Presentation Software

If you have been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I am not a fan of Microsoft Word. Truthfully, I’m not even sure if fans of that abomination even exist, but I am surely not one of them. I am no friend to Microsoft, and being a platform nomad I frequently find little use in its products. What good is an application to me if I can only use on one out of my four computers. Word is probably the best example here because in addition to being proprietary, and platform locked (Windows and OSX only) it is also absolutely terrible at its primary function.

Let’s face it: Word is a tool that is pretty much only capable of reliably generating single page ofice memos, but only if you don’t care about consistency too much. I never use the damn thing, and yet I know more about it’s goddamn quirks and failure modes than most of the people I know combined – and they are the ones who use it professionally for 8 hours every day. Which in itself seems like a punishment. I’m pretty sure there is a circle of hell in which crooked accountants are forced to edit word documents with long lists, figures, footnotes and embedded objects that get corrupted all the time for all eternity. If Word (and all Word like products, including the Apple and Open Office variants) vanished today, erased from existence by some cosmic event, the universe as a whole would be better off.

That said, I do use one of the tools that comes under the Microsoft Office umbrella, and it’s name is Powerpoint. It’s actually quite embarrassing, but for all the shit I heap on Word I am actually fond of the big P. As weird as it may sound, it actually does exactly what I need it to do. It lets me put together quick presentations with minimum hassle. I can create a master template that gets applied to all the slides, and then rapidly build up content by copying and pasting images directly from a web browser, cropping, editing and repositioning them, and annotating them with small amounts of text.

No I’m not! Shut up! I can quit whenever I want.

I have tried to wean myself of of it, I really did but its hard. I did make my Masters thesis in LaTex using the Beamer document style, but that was mainly because I needed to typeset a lot of math (and Powerpoint is famously bad at it) and most of my source materials were LaTex and EPM files to begin with. These days however I mostly create presentations for the introductory level course I teach. There is no math to be displayed there. Actually I did put some math on the white board one time, and my students were mortified. Those who could overcome the uncontrollable fear tremors and hold back the sobbing pulled out their phones and dropped my class right there and then. So I actually don’t need my presentation software to be able to display mathematical equations. What I do need it to do is pictures. I need colorful images and pop culture jokes with which I can trick them into learning.

With LaTex I need a separate tool for image processing and I have to name, organize manage all the images I use as files in some directory. With Powerpoint I can just copy, paste, crop and forget. Not only that, but I have more freedom when it comes to placement, and can do silly things like “farting Canadian head from South Park” effect via motion path animations.

I could of course roll my own web based slide thing, like Jenn did and use gifs, CSS and the Canvas element to create complex animations. But that would require effort. Creating graphics and animations that is, because making slides with HTML is not very work intensive. Managing the image files, and making sure they get placed correctly, and that things don’t get screwed up when the resolution changes is. Which is why web design is a serious profession, whereas making Powerpoint slides is something you tell an intern to do.

I have tried using Open/Libre variety of presentation tools but they always seem to produce wonky files. I need my students to be able to download, open, read and/or print these slides. Giving them Powerpoint files is a safe bet, however when you save Open/Libre presentation to the OpenXML format you typically lose some fidelity. If you post them in a native format, half the students won’t be able to open them because both Apple and Microsoft hate freedom. Or at least older versions of their signature office suites did. The only other acceptable format is PDF but once you go that way, your students lose the neat ability to print 4-6 slides per page. Seeing how my presentations can sometimes go up to 80 slides, I feel like I would be contributing to deforestation of the planet a bit too much if I did this.

This is especially important since over the years I have been slowly refining my slides, in a reductionist way. Every semester I minimize and abbreviate the bullet points, or remove them entirely making my slides more of a visual backdrop: illustrations of ideas, and cues for my key points and accompanying jokes. As I refine my lessons, my slides become progressively less useful without accompanying commentary. So printouts and notes on the margins become all the more crucial way for students to capture the lesson I’m trying to impart.

I guess what I’m saying is that Powerpoint is actually a semi-decent product, if you need to make goofy classroom presentations full of colorful, mesmerizing pictures and fart sound effects. It’s dreadful for serious kinds of presentations – ones which require math equations, actual data or which need to look “professional”. But if all you are trying to be is a wacky, silly and sometimes profound, absent-minded professor type then it works well.

Do you frequently make presentations? What kind of software and/or framework do you use? What would you suggest for me? I don’t really want to use Powerpoint, but so far it has been the best tool for the job. It’s main flaw is that it doesn’t work on Linux. Well that, and the fact that it is proprietary and by purchasing it I’m actually funding the development of Word which is something I’d rather not do.