PowerPoint Embarrassment

[Nevada]

Well I just got back from a somewhat embarrassing PowerPoint presentation today. I had to present a talk about the declining quality standards of mathematics education in the U.S., and I had a nice pretty PowerPoint put together. Since I don't have a laptop, I had to use my teacher's PC. I thought it would be okay because I was still using MS Office, but when I got up to the center of my rhetoric class, I was shocked to find a missing Quicktime Component message where my images should have been. I tried not to let this bother me so much because I only had two images like this (the rest were clipart); I eventually introduced some humor into it by referring to Microsoft's "incompatibility team." But a few slides down, I ran into more trouble; the graph I had made in Powerpoint with the Wizard (straight off the toolbar) didn't show up at all (just a little box with an x in it). So I then had to cite data from in imaginary graph and ended up having to draw it on the board. I managed to laugh off the technical difficulties enough to still make a decent presentation.

Anyway, does anyone find it peculiar how my mac can handle pretty much any format of presentation while the Windows machine @#%@es and complains about everything? I apologize for my frustration, but I ran into a similar problem when I had to give a presentation in front of a bunch of corporate reps about my engineering role on this (http://web.mit.edu/~nevsan/www/SSP/splash.html). I went through about 10 different video formats before I found one that the stupid windows machine could recognize and that didn't lead to ridiculous media file sizes.

Enough ranting, does anyone know if there are any utilities out there that could make my Microsoft PowerPoint presentations compatible with Microsoft Windows? While we're on the subject, does anyone else have similar stories to tell?

[AGhost]

I constantly fight with Windows when it comes to doing powerpoint at school. I once did a 100 slide show on computer software, only to find that every picture was gone (100 pages worth). I have come up with 2 solutions:

1. For images, save them to desktop as .jpg then import (not drag and drop) to the presentation.
2. Use a Windows version to make the show (and the same one that the showing computer uses).

I really wish Apple would make a 'Keynote Viewer' app for windows so I could just bring along a USB stick with my Keynote file and the program to show it on any computer.

[Joseph Duchesne]

What I did was (no joke) export the whole thing to a DVD from keynote and play it in a DVD player. It worked fine.

[Cochrane]

When dealing with PowerPoint, I find that the only way that works is to make the presentation on the same computer you are presenting it with. Anything else is likely to fail, and even this will sometimes fail.

[Skorche]

I was going to do my senior seminar presentation slides in Beamer, (Uses TeX to create pdf slides) but instead decided to use PowerPoint because I could embed my animations.

That was a real pain in the neck. You could put Quicktime movies in a PowerPoint, but doing so is a disaster. When playing the movies, it scales the movies itself instead of using Quicktime's high quality scaling. If the output size doesn't exactly match the movie, then you get to watch a slideshow in a slideshow. :lol: Worse still is that PowerPoint uses nearest neighbor scaling... and it's still slow. :wacko:

The irony is that I ended up having to stop the presentation to play the animations in Quicktime player anyway. I should have just used Beamer and saved myself the trouble. Good riddance!

[aarku]

At least it wasn't a talk about the declining quality standards of presentations in the U.S..

[leRiCl]

Four letters: BYOL

[igame3d]

Don't do powerpoint, generate a PDF, acrobat has slide show abilities.
My instructor used power point last term, and conversion to PDF lost most of the data.

Just skip the powerpoint nonsense all together.

[unknown]

Don't do powerpoint, generate a PDF, acrobat has slide show abilities.
My instructor used power point last term, and conversion to PDF lost most of the data.

Just skip the powerpoint nonsense all together.

yeah that seems smart, or HTML, swf or even txt, I dont personally see what advantage power point has.

[Najdorf]

yeah that seems smart, or HTML, swf or even txt, I dont personally see what advantage power point has.

.txt slideshowshows 4 teh win

[Nevada]

Do PDF format presentations support embedding videos? One of the main reasons I used PowerPoint in the first place was that it allowed me to put in animated shapes and text boxes (e.g. I can circle parts of a graph and talk about them sequentially). But that doesn't help much when the graph doesn't show up at all. Strangely enough, OpenOffice almost did a better job displaying the presentation than Windows did (MIT runs on Linux, so OpenOffice is pretty big here).

[PowerMacX]

Hmm, I once did a PowerPoint presentation, created on a crappy PC and played back in a so-so laptop, which included several videos and, other that failing to play automatically (meaning I needed to manually click on them) it worked fine. I guess I was lucky. :)

Anyway, I found out that when moving from Mac to PC PowerPoint/Word/Excel the biggest problem is if you "paste" pictures in the presentation/doc instead of using Insert File. Pasted graphics consistently failed to show up on PCs. Of course, if you do "insert files", remember to check "include in document" as opposed to "include references" (that happened to me once, and I actually tought at first that Microsoft had developed a very efficient compression method :D )

[Duane]

Use latex; it's easier for everything, especially if you need to write out equations. Besides, everyone can read pdfs. Thank god for adobe.

[Jake]

Also, make sure to always test a power point beforehand on the actual projector and computer that you will give the presentation. I had to give a presentation with a group and luckily someone checked the projector we were using to find that the text we had was unreadable because of color differences in LCD screens and the projector.

I've had terrible experiences with the mac version of powerpoint I use Keynote to read power points made by my professors, its much faster.

[FreakSoftware]

This is why I make bitchin presentations in Keynote. Draws drop at the fact that a) it just works, and b) it looks gorgeous.

[Nevada]

Ah, yes. I haven't been motivated to use Keynote yet (though I have it), because I can't tow a G5 to my presentations. Maybe one day...

[skyhawk]

to those people suggesting plain text or pdf:

to the best of my knowledge, those don't do movies.

My second advice: there is no substitute for preparation, including testing your presentation on the/a foreign computer.

And my third advice: BYOL

[igame3d]

If one does some googling, one finds many articles written by respectable scholars that spell out the failures of PowerPoint presentations.

I was going to dump those on my animation instructor but then decided I was paying too much money to fail the class based solely on telling him his presentations are boring everyone to death.

[FreakSoftware]

That's better than mine reading out of the book.

[ravuya]

Had a similar thing like this where I dragged and dropped several images onto a PowerPoint presentation on Mac, then ran it on a Windows box, which failed immediately.

Turned out PowerPoint converted my nice PNG graphics to a special compression format of TIFF and was using QuickTime to display them under OS X, and the QuickTime version on the Windows box had no idea what the hell was going on, so we got a nice white box reminding us to upgrade the copy of QuickTime.

Sure looked stupid; luckily I backed up the PNGs to a website and was able to alt+tab between the presentation and the images.

[PowerMacX]

If one does some googling, one finds many articles written by respectable scholars that spell out the failures of PowerPoint presentations.

I was going to dump those on my animation instructor but then decided I was paying too much money to fail the class based solely on telling him his presentations are boring everyone to death.

I think this should be required reading for anyone making a PowerPoint presentation:
http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html

Even if you don't read it all, you can get the gist of that article just by looking at the pictures.