[dbergstrom]

I am a medical student at the University of Washington School of Medicine. At the Department of Medicine noon conference today, one of the rheumatologists was speaking.

He hooked his TiBook up to the projector, and I saw he was running OS X goodness. When he launched his talk, I could tell from the beautiful asthetics of the title slide we were not dealing with Powerpoint dreck.

Then he pressed the forward arrow and Wham! - one of those cool 3D cube transitions (actually, it was more like W....h...a...m...! , but anyhoo). The whole freakin' audience went nuts. I mean stop the talk for 30 seconds nuts, lots of "Oooohs" and "Aaaaahs" and "How'd you do that?"

His response, once the crowd settled down, was: "Keynote - anyone with a Mac can buy it for $14.95." (Of course, he was higher ed faculty and took advantage of the educator discount.)

I had to leave then, so I don't know how the rest of his talk went (like if there were any crashes). But man, it was a sweet beginning!

[xtal]

Sounds like what happened when I gave a talk to my lab group. I couldn't stop beaming like an idiot.

(still can't it seems)

[ARENA]

That's the problem with Keynote! The audience gets impressed by it's amazing effects and don't pay attention to the actual information in the slides

[Cadaver]

Yes, same thing here.
I tried very hard to pick transitions that flowed with the content, but anything other than a PowerPoint disolve brings murmurs from the audience.

The second time I did the same talk, I had to nearly eliminate all the OpenGL/3D effects and leave it with pushes/pulls and disolves.

[foamy]

Hey Don. Glad to hear about a keynote success. I'm waiting for error bars before I use it for a presentation. I guess since it doesn't have error bar functionality you can always blame the software when someone asks why your graphs don't have them.

[xtal]

Originally posted by foamy:
Hey Don. Glad to hear about a keynote success. I'm waiting for error bars before I use it for a presentation. I guess since it doesn't have error bar functionality you can always blame the software when someone asks why your graphs don't have them.

You could use Chartsmith 1.2 and import the TIFFs into Keynote. I have a feeling that even if Keynote had error bar functionality, there would still be something important (scientifically speaking) missing.

I wouldn't rely on future releases of Keynote to be 'charting' or 'graphing' applications.

Chartsmith 1.2:
http://www.blacksmith.com/products/index.html

[KeynoteHQ]

My "day job" is in the engineering field. Even with Powerpoint, we don't rely on internal capabilities for graphing many of our data displays. Usually, packages like Igor is used.