[kennedy]

Here I am in a room full of PeeCee people... and PowerPoint makes my pretty PowerBook look like a toy.

First, I can't even run through my slide show properly... with slideshow up on the external and my speaker notes on my laptop's screen. Well, I guess I can, but it doesn't move the notes when I move the slide show, so I keep reading the wrong notes. Argh!

Second, and far worse, the stupid thing corrupts its own files, causing me to lose all my work!! POS!!

HELP!

Anybody else see this kind of behavior?
Or am I the lucky one?

[icruise]

Does the windows version of PP move both slides and notes on automatically?

[SupahCoolX]

www.apple.com/keynote

Puts Powerpoint to shame, IMO.

[kennedy]

Originally posted by SupahCoolX:
www.apple.com/keynote

Puts Powerpoint to shame, IMO.

I have Keynote and yes its pretty sweet... but the other two people I am collaborating with have PeeCee's and PowerPoint only. I haven't experimented enough with Keynote to see if its exported PP's have weirdnesses (you know, like words spilling over onto two lines because they don't fit quite the same in PP, and stuff like that).

However, if PP is going to trash my files, then obviously anything would be better. Unfortunately, it may mean I have to do a lot more work on my PeeCee (which for a while has been almost nothing).

Ugh.

I guess its time to start rewriting all that I did this afternoon... sigh.

[asxless]

Originally posted by kennedy:]
Here I am in a room full of PeeCee people... and PowerPoint makes my pretty PowerBook look like a toy.

First, I can't even run through my slide show properly... with slideshow up on the external and my speaker notes on my laptop's screen. Well, I guess I can, but it doesn't move the notes when I move the slide show, so I keep reading the wrong notes. Argh!

Sounds like you didn't run through your presentation prior to the main event.

If you had practiced with two displays, you would have discovered that PowerPoint on the Mac allows you to display two _different_ and _unlinked_ views of the same presentation. It takes practice but this can be very helpful. For example, you can go forward/back in the speaker notes to answer an audience question without cycling the slides being viewed by the audience. Or you can advance the speaker notes to the next slide to remind yourself what is coming before you switch the slide being viewed by the audience.

FWIW my PC laptop toting colleagues have often been amazed by my PowerBook's ability to display a full screen PowerPoint presentation on the LCD projector while allowing me to view speaker notes AND related budget info (in a spreadsheet) AND related Email/memos in private on my PowerBook's screen.

AFAIK this is a Mac only feature. Every PC laptop I've ever used only supported video mirroring on the external display.

-- asxless in iLand

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by kennedy:
I have Keynote and yes its pretty sweet... but the other two people I am collaborating with have PeeCee's and PowerPoint only. I haven't experimented enough with Keynote to see if its exported PP's have weirdnesses (you know, like words spilling over onto two lines because they don't fit quite the same in PP, and stuff like that).

However, if PP is going to trash my files, then obviously anything would be better. Unfortunately, it may mean I have to do a lot more work on my PeeCee (which for a while has been almost nothing).

Ugh.

I guess its time to start rewriting all that I did this afternoon... sigh.

Keynote can read/write PowerPoint files, AFAIK.

[Cadaver]

The Mac version of PowerPoint does not link the presenter screen and the presentation screen together like the PC version (Office 2000 and Office XP). While I wish the Mac version had the option to have the dedicated linked presenter view like MS Office 2000 or XP, I can also see the benefit of being able to work with a completely separate application on one screen while the PP presentation continues on the other.

(BTW- asxless, my (work's) Dell Latitude C60 w/ Radeon 7500 Mobile supports dual displays just as most Apple laptops do, though no DVI).

Apple's Keynote has a linked presenter screen and presentation screen. If you truly need this feature, you can just import your PP file in to Keynote and run it.

***As always, preview your presentation before hand to make sure it will display correctly. This is not just good advice when going from Mac to PC (or vice versa) but also from one PC version of PowerPoint to another. I've seen more than one persons presentation display improperly because the author used features of PowerPoint XP (2002) not present in the presentation system - PowerPoint 97 (or was it 2000? Doesn't matter). Even font differences from Windows 98 to 2000 or XP are enough to visually corrupt a slide.

Kennedy, not sure why your PowerPoint corrupted your files. I know it doesn't help to say "that's never happened to me," but, in fact, it's never happened to me. And I use PowerPoint (Mac Office v. X) almost daily.

