On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:42 AM, David Cantrell <[email protected]> wrote: > Am I a terrible heretic for quite liking Powerpoint?
depends what faith you profess. One who worships at RMS's FLOSS altar should be liking OOo merely adequate tool instead. One who praises Tufte among the leading saints of exposition should eschew bullet points entirely, and would likely find some other means of sequencing > I think it's a > great tool, that is usually horribly abused. It's a tool that has provided wondrous support for creation of paged bulleted outlines of the same disreputable sort we were producing on plastic-foil overhead-projector "slides" by chemical means in the '80s. As with most technologies, it is dual use. It can be used to convey actual information as opposed to rhythmic propaganda. > And yes, I've used > animation in my slides. Occasionally. Carefully. Yes, it takes great care to use PPT for anything other than mind numbing advertorials. I have a few animations too ... that serve as a laser pointer that leaves a burn mark for reference where it lingered at a specific point of interest on a graph's scale the minimalist, fast cut trend ... which is more commonly associated with xul slideware but can be done with ppt ... is refreshing. It is nice to see people using the projector's ability to change faster than we could flip the foils of yore to provide tempo and context without displaying the entire outline to be read aloud. we used to slowly 'striptease' the backing from a foil on the projector, to focus attention on one line at a time, so we felt the wrongness of having the same fragment of outline on-screen for three minutes even back then. Most importantly this is a stealthy return to giving a prepared speech or address, with Churchillian free-verse pacing and emphasis, with the audiovisual accessory provided to amuse the children of Laugh-In and Sesame Street who must listen with their eyes, only seemingly the centerpiece. (CNN's viewer response meters are another solution.) -- Bill [email protected] [email protected] _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
