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Comment by mattfenwick | Hacker News Reader

One of the biggest problems with PowerPoint presentations is their linearity (i.e. one-dimensional). Most topics, stories, etc. are not linear.

We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.

A good start that I've tried was to make a 10-foot-by-10-foot drawing on GoogleDocs, and then arrange all my content within that one slide. Since it's a two-dimensional canvas, there's plenty of opportunities for putting related topics close to each other, even if you talk about them at separate times. It's also effective to put loops in your procession, so that you return to a topic that you covered earlier, reiterating its significance and reminding the audience of it. (Another advantage is that you can save it as a PDF. Then open it in a program, such as Chrome, which lets you zoom in as far as you want. You'll never have to worry about text being too small to read again!)

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Well, you can actually build non-linear presentations in powerpoint.

I'm a high school teacher, and I had a rule for a while whenever students wanted to make powerpoint presentations. They had to build on-screen navigation into their presentation, just as if they were building a website. When they were giving their presentation, they had to use the on-screen navigation, instead of clicking forward and back. The navigation had to be semantic, it couldn't be just "next" and "previous".

Presentations were interesting, because people were free to interrupt with questions such as, "Your data seemed to show xyz, can you explain how your conclusion of abc really follows from your data?" Then students could click right over to the data part of their presentation, without flipping through all the slides in between.

Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.

For something with any interface you want, a tool being used incorrectly is a flaw in the tool itself. Unless you're going way out of your way to use it incorrectly.

That's a bit too broad. Someone holds a screwdriver incorrectly when screwing in a screw. The screw is slightly crooked because of the improper technique. Is the screwdriver fundamentally flawed because it allows the wielder to mess up? It's difficult for me to conceive something as portable, usable, cheap, and effective as the screwdriver, that does the same thing, and does not allow me to mess up. You have to make a sacrifice in some important category to get that. Programming languages can be pretty similar. Some are designed to make it harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but are far less popular (ADA is the example I'd use).

But if you'd seen hundreds of people use screwdrivers, and had only heard one anecdote about a correctly aligned screw in an online forum...

For a convincing (to me) argument against Powerpoint as the problem itself in poor presentations, see Edward Tufte's booklet/essay: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp

> Like most things, the problem is how a tool is used, not the tool itself.

Yes, I absolutely agree with that, and should have said that in my earlier comment. Thanks for bringing that up.

My problem is with the presentations, not with the tool itself.

However, I've never actually seen somebody give a non-linear PowerPoint presentation. TBH, I don't think very many people know how to do this. (including me -- but thanks for pointing this out, I will definitely spend some time figuring out how to do it).

This makes me wonder whether the problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it easy for people to be lazy with their presentations.

TBH, I don't think very many people know how to do this. (including me -- but thanks for pointing this out, I will definitely spend some time figuring out how to do it).

It's pretty straightforward. Simple approach:

- Make a textbox.

- Add a word for each page you want to link to.

- Highlight the word.

- Insert -> hyperlink -> Place in this document.

- Copy that textbox to every page.

Here's a simple example. I put it on github, because I don't use dropbox, and I haven't heard good things about slideshare.

https://github.com/ehmatthes/nonlinear_powerpoint

Does it still work when inherited from the master slide so it doesn't have to be copied? DRY and such..

It's funny, but overhead projectors were great for that. You could easily throw random foils on it as needed. You could draw on foils in real time with a marker. Hell, you could throw on a blank foil and draw on that if you wanted. We need a modern replacement for the overhead, and PowerPoint ain't it.

Maybe we just need overhead projectors back.

There were a few things wrong with them (painful to look at while operating, and the bulbs tended to burn out if you moved them around while turned on) but fundamentally I don't think they were broken technology. Overhead projectors would be well complimented by computer projectors, but computer projectors make a poor replacement for them. Attempts to replicate the advantages of overhead projectors on computer projectors always fall flat, as far as I have seen.

I think the demise of overhead projectors is an example of a regression caused by our tendency to have rose-tinted glasses whenever considering more technological alternatives to existing technology.

Interestingly decent second hand overhead projectors are going very cheaply on eBay.

In university we have cameras over some parts of the professors table which are directly projected on the screen. Works great without the the drawbacks of an overhead projector.

I think that is probably the solution. I've seen somewhat similar systems that tried to be more technically advanced than that, but they always made things worse. Just a straight-up camera-feed to the projector would work great though.

The advantage of these over overhead projectors would still be pretty small though (really only the being blinded and replacement bulbs issue), so you would need to ensure that the system is rock-solid reliable. If not, then you've just made it worse by making it more advanced.

