Two visions of Powerpoint

I feel a bit like Jim Anchower since it's been so long since I updated, but Hola again.

I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.

The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest

The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.

A better Powerpoint?

PPT annoys me- it's a useful program in a lot of ways, but it's just so bloody ugly and annoying. If you have a bunch of photos/graphs and some text to show it's a pretty decent tool, but it's very linear at the core, making people go through hoops if they want to jump around in a presentation rather than follow along.

So when my boss showed me Prezi I was instantly interested. At the core it's basically a presentation graphics program, but set up somewhat differently. There's only one slide- you can include text, graphics, video and the like on the slide in any arrangement. You can define a path to follow where the program will follow along, PPT like, or you can jump back and forth by zooming in and out and clicking on what you want. Prezi autoscales as you click- you can "hide" pictures and text by making them too small to see on the overview and then have them appear/vanish through zoom. There's some nice zooming/rotation animations, although I'm still not a believer in funky slide changes- it distracts from the content.

I really like the freeform setup of the content. Imagine you have a talk with three distinct threads. You can set them up at 0, 120 and 240 degrees and make it instantly clear how your talk is organized. it works equally well in "bush/tree" form where you start with a concept and expand out from that through multiple layers, each with an option. You basically build your talk's overview within the program automatically.

It's still clearly an early beta- it's missing a lot of stuff like user-defined text styles, the help is barely there and bugs abound, but that's not exactly unusual for Web 2.0 apps. There's an offline viewer so you can package up your content and use it in the boonies, and you can either get the free version or pay for more storage. I'm going to be very interested to see how this goes.