5 Rules for Better PowerPoint
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.Great great post about making usable PowerPoint presentations. I agree with every single word of this. I used to do training sessions on building PowerPoints at my previous job. It's amazing how many people don't understand that they are the presentation, not the slides. Read this and learn!
I also agree with the bit about KeyNote as well. What a great program.
Discussion
I also like what guy kawasaki says about powerpoint...
http://www.forbes.com/ceonetwork/2004/09/10/0910chat_transcript.html
Created by Liam (alex) Strand on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
It's not freely accessible, but if you can get your hands on Tufte's Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, it's a good read:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
In there, he shows how damaging PowerPoint can be to a presentation. When I saw Tufte speak last year, his slides were all visuals... no text at all up there.
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
Edward Tufte's website is inspirational. I dip in and out of the forums from time to time to check out the great ideas. He also posts in-progress chapters of his upcoming book for review and comments.
Created by MattB on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
Thanks for posting that!
I wasn't as impressed with his five rules as I was with the Seth Godin PDF he linked to:
http://www.sethgodin.com/freeprize/reallybad-1.pdf
That's great stuff!
Created by Dave Lemen on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
Thanks for the Tufte link Kevin. His book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, seems extremely interesting. It's in route from Amazon as we speak! Ah more proof of the power of blogs.
Created by Ian on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
That was the nice thing about seeing Tufte's presentation. The presentation included all three of his books, plus the Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. The guy definitely knows his stuff.
If you poke around on Tufte's site as MattB suggests, you'll learn about Sparklines, which are cool... and you can even find code in different languages for making your own sparklines!
Ahh... too much to read, and too much to learn!
Created by Kevin Dangoor on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm
Oh yes I've seen the sparklines library for PHP before. I didn't realize it was the same guy. Interesting.
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Created by Ian on 06.21.2005 10:06 pm