Emergency PowerPoint?

Probably one of the few things I got out of education courses at McGill was the importance of making a decent PowerPoint presentation. Really, if I wanted to spend 5K a year for five years to learn to use PP, I would have just had to buy the fricking thing and sit here reading a layout manual.

Anyway, I don't have a lot of fantastic ideas on how to make a good presentation. I'm far, far, faaaar from being any professional in layout or graphic design. I have only a few pointers for some of you who might be kind of lost...

• Pick a clean font. Not Comic Sans. (This gets a bit more complicated because you have to package uncommon True Type fonts with your presentation...)


• Keywords, not entire paragraphs.


• Put in as many large, high quality relevant images and/or graphs as possible. Not on the same slide.


• You're presenting the slides, not the other way around... unless you're trying to be clever.

Jorghnassen had been here since Monday to have me help him put together his PP presentation for a talk. Yes, a 3 hour trip here just so I personally would do it for him. :) But it is a very important talk - scheduled just for him at UWaterloo next week. And, since I am certain that he'll get completely befuddled in Ontario due to the mass crowds of Ontarians, I'll be going along with him for the three days.

I don't really like PP. It does the most ridiculous and idiotic things, like changing its mind every few seconds and either allowing you to use different symbols and fonts in a text box... or not. It also doesn't like it when you want to make a minor change in its organizational chart wizard, since a mere human doesn't know what he or she really wants.

On the other hand, some people like PP for its preset elements you can choose from, like templates and colour schemes. There are some mighty ugly ones in there (COMIC SANS), but the choice is still there. And since Jorgh has a really hard time choosing things, the numerous but limited choices gives him (at least) the illusion that he can come to a decision.

Now there's just a few slight problems with using PP... not everyone has it, and not everyone uses Windows (no, really???). Fortunately, for the hapless Windows users, there is the PP viewer so you can knock yourselves out on that one. Also, fortunately for the "everyone else" user, there is Open Office that has a compatible tool, Impress.

Jorgh has a different problem though. He tends to be clueless about the computator and all its inner and outer workings, though he's smart as a whip and cute as a button and all sorts of other nice idioms. Thus, he came all this way to have me make his presentation.

That's okay, since I don't have anything else to do. :(