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[bibliothecula]

I recently saw a presentation done in Mac's Keynote, and it blew me away. Does anyone know of anything similar for PCs or Linux? PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress are just plain boring after seeing Keynote.

[bread_pirate_naan]

No, there isn't.  You can get quite a bit out of ppt., if you learn how to use it. Not 3d or animation effects.

I am in one of those design conscious disciplines where a bells and whistles presentation with kitchen sink, clusterfvck design (read: visual communication illiteratati) makes your scholarship look bad. Or even worse, leaves people talking about your software instead of your talk.  Or, paying closer attention to transitions than content.

IMO, if you can't make work interesting in existing digital formats, it's the work, your design skills and the delivery that are boring/inadequate.  I am all for creativity, but advise caution and restraint with design tools.  They make everyone with mac think they know what they are doing.

naan (intermittent minimalist)

[conjugate]

If I did know of such a thing, I wouldn't be able to use it since most of the equipment wants something that's PowerPoint compatible.  It might look as cool as all get-out and if nobody can open it you might as well go with overhead slides, right?  However, there's a list of stuff at this web site that might give you some ideas.

I don't know if you have access to WordPerfect's office suite; they have a presentation program that's not mentioned on that web page, but I haven't used it much.  I believe it tries to be MS Office compatible, though I don't know how well it works.

[bread_pirate_naan]

If I did know of such a thing, I wouldn't be able to use it since most of the equipment wants something that's PowerPoint compatible.

I understand bibliothecula is looking for something PC/windows compatible, but that was my first thought as well.  Most of the time I have to load up my presentation well ahead of time and it must be in the suite of software on whichever that computer happens to be.  This means certain fonts (handwritten/epistolary) have to be embedded in the presentation to make a certain element look cool when I foreground information that way (read: not adding visual complexity for the heck of it).

In my opinion, people who switch out hardware and/or delay the schedule because they must have snowflake technology are again, attracting the wrong sort of attention.

This blog is geared more towards the corporate sphere, but gives some good basics and lots of references on presentation design in any software application.

[tee_bee]

I recently saw a presentation done in Mac's Keynote, and it blew me away. Does anyone know of anything similar for PCs or Linux? PowerPoint and OpenOffice Impress are just plain boring after seeing Keynote.

For your own sake, read some of Tufte's work. He argues that, in essence, presentation software is really just the control program for a slide show. As PB_Naan notes, all these fancy, corporate, successories-style "features" are likely to detract from what you are trying to convey to an audience. As Tufte notes, presentation software was designed to help people sell things, not communicate well. That said, the software can be adapted. But there's very little that Keynote does that Powerpoint 2007 can't.

As to "equipment" being "powerpoint compatible," I hope this means the file format--if you project from a machine running your own presentation software, anything the computer outputs to the VGA or fancier port will be fine. But I have to agree that switching out hardware is a fatal error--all slides should be loaded up on one machine or one thumb drive well before an event. Time spent goofing with hardware is on the presenter's time, not the audience's.

[conjugate]

As to "equipment" being "powerpoint compatible," I hope this means the file format--if you project from a machine running your own presentation software, anything the computer outputs to the VGA or fancier port will be fine.

Yes, that's what I meant.  I mean that if I take my thumb drive someplace, I find that they have a PC running Microsoft Windows with PowerPoint.  They don't, in general, have (for instance) a DVI viewer (for LaTeX output) and sometimes not even Flash animation or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

That's why I am still old-school enough to use transparencies. 

[tee_bee]

As to "equipment" being "powerpoint compatible," I hope this means the file format--if you project from a machine running your own presentation software, anything the computer outputs to the VGA or fancier port will be fine.

Yes, that's what I meant.  I mean that if I take my thumb drive someplace, I find that they have a PC running Microsoft Windows with PowerPoint.  They don't, in general, have (for instance) a DVI viewer (for LaTeX output) and sometimes not even Flash animation or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

That's why I am still old-school enough to use transparencies. 

You might see if there are portable versions of these apps that you can run off a thumb drive. Not a lot of apps do this, however. At http://portableapps.com/ they have a PDF reader called Sumatra. There may be others. They also have openoffice.com portable, which may work for some kinds of slides. I've never really tried this--used to have a U3 drive some time ago, which was cool, but I really didn't need it. Both other folks swear by these.

[galactic_hedgehog]

As to "equipment" being "powerpoint compatible," I hope this means the file format--if you project from a machine running your own presentation software, anything the computer outputs to the VGA or fancier port will be fine.

Yes, that's what I meant.  I mean that if I take my thumb drive someplace, I find that they have a PC running Microsoft Windows with PowerPoint.  They don't, in general, have (for instance) a DVI viewer (for LaTeX output) and sometimes not even Flash animation or Adobe Acrobat Reader.

That's why I am still old-school enough to use transparencies. 

You might see if there are portable versions of these apps that you can run off a thumb drive. Not a lot of apps do this, however. At http://portableapps.com/ they have a PDF reader called Sumatra. There may be others. They also have openoffice.com portable, which may work for some kinds of slides. I've never really tried this--used to have a U3 drive some time ago, which was cool, but I really didn't need it. Both other folks swear by these.

I use the portable version of OpenOffice.org and am very happy with it.  In addition to it's own file format, OO.o can read PPT (and, I believe, PPTX) and PDF files (with the Sun PDF Import Extension).

As for LaTeX output, you can, of course, create files other than DVIs.

[dr_strangelove]

I haven't used it, but a lot of people seem to like prezi.com.

And people still produce DVI with latex? Wow. That is so 1980's.

[conjugate]

I haven't used it, but a lot of people seem to like prezi.com.

And people still produce DVI with latex? Wow. That is so 1980's.

\begin{defensive}

So, what part of

I am still old-school enough to use transparencies. 

didn't you understand?

\end{defensive}
☺

[dr_strangelove]

I assumed you were writing them by hand using permanent markers, naturally.

[conjugate]

I assumed you were writing them by hand using permanent markers, naturally.

No, that's for the white-board.  :-)

[ab_grp]

How about beamer for those using LaTeX? Anyone a fan?

[conjugate]

How about beamer for those using LaTeX? Anyone a fan?

Yes, I use beamer.  It's the current version of SliTeX, and it works reasonably well.  I just print to transparency, or did the last time I gave a talk with slides. 

<Sigh> I suppose I'd better learn to use PowerPoint or something similar for the next talk I give at a conference.  Alas.  And here I'd just made the transition from clay tablets, too.

[dr_strangelove]

I assumed you were writing them by hand using permanent markers, naturally.

No, that's for the white-board.  :-)

I shouldn't really talk, I'm sure the majority of research talks I've given have been marker-on-transparency. (I do mostly posters these days.) But that reminds me of the worst talk I ever saw at a conference. The speaker approached the projector with a stack of blank transparencies and a marker. I don't remember anything after "Let sigma be a ..." I should have left after 30 seconds, but was too young and dumb.