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Comment by kevinburke | Hacker News Reader

When I was in high school I tried to ban powerpoint, arguing that it inhibited our ability to grow as public speakers. I wrote Edward Tufte and told him about it and he shipped me 20 copies of "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" (http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp).

Some teachers opposed it and I ended up losing. I'm sure Powerpoint was more convenient for them. I use deck.js for slides now but mostly for images - the other slides tend to have 3-4 words while I try and tell a story to draw in readers.

My last project pitch to management I printed out copies of a written proposal and had everyone read for ten minutes to start the meeting. It was actually really nice.

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My girlfriend is a teacher, and I can say for sure that it is a lost cause.

Teachers know that their slides suck, but it's what they are taught, and is what their curriculum demands. They demand bright colours, Comic Sans for dyslexic students, and tons of text on each slide.

For a middle-management role in the school, I designed her slides using one of those JS slide scripts, and it went down a treat. It took me the best part of two hours to port her content from Powerpoint to these slides, and I was able to add videos, animations, and to embed Google Apps data directly into the slide. Apparently, the interviewers had their minds blown by being able to view a Google Docs spreadsheet (where I had written the formulas) directly into the slide. I'd still say that it was fairly poorly designed, but it was a lot better than what kids are forced to read.

Edward Tufte hosts seminars, and this 1 page report is what he was talking about this year (I don't know how much content varies from year to year).

For information density, you can't beat paper, and there's a number of things you can do to make the paper very information dense, like sparklines. He argues that in some ways, sparklines are actually typography and not charts.

With the paper report people can drill into the information they want, and ask questions from there, as well as refer back to the information during Q&A. One quote he said was "They didn't get to become your peers because they can't read fast."

He also said to not give homework. When you make these reports, you spend meeting time reading the paper. It's not something they have to do before, because everyone is busy and no one will actually read it.

Have you tried Prezi?

http://prezi.com

(I work there.)

My girlfirend just showed me Prezi and I love it!

Just waiting for an opportunity to using it in a real context!

You should check ImpressJS http://bartaz.github.io/impress.js

That must be one of the worst demos I've ever seen. I got dizzy going through it. Ugh.

Prezi looks good but only replaces boring bullet points with pretty bullet points.

To really focus the presentation to the speaker's voice I find that HAIKU DECK for iOS really removes bullet point syndrome. http://www.haikudeck.com/

(I don't work there.)

Not available in Canada. My daughter really likes their music in the video though.

Prezi gives me motion sickness. I don't see the point.

Using it right is a little bit of a skill. Too much panning and zooming can be bad, but just the right amount makes the presentation seem more fresh and alive than a ppt.

I've been using prezi for a few years now, and almost always get good audience feedback. Like any tool, you still have to know how to use it, it will not do all the work for you.

I looked at a sample Prezi, and it had way too much panning and zooming. Of course, then again, I was quickly clicking through it, whereas normally I'd imagine there'd be a couple minutes of talking and delay between each step.

Prezi adds nothing to the content I'm presenting. Its one animation gimmick and that's it.

The best slide presentation software I've seen so far is SlideShow, but its for programmers only :)

http://www.cs.utah.edu/plt/publications/icfp04-ff.pdf

When transmitting information on screens, you can only fit ~7 lines of ~7 words each at a readable font. This inhibits the transfer of complex narratives.

Fancy animations and zooms can't fix this inherent limitation of the slide format.

I was so anti PowerPoint that I used to actually build presentations in Flash (im saying in the late 90s) so as to avoid using it. But most teachers would reject the option since traditionally everyone knew just about PowerPoint.

And it is a lot harder. And it misses the point of this article, and just replaces PP with something else producing slides.

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