The NY Times has an article by Elisabeth Bumiller about the Army’s disenchantment with Powerpoint. It leads people to over-simplify complex problems (although the centerpiece of the article is a graphic that is too complex) and people spend too much time putting together text and graphic decks.

Sure. Fine. We have all sat through presentations at which someone reads through the 15 6-pt bullets on each slide, until by the time he reaches the 19 ways the company can synergize verticalized asymmetries, we’re begging for an aneurysm and don’t care if it’s his or ours. Sure, we’ve all been there. But …

Powerpoint imposed upon wandering business reports and updates a needed and welcome discipline of thought. Powerpoint forced presenters to break what they wanted to say into a set of headlines, and then think about how each headline was supported or elaborated. They could see how many slides they were taking to make their points. Bulleted lists focused the mind.

Powerpoint’s model of thought is better than the ramblings of a self-important business guy who’s grabbed the floor for as long as he feels he’s interesting, but it’s still quite a limited model. Powerpoint encourages us to think in a sequence of brief points, and doesn’t encourage us to express or make visible the relationship among the points. It doesn’t have a built-in way to indicate the clustering of points into a section. You can always create a sub-title slide with a distinctive look, but Powerpoint itself doesn’t encourage us to think that way. For example, it might have a breadcrumbs widget that shows the path we’ve been down as a standard part of slides, but it doesn’t.

What would a presentation system look like that expressed the relationships among the parts? I don’t know, but it probably wouldn’t be a set of discrete rectangles. The mind mapping programs are one approach (although I still haven’t found one that lets me disclose one leaf on a branch at a time, which is often necessary for narrative drama) and Prezi takes another.

Anyway, all I wanted to say is that we ought to remember that Powerpoint made business thought and expression more rigorous and structured.

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I know this is ridiculous, and it’s undoubtedly been done before and well. But, I had fun doing this, so leave me alone.

When I was in Saudi Arabia, not only did Open Office eat the slides I’d made, it also then itself crashed into little tiny pieces. I have no idea what the problem was, but I didn’t have a reliable Net connection, and I didn’t have any other presentation software, so I quickly recreated my slides in HTML and wrote a little Javascript so I could click to go from one slide to another in my browser. So, then I thought it might be useful to have a little program that let you write your slides with a text editor, using a very simple markup language (simpler than HTML), and that would then display your text as slides.

Welcome to ImpotentPoint. The site explains the markup, but basically you begin a new slide by beginning a line with four or more dashes. A line that begins with a = is taken as a head (<h1>). You can use up to six =’s to get six levels of heads. A bullet point begins with a *. A bullet point that will build begins with a +. Unfortunately, you have to use HTML markup to get a graphic in. And that’s about it.

I like the idea of writing slides in plain text, but I’m afraid that the markup required to make this actually useful would turn out to be as complex as just writing them in html.

If you want to see a tutorial click on this button and paste the text into the first text box at ImpotentPoint.

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Jeez, it would save me a lot of time if Keynote (or Powerpoint, if you insist) let me tag slides and objects in slides (especially images). I spend way too much time looking for that slide of a “smart room” or the one that shows business vs. end-user use of Web 2.0, or that photo of an old broadcast tower. (Later that day: Maybe I should add, having just rewritten the Wikipedia entry on Interleaf, that back in the early 1990s, Interleaf gave us exactly that capability.)

Instead, I have two hacks, both a pain in the butt. First, I keep a humungous file of slides I think I’ll want to use again. Second, I’ve started putting tags into the speaker notes by putting the tags in brackets. But I use the speaker notes to speak from, so larding them up with tags is sub-optimal.

And especially if you save Keynote files in the pre-2009 multi-file formats, then it’d be a snap for third parties to build tools that extract the tags and manage them. (I have a fussy home-made utility that extracts the text from the speaker notes and builds an editable file of them. If you want it, let me know.)

Tags are easy! Tags are useful! Let tags be tags!

[Tags: tags everything_is_miscellaneous keynote powerpoint metadata whines ]

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How about if there were a magical shape we could draw on top of a slide that would magnify what’s under it? So, if you were showing a slide of a screen capture, you could invoke these shapes to come and go, enlarging the elements to which you want to call attention.

kthxbye.*

Yes, not an entirely appropriate use of the term, but I find it an amusing youthicism. Its marginal appropriateness in this case is that I’m acknowledging that I’m talking into the wind when it comes to making product enhancement suggestions. And, yes, now the footnote is longer than the post. kthxbye.

[Tags: powerpoint keynote ]

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The latest version of Keynote exports files in Powerpoint format that the latest version of Popwerpoint can’t read. Charming.

A discussion board pointed out, however, that if you strip out all the presenter notes from your Keynote file, the exported Keynote file will indeed open in Powerpoint. I tried it on one small file, and it worked.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to strip out all those notes. And I haven’t seen anything from Keynote about an update.

[Tags: keynote powerpoint ]

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