what I copied previously, not what I just copied (or thought I did).
SlideRocket does offer a modest selection of simple slide templates. Fortunately, they don't hit you with a bunch of horrendously complex templates like some applications *cough*PowerPoint*cough*. The five they do offer, all-white, all-black, a gradient theme similar in concept to what Apple uses in their keynotes (small k), "Elegant" (a lighter gray gradient theme, and "Ripple," which I think we can all do without. In the future, they'll be adding the ability to share themes and layouts with other SlideRocket users.
Adding new slides is fairly simple, with it giving you the layout of the last slide you created as a default. Using the panel to the right, you can change it to five other layouts if you wish:
- Title slide
- Text (think default PowerPoint "you know you want to use bullets!" slide layout)
- Title only
- Blank
- Picture - horizontal
- Picture - vertical
Adding elements is fairly easy and is the best part of the UI. Click an icon and often either the appropriate drawer slides out or you're presented with an asset library. Text boxes are simple to add, for example. However, once you need to modify properties, you're faced with a rather confusing properties panel with some odd UI conventions that either don't seem to make sense or just don't seem to work, period.
There's a decent amount of shapes available that can be drawn to the slide. Again, the properties panels to the right leave a lot to be desired. A LOT; as in, you can't do squat. Come to think of it, instead of complaining about the panels each time I cover a feature, let me make it clear right here: they suck. They're so bad, it's one of the main reasons why I felt very limited when using SlideRocket and why I felt frustrated with how I was unable to bend it to my will. The manipulation of shapes and positioning and formatting of them was torture. Add to this the copy+paste issues I mentioned earlier, and suffice it to say, I was relieved when I was finally done. If given a choice next time, I'd rather choose waterboarding.
Adding images worked well. To be honest, with the exception of the asset library, it's hard to screw this up. With that said, I did like the way they implemented the asset library. It's also from here where you can access image sources such as Fotolia and flickr.
My attempt at adding video left me, well, sad. I knew I had trouble when I tried to upload my short QuickTime movie and it didn't want to let me select any. It would have been better, much better, if SlideRocket let me know up front that Flash Video and only Flash Video can be used. This left me in a bit of a quandary since I don't have any software that I'm aware of to convert my movie to FLV. After a while spent on Google, I came across Zamzar, a free service that will convert your movies to any one of many different formats. Using Zamzar, I was able to convert my QuickTime movie to Flash Video and upload it to SlideRocket. I really wish SlideRocket was more upfront with this restriction as it's one that will surely leave many people quite puzzled.
Wrong Colors
Shapes left me mad, images made me happy, video left me sad, and charts, well charts just plain old let me down. Knowing that SlideRocket is built in Flash and that Flash is a vector-based application, I held quite a bit of hope in their chart capabilities. Alas, it was not to be. Bar charts were quite limiting. I could not choose between data labels or the Y-axis. I got the Y-axis, whether I wanted it or not. Where it put the labels also failed to impress. You had the choice of outside (only if the bars didn't go to the top) or inside and inside meant dead-center. You couldn't isolate individual data points for their own color in the way that would be easiest, but even using the Keynote method leaves unimpressive results.
Pie charts had their own frustrations. For example, SlideRocket's chart's legend is ridiculously small. There's no way on this green earth that anyone in the back of a conference room could read the legend. Also, when you change the start angle so that you can more intelligently orient the slices, SlideRocket conveniently forgets your stated intentions and reverts it back to what it's default to as soon as you move away from the slide.
Where's My Data?
Line graphs were nothing short of amazing; utterly amazing in their ability to trash the visual display of my data. Not only did it fail to use the line colors I chose for the data series, but in the final product, data points that it still maintains fail to show up on the chart at all. You better hope your data points don't go something like 48, 34,0,25,0. That 25 will not show up on the chart whatsoever.
The final product, built within SlideRocket:
Remote Delivery
One of the enticing points of SlideRocket is the ability to drive the slides while your audience, located anywhere in the world, can listen to your presentation (over the phone, Skype, etc.). I tried this out on my computer using two different browsers to simulate the presenter and audience and it worked well. I rehearsed several times in the conference room where I was due to present (a different slide deck than these examples, of course) without a hitch. I even was able to use my presentation remote just fine.
