Comments on: PowerPoint is Evil

By: mahmud

mahmud — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:19:27 +0000

i am a marketing presenter .I've used SlideShare and many others before but now I use PowerShow.com instead to share and upload my presentations. It's a lot easier to use and supports more multimedia effects. its very good. powerpoint

By: rashed

rashed — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 03:58:26 +0000

i am a business presenter .I’ve used SlideShare before but now I use PowerShow.com instead to share and upload my presentations. It’s a lot easier to use and supports more multimedia effects. now i am satisfied about it.

By: efrique

efrique — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 07:37:47 +0000

A different take on the evils of Powerpoint —

“If Shakespeare had been born 400 years later”

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/240.html

By: Clayton Summers

Clayton Summers — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:05:20 +0000

Ah, death by powerpoint. If the inquisition existed today, powerpoint would be preferred to the rack. I'm surprised the military didn't just make their prisoners sit through interminable powerpoint presentations instead or water boarding them. This discussion also reminded me me another old youtube video: chicken chicken chicken

By: rob

rob — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 16:00:55 +0000

power point is just a tool that people can use to spit out crappy talks. it can be used well or incredibly horribly.

remember:

the road to hell is paved with powerpoint presentations.

By: Giffy

Giffy — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 06:02:51 +0000

PowerPoint is not about writing its about speaking. Of course a presentation is going to have few written words as the bulk of the content is spoken verbally.

It should not be the only thing they do, but schools should be teaching kids how to communicate verbally with visual aids.

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:58:28 +0000

Sounds like a great way to make really boring presentations. With PowerPoint (and probably the freeware stuff as well) I can insert videos, pictures, sounds and other stuff very easily. Since my research subject is behavior of wild animals, this helps a lot. Making text-rich presentations seems useless to me, as I use powerpoint to put slides and videos together (and the bulk of my treatment of the subject is given by myself as a speaker, engaging with the audience and telling the story).
If I were addressing a class, I would use slides for illustration, and write text on a board or overhead in order to give notes.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:55:05 +0000

Yea, I can’t see Latex as helping with portability, even within a given user’s needs.

Like, I can’t use pandoc to export a .tex file that will work in lyx. I’m sure there’s a simply reason for this and it can be fixed in fewer than fifty lines of code, but still….

My ultimate goal will be to write a sed script that will turn text files in to slide-ware presentation and handouts in one fell swoop, called from emacs, of course.

(rtf or html may be the way to go. What sucks about html is that it does not know about paper. )

By: Roman

Roman — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:30:49 +0000

@Greg Laden

“The point is to use text files that can then be used in numerous ways and converted in numerous ways.”

My point was that LaTeX has been always promoted as solving the problem of sending sharing documents and enabling separation of content and presentation. Neither of this points is even close to reality.

– Sharing documents is easy as long as you don’t use any non-standard packages, which is often a must, as many things are very hard to do in native LaTeX; you are also missing out on advanced tools for reviewing text which are present in, say, MS Word
– My example of how cumbersome it is to align numbers in a tabular environment is also an example of how quickly the separation of content and presentation erodes — I have to mangle content (replace . with & in numbers, formally splitting them in 2 colums) to achieve decent presentation; if later I would like to search for one of the numbers in the table, I’m out of luck
– When I was writing my master’s thesis, I’ve been swapping LaTeX files back and forth with my adviser. He was using Windows LaTeX (and CP1250 codepage), I was using Linux (and Latin-2 encoding). It required numerous conversions of files and adjustments of inputenc package options.

“You’ll be using vim or emacs and some kind of reliable easy to use filter that can output a chunk of minimalistic HTML code, not a document-level code with divs and spans and piles of other crap.”

OK, so for you LaTeX is an assembler, which you don’t use directly, but compile your high-level markdown language to. That’s a neat idea — I really like it — but that’s not how most people use LaTeX.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 18:08:53 +0000

Austen is correct. I’ve never once written one tiny bit of LaTex code. It is nice that I could if I had do, but I don’t have to.

The point is to use text files that can then be used in numerous ways and converted in numerous ways.

Try this: Write something that uses some formating (itals, etc., may be a header). Do it in OpenOffice writer and do it in your favorite text editor using markdown.

Now make some HTML to put that in a blog post, from both starting points.

Then do that ten times a day for a year. You won’t be using Writer at the end of that. You’ll be using vim or emacs and some kind of reliable easy to use filter that can output a chunk of minimalistic HTML code, not a document-level code with divs and spans and piles of other crap.