Document cameras like this work very nicely, but there is one small downside I've noticed: their framerate tends not to be very good. That's usually not a problem at all, but I have a couple of physics demos where I roll things around on an overhead projector, and the document camera often can't keep up with quick motion. Simple analog light and shadows obviously have no issues with that at all.

overhead projectors are a bit dimmer and can't make nearly as big (or uniform) an image as the document cameras can.

Exactly this, in university one of my professors in first term rather than using slides, printed his slides onto paper and put them under one of these cameras, visualisers as they're called. I found it much more engaging since he could easily annotate things and just get a blank sheet of paper if anything needed further explanation.

When I attended lectures with such cameras (which was some years ago) they were pretty horribad. Low contrast, low framerate, and motion blur everywhere. Probably had tons of latency too.

My math professor hooks her Windows tablet to the projector and then draws on that using Onenote which works out pretty well

Seems like an ipad is pretty close to what you want. If you could project part of the screen and leave some left for nav, new slides etc. then you could draw at will and be able to jump around slides without having to disturb the audience while you fumble around for it.

iPads are OK but not ideal for this sort of thing. Because they're capacitive (rather than resistive) touch, writing is relatively coarse and crude and you have to be somewhat careful with false pickups from your palm. They're usable to draw on but it's not like writing on an overhead foil or a piece of paper.

MS Surface attached to a projector. Done.

We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.

Isn't that what hyperlinks do? Perhaps I don't understand what you mean.

Yes indeed, and in fact, I've given presentations from hyperlinked HTML documents before.

What I liked about this approach was that you start out from your main content -- perhaps it's a summary or overview -- then you go off into a sub-topic, and then you come back to the overview so how the sub-topic is related to the whole is constantly being reminded to the viewers.

So yes, that kind of thing is what I'm going for (but I'm no expert -- I would love to hear more ideas!)

This sounds like Prezi.

> We need technology that makes it easy to build non-linear presentations.

http://lab.hakim.se/reveal-js/

(I really dislike these presentations)

In my opinion -- and I know this is subjective -- that's a linear presentation. And so I would say no, that's not the kind of presentation I'm looking for. The content is arranged in a line, in some arbitrary order.

The "vertical slides" add a bit of hierarchy, but again, I don't feel that they add any non-linearity to the presentation.

Now, if say the 15th slide referred back to some content in the 8th, or if the 3rd-6th slides were all interrelated -- and this structure was reflected in the structure of the presentation -- then I would be enthusiastic.

So tl,dr; I agree with you -- I dislike these presentations.

If you have PowerPoint 2007, try to find an experimental plugin call pptplex. It allows you to create a presentation almost identical to the style you described, with an almost infinite zoom feature. It came out of the Microsoft research labs, where there mixed the technology behind Seadragon (now deep zoom - theres a great talk on TED with one of the creators of Seadragon)

Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. Time is linear. If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order:
A.1, B.1, A.2, B.2
Problem solved.

>Anything that occurs in the real world occurs linearly. //
Solution finding in a quantum computer? They're solutions are supposedly parallel and non-linearisable. Reading the solutions I guess forces linearity.
There's also relativistic issues but you can solve those by saying there's an implicit "within any particular Inertial Frame of Reference".
I think perhaps what you mean is anything that we experience we experience linearly; is that a better way of saying it?

I'm not sure if we are on the same page here.
What I am saying is that:
- most (all?) topics are not 1-dimensional: they deal with multiple issues with many complicated interrelations and interactions. Let's call them multi-dimensional.
- many people build 1-dimensional presentations using PowerPoint (and related tools).
- treating a multi-dimensional topic as 1-dimensional makes for a poor, confusing presentation.
To connect this with your point: the hard part of building a presentation is mapping an n-dimensional topic onto a 1-dimensional medium (time), while sacrificing the minimum amount of accuracy. Based on personal experience, many people don't spend much time on this part; they just throw a bunch of information onto slides in an arbitrary order. And so this smacks of circular reasoning to me:
> If you are going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2, and B.1 before point B.2, but you will speak about point B.1 before point A.2, then just put them in that order. Problem solved.
But how do you know you're going to talk about point A.1 before point A.2? Figuring that out is the hard part!
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All this is just my subjective opinion, of course. :)

That's fine, as long as the final product ends up linear. What I can't stand is presentations with multiple "directions", like you can move "right", or "up" or "down". I find that to be just distracting and stressful because I'm never sure if I'm going in the "correct" direction or if I've missed something. To me, that style of presentation is a solution looking for a problem.
We're going to view them in some order, just put them in that order and call it a day. If there is no order, then random order should be just fine. After all, what if you really needed more than two dimensions? You'd have to compress your ideas into a two-dimensional space anyway. Might as well make it one-dimensional and therefore less confusing.

It sounds like you're describing a mind map.

What I do is I write down all the key page numbers by hand then do a ^g to jump to them when questions come up.

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