Come show time, SlideRocket failed me miserably. When attempting to advance to the second slide, the second window that had the slide playing went to the back, giving me the the regular SlideRocket interface. To make matters worse, the moment that happened, Safari froze solid. The only thing I could do was move the mouse and do a hard reset. Even command-option-escape didn't work. Fortunately, I had rehearsed enough so that I could keep going and get the remote folks back up to speed quickly once I rebooted and relaunched Skype and the SlideRocket deck. This surely didn't give me confidence that SlideRocket was indeed ready for prime time. It's too bad it waited until then to teach me that lesson.
Summary
SlideRocket is a service whose concept genuinely has promise. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it just fails to deliver on many counts. The ability to embed full-featured slide decks in a Web page, a fail-safe mechanism when presenting on the road, integration with online services such as Fotolia and flickr, and an alternative to the software out there now make SlideRocket and services like it something I'd like to see succeed. However, the UI frustrations, limitations, and broken charting functionality make the extra effort to create slides in SlideRocket an effort I would rather not undertake. If they can fix these problems, I would love to give it another thorough review because as I said, based on what they promise, I'd like to see them succeed. However, they first need to deliver on those promises.
Improve Your Slide’s Charts
Types of slides that we often create are those that try to present data to our audience. All too often, this data is placed in a cluttered data table or worse, is presented in a narrative format. In most cases, a chart of some sort is the appropriate method of presenting data. However, there is an art to doing it right. A poorly formatted chart can be just as bad as that useless narrative on the screen.
In my experience, I've seen far more bad charts than effective ones. Often, the reason is expedience or because someone decided "hey, this looks cool!" An exotic sports car with a broken transmission may look very cool, but it's not going to get anywhere. Likewise, a poorly thought-out chart may look cool, but it's useless without an explanation.
We've got 3 seconds for that chart to convey its information in support of our story.
When creating a chart, the first thing we need to ask ourselves is, "what is the most important information?" The key words there are "most important" and "information." Information and data are not the same. Data are the raw numbers and figures. There's nothing more to them. Information is the message or story being told by the data. Data by itself will not translate into information. What we do to the data will provide us with information.
Secondly, we need to focus on which information is most important. Depending on how you present your data, the information will be different. I'm sure you've heard the phrase, "Lies, lies, and damned statistics." Well, it's true. How you manipulate or present data affects the message being presented. Let's look at two charts that contain the same data, but because of a different presentation, tell a different story.
Bad Pie Chart
For this example, I took the number of level 80 characters is one of my World of Warcraft guilds and created two different charts. The data is exactly the same in each. In the pie chart, the data is represented as percentages of the total while in the bar chart, the data is represented by the raw numbers. The message contained within both, while truthful, are misleading. In the pie chart, you have a large number of slices that well crammed into one chart minimizes the difference between them. Though you can interpret correctly that there are twice as many druids as there are warlocks, the visual and mental effort required to get there is more than is necessary. Without the labels, all we can do is guess at the relative values. In addition, since all we see are percentages (fractions of one whole pie), we lack any information about the size of the guild.
Keynote Bar Chart (before)
The bar chart tells a completely different story. Here, you've got a more apparent representation of the relative class populations. Is the chart poorly formatted? You bet. I'll get to that in a moment. However, in this example, it's immediately apparent that the warlock population is very small. A simple glance and the two bars tells that story in 3 seconds or less.
Bar Charts
Now, with that said, the relative populations of each of the classes is not what my most important information was. The information I wanted to convey was the population of death knights, added to World of Warcraft this past November, relative to to the other classes. The other bar chart example, this time from PowerPoint also fails to convey this information. In both the Keynote and PowerPoint examples, the chart settings were left mostly to their defaults. Below are the major problems with these charts:
PowerPoint Bar Chart (before)
- 3D In this example, PowerPoint's default is to present a 3D chart. The problem with 3D bar charts is that they lie to us. They give the bars more surface area than is necessary, and which is often out of proportion with reality, especially for the smaller bars. Take for example, the same chart displaying data for one of my other guilds. This chart has two bars with a value of 0, yet they have surface area. Thus, visually, these two bars appear to have value when in fact they don't.
