Death By Powerpoint
Posted by: Rowan in Personal Blog, tags: Apple, Design, Futuresonic, Keynote, Microsoft, powerpoint, presentation
I’ve just spent the day at Futuresonic, the Urban Festival of Art, Music & Ideas in Manchester. The talks I saw ranged from the unintelligible to the inspiring, but on the whole it was an enjoyable day. I was particularly impressed by Aaron Koblain’s talk on data visualisation. I shan’t relay what he said, but instead will simply suggest you check out some of his amazing work at his website.
What the day also got me thinking about however was the quality of presentations. Every presenter I saw today used some sort of computer presentation, all run on the venue’s Macs running Apple’s Keynote software. However it was clear to see which presenters had written their presentations in Keynote and which had put them together using Microsoft Powerpoint. Reason 1 was that Keynote’s ability to import Powerpoint files isn’t quite perfect, making for some slightly oddly aligned fonts. Reason 2 was that I recognise some of the templates provided by both pieces of software. But reason 3 was that the presentations run on Keynote were – without exception – quite simply better than the Powerpoint ones. I couldn’t help but wonder why – both pieces of software offer similar functionality, so why would users of one program produce better presentations than users of the other?