[asxless]

Originally posted by Cadaver:
(BTW- asxless, my (work's) Dell Latitude C60 w/ Radeon 7500 Mobile supports dual displays just as most Apple laptops do, though no DVI).

It's good to know that PC laptops have caught up on a feature of every PowerBook I've owned for a decade

Seriously, thanks for the info and insight into the differences in PowerPoint on PowerBooks and PC laptops. I agree that it would be nice to have the _option_ to sync the speaker notes and presentation views. But I rather like the ability to use them un-synced.

-- asxless in iLand

[kennedy]

Originally posted by asxless:
I agree that it would be nice to have the _option_ to sync the speaker notes and presentation views. But I rather like the ability to use them un-synced.

I can see in rare cases that unsyncing might be useful... but in the normal flow of things, it is just problematic. And worse...

if you click the mouse to move the presentation forward, then go click the slide down button on the normal display, the slide will move to the next (matching the presentation), but the speaker notes stay where they were!!! Extremely deceiving!!! To get both the slide and the speaker notes to move forward, you have to click into the speaker notes pane, and then click on the down slide button. So, to transition to the next slide, in the normal presentation flow, you have to click the mouse three times, the third click on a tiny little button. That's just waaayyyyy too much to be doing while at the same time trying to give a presentation.

In my mind it renders the Mac's ability to do presentation on one and speaker notes on the other useless!

[kennedy]

Originally posted by CharlesS:
Keynote can read/write PowerPoint files, AFAIK.

Yes... but I just don't know how much stuff it mangles, munges, or renders different. No experience with that.

So far, I know it sometimes takes the title box and shrinks it to the size of the one line of text, resulting in the text no longer being centered in the Title area, but instead being near the top of it. Unfortunately, it is not consistent about this.

It also changed all the slide transitions... using one of the cooler ones not offered by PP. In this case, I like the change... but it makes me worry about what else might be changed.

I've decided PP on the Mac is a no-go (crashes and corrupts files once a day); and resorting to having to do regular work back on my PeeCee is a dreadful thought, only as last resort; so for now I am going to try using Keynote for everything. I pray its compatibility with PP is really high!


Oh, and FWIW, I did view the presentation prior to presenting it... but I didn't try to follow the speaker notes... I just sped through it. Ooops.

[asxless]

Originally posted by kennedy:
I can see in rare cases that unsyncing might be useful... but in the normal flow of things, it is just problematic...

Often one person's 'must have feature' is another's 'only as an option'. That's the nice thing about options -- everyone can have it their way

Truth be told, I've only given between 50-150 PowerPoint presentations a year for the last decade and have _never_ used speaker notes during a presentation (except when giving someone else's presentation). So the issue of keeping the speaker notes view synced with the presentation view has never been a problem for me. I usually keep the current presentation open in slide view on the PowerBook screen and occasionally skip forward (or back) to verify specific slide content prior to displaying it for the audience (as I described earlier).

FWIW I also use the PowerBook screen for additional background material in PowerPoint and other formats. This allows me to answer audience questions based on facts / documents not recollections.

-- asxless in iLand

[gregpins]

I do a lot of presentations and just did a big one yesterday. My modus operandi is as follows:

* Build the presentation in PowerPoint: it's text handling, formatting and navigation are a heck of a lot more advanced and flexible than Keynote.

* Import into Keynote to add cool transitions, drop shadows and to gain the benefit of Keynote's excellent display of graphics and text. Keynote also seems to run a bit more smoothly than PowerPoint on my TiBook 500

Importation has worked very well for me. There will be a few slides that you need to tweak, but by and large, it is very good. Make sure you are using 1.1. It is dramatically better than the 1.0 release.

Keynote is a good start, but it has a long way to go before it is as feature complete as PowerPoint. For me the best solution is a combination.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by gregpins:
Build the presentation in PowerPoint: it's text handling, formatting and navigation are a heck of a lot more advanced and flexible than Keynote.

Sorry but this just made me . What exactly do you like about PowerPoint's text handling? For me Keynote is dramatically better. I like how you can adjust the line height, character spacing, bullet height etc... to the point. I also like that you have OS X's full text capabilities. Fonts update automatically, fonts in categories etc... You can also move text boxes/objects pixel by pixel unlike PowerPoint. Another problem I have with PP (today, actually) is that if you edit a text box with white text... it makes the box background white.. effectively unreadable and pretty ridiculous IMO.