- Inappropriate Title These charts are titled, "Classes - D'Gentlemen." Though it is true that these charts are displaying the number of level 80 characters in D'Gentlemen, sorted by class, that's not the most important information. What's most important is the number of death knights relative to the other classes.
PowerPoint Bar Chart #2
- Bar Colors Obscure the Message When displaying multiple data points, it's not necessary to always give them their own color. Remember, what's most important in these charts isn't each bar relative to the other 9. What's most important is the value of one specific bar relative to the other 9.
- Sort Order Obscures the Message When displaying multiple data points, be mindful of the sort order. Sorting them alphabetically doesn't always make sense. Reordering the bars by value (alphabetically as a secondary sort) drives home to the audience the relative population of death knights in a manner that takes very little visual effort. The eyes don't have to bounce all around the chart to put all the pieces together.
Keynote Bar Chart (after)
- Chart Junk Edward Tufte refers to the stuff on a chart that doesn't add value to the chart "chart junk." In this case, the border of the chart, the grid lines, legends, and the numbers down the left all contribute to a data:ink ratio that is out of whack. None of that contributes to the easy absorption of the data. Because of limitations of presentation slide software and the nature of the data, our best option here is to place the value of the data points right there on the bars.
PowerPoint Bar Chart (after)
Once we clean up the problem areas of these charts, we're presented with two completely different representations of the same exact data. However, this time, the information that is most important is what is conveyed to the audience. The title was changed to "Death Knights - D'Gentlemen," the data points were reordered and all of the bars, with the exception of "Death Knight," are the same color.
Pie Charts
Keynote Pie Chart (before)
Another popular chart type is the pie chart. One key thing to remember with these charts is the information conveyed is always the data point as a percentage of the whole. Even if the labels show raw numbers instead of percentages, the message that your audience receives is that of a percentage or fraction.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (before)
My two examples of the before versions of PowerPoint and Keynote slides are of the 3D variety. Though not the default, they are by far the most popular. These charts are intended to convey the population distribution among the different races in my World of Warcraft guild. Let's look at where these charts fail us:
- 3D It can't be said enough that 3D charts lie. In the Keynote example, the 10% slices look just a little bigger than they should, all because of the illusion of perspective. In the PowerPoint example, because the gray slice is just as tall as the green slice, the gray slice appears to be bigger. This is because with a 3D pie laid out as it is, our brain expects the gray slice to be shorter. The rules of perspective dictate that identical height objects at different distances appear to be different heights, with the one furthest away being the smaller. You also have the same problem you have with bar charts where smaller data points get extra surface area than they should get, proportionately.
Keynote Pie Chart (after)
- Texture and Colors The Keynote example is using its default fill texture. Marble doesn't add any value and instead distracts the eyes with a lot of visual noise. Many extraneous lines are added when only a few, those that separate the pie slices, are important. The PowerPoint slide uses colors that just don't contrast enough and lets slices "hide."
- Lack Of Values Leads To Guessing The lack of data values in the PowerPoint example leads to guessing about the relative sizes of the slices. The legends in both leave a lot to be desired, but Keynote can move that information to the slices without compromising too much (depending on the slice sizes). PowerPoint can move this information to the slices as well, but the size of the chart is sacrificed too much.
PowerPoint Pie Chart (after)
- Chart Junk The PowerPoint example contains the usual chart junk: chart borders and slice outlines.
I cleaned up the charts by flattening the charts, simplifying the colors & textures, using more dense and informational labels (where I could), and eliminating chart junk. The new slides should be more effective when presented to an audience.
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
Rehearse in PowerPoint
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.
Rehearse in Keynote
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!
PowerPoint Options
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.
Presenting in PowerPoint
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.
Slideshow Options in Keynote
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.
Presenter Options in Keynote
Presenting in Keynote
Recording Yourself
Audio Options in PowerPoint
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.
Audio Options in Keynote
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:
| PowerPoint | Keynote |
|---|---|
| QuickTime Movie | |
| PDF (print dialog) | PDF* |
| JPEG* | |
| PNG* | |
| TIFF* | |
| PICT | PPT |
| GIF | Flash (can include audio) |
| BMP | iPod |
| Web Page | |
* = Keynote allows you to step through slide builds.
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.
