[Gllug] Microsoft was distributing Ubuntu

[Richard Jones]

On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 11:40:10AM +0100, John G Walker wrote:
> What PowerPoint does is to display slides on a computer screen. If
> there's a problem, it comes from the people who make the slides, as I
> pointed out in another sub-thread.

I had a grumpy hangover this morning...  Here are some concrete
problems that I have observed:

(1) In the way that people typically use it (emailing "stacks" back
and forth) you end up with loads of different versions with no
versioning and no way to tell which is the latest version.  This is a
general problem with Office docs.

(2) Large files containing very small amounts of text.

(3) Slide format can't contain enough text.  Using multiple slides
means that people have to remember the contents of slides across
slides.

(4) People who read off the slides and say little else.

(5) Hitting keys accidentally causes things to move around - you
quickly get to the point where you're lining stuff up manually.

(6) Doesn't work well when the screen size or aspect ratio changes, or
when there's a missing font.  You often get parts of the slides
disappearing off the bottom of the screen.

(7) Docs don't store well in traditional version control systems,
because they're binary.

(8) Impossible [Office] or very hard [OpenOffice] to process or
generate the files automatically.  And yes, I have generated OO.org
files from programs, and was deeply unimpressed with the format
(although I'm sure OOXML is worse).  IMHO they should have used
DocBook/XML, which is a far better format only let down by the tools
used to process it.

(9) Can't view the structure so you often get the situation where
boxes are on top of each other, with lower ones "disappearing"
(actually obscured / invisible).

(10) Frustrating, imprecise diagram tools.

(11) How do you apply a uniform style to all slides?  (I'm sure that
PP experts will tell me how to do this, but I never worked it out).

I would say that all but perhaps one or two of those are software
problems.

> The inherent problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it incredibly
> easy to produce a large number of useless slides. Se the Video Arts
> film on slide shows for how to do this with an earlier technology,

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/  His books are expensive, but
every one I have got has been well worth the money.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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