[gregpins]

Originally posted by Synotic:
Sorry but this just made me . What exactly do you like about PowerPoint's text handling? For me Keynote is dramatically better. I like how you can adjust the line height, character spacing, bullet height etc... to the point. I also like that you have OS X's full text capabilities. Fonts update automatically, fonts in categories etc... You can also move text boxes/objects pixel by pixel unlike PowerPoint. Another problem I have with PP (today, actually) is that if you edit a text box with white text... it makes the box background white.. effectively unreadable and pretty ridiculous IMO.

Ok, for starters, Keynote has no true outlining. You demote something and it just indents, without reducing the size, the line spacing or changing the bullet. Very ham-handed.

Secondly, there is no option to allow automatic resizing of text to fit a copy box. You have to reduce size manually.

As or your problem with white text, just switch to black and white and you can see it. You can customize your button bar and put a simple button in to do that.

Keynote makes text look prettier, but when you're plowing through a 40 slide presentation the night before, I'm not that worried about pixel by pixel movement of boxes or adjusting character spacing.

To be clear, there is plenty about PowerPoint that I don't like, and I bought Keynote the day it came out. I have confidence it will someday be my primary presentation software.

[gregpins]

Originally posted by gregpins:
Ok, for starters, Keynote has no true outlining. You demote something and it just indents, without reducing the size, the line spacing or changing the bullet. Very ham-handed.

Secondly, there is no option to allow automatic resizing of text to fit a copy box. You have to reduce size manually.

As or your problem with white text, just switch to black and white and you can see it. You can customize your button bar and put a simple button in to do that.

Keynote makes text look prettier, but when you're plowing through a 40 slide presentation the night before, I'm not that worried about pixel by pixel movement of boxes or adjusting character spacing.

To be clear, there is plenty about PowerPoint that I don't like, and I bought Keynote the day it came out. I have confidence it will someday be my primary presentation software.

A couple of other things -- Keynote just doesn't have enough variety in slide templates. The absence of a two column template is particularly problematic.

Also, the outline view in PowerPoint is quite handy. You can edit the words without going slidey by slide, and it's an easy way to knock out extra lines on slides quickly. Keynote could really use something similar.

Again, these are rough edges on what is otherwise a very promising program.

[kennedy]

Another thing I've noticed is that arrow heads on lines tend to vanish when coming into Keynote. Does keynote even have the notion of arrow heads on lines? I've whipped up a couple triangles for lack of time to figure out how Keynote intends to do arrow heads.

[Synotic]

Originally posted by gregpins:
[B]Ok, for starters, Keynote has no true outlining. You demote something and it just indents, without reducing the size, the line spacing or changing the bullet. Very ham-handed.

Agreed, it'd be useful something more like Word/PowerPoint's automatic outline creation.

Secondly, there is no option to allow automatic resizing of text to fit a copy box. You have to reduce size manually.

By copy box do you mean text box? Also did you mean reduce or increase? There's nothing wrong with having the text box taller than the text. I usually just make the text box as wide as I would need it to be. As for auto-sizing, when you create a new box via the text tool, it auto sizes. Although it would be a nice feature to have it auto size.

As to your problem with white text, just switch to black and white and you can see it. You can customize your button bar and put a simple button in to do that.

I ended up having to do that, but it was really annoying. It also doesn't let you see what's behind the text box.

Keynote makes text look prettier, but when you're plowing through a 40 slide presentation the night before, I'm not that worried about pixel by pixel movement of boxes or adjusting character spacing.

Perhaps not when you're plowing through a 40 slide presentation, but when you're working with the masters, then it's very useful.

A couple of other things -- Keynote just doesn't have enough variety in slide templates. The absence of a two column template is particularly problematic.

I think you're having more a problem with Keynote's flexibility in multiple main text boxes. If it was there you could easily add a new master. I'd also like to add multiple master text boxes, but I want to have some which aren't specifically made for bullets. For use in captions/info, without me having to manually remove the bullets, adjust the tabs, margins, spacing and all that.

Also, the outline view in PowerPoint is quite handy. You can edit the words without going slidey by slide, and it's an easy way to knock out extra lines on slides quickly. Keynote could really use something similar.

Keynote has the exact same thing done even better Click on the View toolbar item and select "Outline".

To be clear, there is plenty about PowerPoint that I don't like, and I bought Keynote the day it came out. I have confidence it will someday be my primary presentation software.

I never doubted that Keynote is an awesome program but it has a lot of room to grow.