PowerPoint 2004 vs. Keynote ’08
Having read in books and online how great Keynote was and how the pros use it over Keynote, how could I not spend the $70 on iWork and give it a spin? The version of PowerPoint that I have to compare Keynote to isn't the latest and "greatest," but as some may argue, with the lack of macro support in Office 2008, the older, PPC-based version may be the better of the two Microsoft offerings. Personally, all I have is 2004 and given how I can't support Microsoft's anti-competitive no-macro move, Office 2004 is what I've got. Also keep in mind that this is based on early impressions and early, limited use, so if I'm just not figuring something out and you know the answer to what I'm looking for, then please feel free to share.
Templates
So, when I'm creating a new slide deck, I'm typically not one to use built-in templates. In fact, given my long history with PowerPoint on Windows, that's the wise approach. Microsoft's templates are just atrocious, hideous, and simply not professional. For all we know, they hired a monkey to throw poo at Windows Paint. They just aren't conducive to readability. The template is the star of the (B-movie) show, not your content. What's worse is that if you did want to use one of their templates, PowerPoint sure isn't that helpful.
PowerPoint Templates
You have two ways to choose you design. One is through the formatting palette and the other is through a Finder-based dialog. The thumbnails in the palette are too small to be useful and essentially require you to choose them one at a time to really get a good idea what it's about. The dialog is even worse because you're choosing them by name, with no thumbnail or preview at all.
Keynote, on the other hand, actually has me considering using their templates (called themes), even if just the simpler ones. You're presented with usable thumbnails in an easy to navigate dialog.
Keynote Templates
The themes are also quite intelligently designed. Unlike Microsoft, Apple apparently employed real designers with a knowledge of the fundamental concepts of what makes text readable. They are also, for the most part, simple enough to not be too distracting. I took a PowerPoint slide deck I created and applied one of the built-in Keynote themes and got what instantly looked more professional even though the original design and Keynote theme were similar in concept. In Keynote, it's more polished right off the bat.
Interface
PowerPoint Interface
So, now we've got our template chosen, let's take a look at the interface.
Office 2004 is famous for straddling the line when it comes to obeying the Mac Human Interface Guidelines. On the one hand, they put the controls in a (mostly) easy to use formatting palette, yet they still give you a Windows-ish toolbar. You can close the toolbar, but you'd lose access to some functionality, such as the format painter. Truly bad interface design. With that said, it's still much more elegant than the Windows version. It's as though the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft tried to build a compliant UI, but overlords in Redmond weren't going to allow them to stray too far from the ranch.
Keynote Interface
Keynote, on the other hand, puts the toolbar, front and center, and attached to the document. Huh? Say what? Yeah. The very thing you're not supposed to do to Mac apps, Apple did. The very thing that makes no sense (attaching toolbars to documents rather than the application itself), they did. You know what? I don't like it. Yeah, they're easy to access and they're far more usable than their Windows counterparts, but I really resent losing that form of real estate. I don't think splitting duty between the menu bar and the toolbar is good interface design. The application/document relationship we have come to understand because it frankly makes sense has been turned sideways and upside down at once. With that said, you can turn the toolbar off and not lose access to any functionality. They do provide an inspector palette, which does make me feel at home, for what it's worth.
Adding slides to your deck is also different between the two. In PowerPoint, your primary interface for this is under "Add Objects" in the palette. I prefer to use a blank slide as a starting point when designing my slides, so I have to scroll down to find what I want. Even if a blank slide isn't what I'm looking for, the various designs would likely require scrolling to find what you want.
Keynote takes a different approach. When you click "New," it creates a new blank slide for you. Hey, what do you know, it creates exactly what I want by default! If you want to change the layout of the slide, click the Masters button in the toolbar and you'll get a list (no scrolling) of your options. The thumbnails you are provided in the drop-down list actually have your theme applied to them so you have a better idea what you're getting yourself into than in PowerPoint.
Going Full Bleed
One of the tricks for cross-platform builds in PowerPoint is to use your full-bleed images as individual slide backgrounds. This prevents all kinds of odd-behavior in going between PowerPoint 2003 and 2004. One of the things that PowerPoint also does is it will scale your slide and everything in it to the resolution of your screen or projector. Keynote provides the option to scale to the size of the screen as well, through the preferences. -added 12/14/2008 Keynote takes a different approach. Rather than risking the distortions and pixelations that result when rescaling graphics, you create your slides with a specific resolution. Each approach has its benefits.
