Hacker News Reader

Comment by april_22 | Hacker News Reader

Non-Apple user here. Just out of curiosity: what makes Keynote better than Powerpoint?

Keynote is more limited than Powerpoint; but unless you're a Powerpoint wizard, Keynote has much better defaults and styles. I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint; but the average user seems to make better ones in Keynote unless they have a designed template that they stick to very carefully.

> I've yet to see a Keynote deck that cannot be replicated in Powerpoint;

Almost every deck I've ever made in Keynote cannot be replicated in PowerPoint. It doesn't have the same support for transitions that Keynote does. Good transitions (not flashy ones) are what make a good presentation great.

Nah mate, I disagree. Good content delivered by a good presenter (or should that be great content and a great presenter) make a great presentation. The slide transitions are eminently forgettable.

Consider perhaps the most famous presentation of them all - the iPhone release - I don't think the slide transitions got too much press, and I don't personally recall what they were.

These days my slide transitions are simple - slide 1 replaced instantly with slide 2. In other words no transition at all.

You may prefer a different transition, but to say it's the transitions that make the presentation great is reaching imo.

The transitions never get press or notice, unless they are bad. Then you get comments about how it looked "unprofessional". Apple keynotes are a great example -- they will never have a slide without a transition of some sort (the instant replace that you mention).

I get paid to make presentations, I've worked with other paid speakers, and I've seen 1000s of presentations. All the people who get paid to make presentations use transitions (and almost all of them use Keynote too), and there is a reason. Because it just looks "unprofessional" when you don't.

This book really upped my presentation game, and using transitions is in it with more explanation, if you're really interested:

https://nealford.com/books/presentationpatterns.html

Doesn't the content and the public speaking skills of the presenter play a role?

I mean of course it does, but if you have a great speaker with great content and a crappy deck, it really takes away from the message. But if you have a good speaker with good content and an amazing deck, it enhances the message so much that that presentation is perceived very highly.

Yes, you need good content and a good speaker as a baseline, but assuming you have that, the deck is what makes the difference.

PowerPoint has been iterated over the years to be more or less a document publishing app that happens to go full-screen. It has support for lots of embeddings (like Excel), and can help turn especially heavy chunks of text into something slightly more digestible – Smart Art is good at this, in fact.

Conversely, Keynote was and remains an app designed for visually heavy presentations, so it optimises a lot more for aesthetics: gradients, blends, transparency, (sadly still no blur wtf), animation of items on a slide, very complex animated reveal and build, complicated slide transitions, etc. It has also UX optimised for visually precise layout (in areas PowerPoint is frankly unhelpful).

If you just want to make people look at pages after page of charts and graphs that should have been memos, PowerPoint is good and possibly stronger. If you want to make an aesthetically compelling visual presentation, Keynote will get you there for less effort.

I'm an Apple user and a PC user at work. Keynote is a toy that works well as long as your use case is hyper-practiced presentations with timed transitions and animations like Steve Jobs would do. Or, pretty pitch decks with made up numbers for VCs to marvel at.

In the real world, where PPTs are created and shared for presenting information and making decisions, we need good integration of real data. PPT does that by linking directly to the source file. If you have an Excel chart that you copied over to PPT, updating the numbers in Excel will update the PPT chart in real time as well. This was a gamechanging feature that saved a lot of time, and I think it only became available with PowerPoint 2007.

The embedding features date from Windows 3.x era, and I think fully came to be with Office 97 or 2000, either of which was implemented fully as set of COM objects with OLE Automation interfaces and essentially embeddable in everything - if you deliver an application on Windows and can specify Office license in your requirements, suddenly you can do a lot more - for example, I've used programs that simply embedded Excel for data entry features, not just as "can import from specially prepared Excel sheets" but directly embedded Excel sheet editor in their GUI and stored Excel data streams internally to their document formats.

Personal opinion. The animations are smoother and better designed, the templates are nicer, the UI is simpler, the default fonts they ship with are more recognizable and render better (at least on hi-res displays), and it feels a little easier on CPU and Memory.

Its simpler and easier to use. Maybe my usecase isnt very heavy but I have not come across anything in Powerpoint that I couldnt do just as well in Keynote.

Also it exports to video. Which I think Powerpoint doesn’t do? (Older version at least)

PowerPoint has been able to export to video for ages. You can even export to GIF shudder

Keynote has great transitions and appearance the interface for the iWork suite is pretty intuitive and easy to use.

Steve Jobs presentations always made use of it.

But I gotta admit PowerPoint has come a long way and has a ton of great features these days too. Eg it can actually.l design slides for you, quite tastefully on the new 365 version.

Keynote was made so that Steve Jobs could switch to making presentations on Mac instead of PC running late version of OpenSTEP, and faithfully replicated Concurrence which Jobs used on OpenSTEP.

It was made for Jobs' keynotes as its main goal

> quite tastefully on the new 365 version.

This is definitely a YMMV situation.

Probably the fact it isn't PowerPoint. When you use PP you use it will preconceived notions that it's a piece of junk that gets in your face. It is and it does.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com