PowerPoint:
- Your slides will fill up the screen no matter what you're projecting on. You don't need to think about what type of projector you're going to be using.
- Individual slide backgrounds allow your image to be free from accidental dragging.
- Almost all projectors project at 1024x768, so scaling may not be an issue.
- No distortions or pixelation of images
Pick your poison.
Design
PowerPoint Guides
One of the things that's useful when laying out graphics and images on a slide is some sort of guide that shows you the power points as defined by the rule of thirds. When turning on guides in PowerPoint, you're presented with two guide lines, which can be moved. In all my time using PowerPoint, I have yet to see a means with which you can add guide lines. It's either not there or not obvious.
Keynote Guides
Keynote, on the other hand, allows you to drag new guide lines from the rulers to your slide. In addition, the rulers just make sense. In PowerPoint, the rulers seem to be in at least the equivalent of inches. 10 "inches" across the top and 7.2 along the side. Each major mark (an inch, I guess) is divided into 8ths. Since PowerPoint (Keynote won't either) doesn't give you the thirds laid out with the guides, you've got some calculations and approximations to do. Keynote's ruler is divided into 10 major units along the top and along the side. Each major unit is divided into 10ths. Now, you tell me which is more useful?
Media
PowerPoint likes to throw you right into the clip-art folder whenever you want to add an image as a background (the PPT hack I described above). I have yet to figure out a reason for this bizarre behavior. It's extremely annoying and just obnoxious. Given the clip art included with Office, nobody should even want to use what's in that folder. Fortunately, adding an embedded image doesn't share this behavior. That's good, but it also sheds light on the inconsistent and seemingly hap-hazard user interface decisions by Microsoft.
Media
Keynote offers excellent integration with iPhoto, through a media dialog that shows you what's in your iPhoto library. Just drag and drop. You can also choose something outside of iPhoto if you wish. Unlike PowerPoint, though, you don't need to specify what kind of file it is before you do so.
Charts
If there's one universal truth, it's don't copy your charts from another program and paste them onto your slides unless there's just no way on this green earth your slide application can handle the task. If you've ever seen an Excel chart pasted into a PowerPoint, you know what I mean. Both PowerPoint and Keynote have the capability of adding charts. However, the approaches the two applications take couldn't be more different.
PowerPoint Charts
PowerPoint starts you off with a bar chart with 3 data series and 4 data points. The default chart is full of what Edward Tufte calls "chart junk." It's 3D, has unnecessary borders, rules, and values on the Y-axis. Oh, did I mention, PowerPoint launches another program for this? While working on your PowerPoint chart, you're actually working in an application named Graph. This isn't just a Office 2004 thing. Office 2003 for Windows does the same thing. PowerPoint offers a seemingly limitless palette of colors for your potentially limitless number of data series. Of course, only if you want to lose your audience while they're trying to decipher your chart, would you use that many data points.
Keynote Charts
Keynote doesn't launch a separate application to create your charts. The default chart starts you off with 2 data series and 4 data points. The starter chart is also in 2D. Big deal? Not really. However, it does seem to suggest to the user a smarter use of charts in this context. The data entry mode is through a dialog and all updates are reflected in the chart real-time, unlike in PowerPoint. Chart colors are limited to only 6 for the chart. Though limiting, if you looking to add more than 6 data series, then you need to rethink your chart. Any more than 6 will surely create visual clutter. I would even find it hard to get up to that number of unique colors. Rather than diving through dialogs for each data series like you do in PowerPoint, changing colors of individual data series is done by dragging and dropping from the chart colors dialog to the series in the chart. This is much easier and far more efficient.
Summary, for now...
As you can see, I've very impressed with Apple's presentation slide software, Keynote '08. For a relatively new entrant into the space, Apple has shown they have more than enough of what it takes to compete effectively and give presentation professionals a tool worth choosing, even as a first choice.
As I mentioned earlier, I'm fairly new to Keynote, so what I've shared thus far is based on early impressions. There's more I have yet to explore, such as video integration, export options, etc. My next article on these two applications will cover features used when presenting. These two are in a class of their own, both far more useful in actual presentation mode than their Windows-based counterparts.
