Presentations Using Linux
Being User-Friendly — and Avoiding PowerPoint
UKUUG Linux 2004 Conference • 2004 August
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1 Intro
- “PowerPoint presentation” almost a generic
term
- Edward Tufte’s case against this style of presentation http://xrl.us/powerpointcritique
- on Linux:
- PowerPoint itself not available
- possible political reasons for avoiding it even when possible
- a look at the Linux-friendly alternatives
- in terms of end-user experience
Tufte’s book The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is worth a read; what he says applies to all PowerPoint-esque presentations.
This talk — dealing with the mere form of presentations — may seem quite trivial, but it matters. It matters because it’s hard for people to take Linux/software libre/your point seriously if it offers worse user experience than the package that (currently) nearly everybody else uses; it needs to be at least as good.
2 OpenOffice
- obvious PowerPoint alternative is OpenOffice
- problems:
- actually worse than PowerPoint in some critical ways when thinking about it
- turns out PowerPoint is far from optimal anyway
3 Thinking About It
- two different scenarioes in which slides are viewed
- during the presentation
- audience sat collectively staring at a big screen
- individual reading afterwards
- web or paper
- talk attendees reviewing content and noting specifics
- others reading it as their only source
- different requirements in each case
4 Requirements
- during presentation:
- one slide at a time
- full screen
- big text
- individual reading:
- skim through it quickly
- searchable
- linkable
- viewable without downloading special software
5 Full Screen
-
OpenOffice:
- fine
-
Acrobat Reader:
- has full-screen mode
- many different ways to generate PDFs
- web browsers:
- many now have full-screen modes
- text needs to be bigger than on a typical webpage
- navigation to consider
Examples of HTML-based talks include Mark Jason Dominus’s Conference Presentation Judo.
6 Individual Reading
- contradictory requirements
- often neglected
- important
- most people there can’t remember everything
- most people not there
7 OpenOffice Individual Reading
- big download if not already installed
- especially annoying for Windows users who already have
PowerPoint
- might not know what OpenOffice is
- so PowerPoint a better format to use than OpenOffice!
- very user-unfriendly web format:
- 1 page per slide tedious to navigate
- jpeg format does terrible things with text
- can’t search
An example OpenOffice HTML presentation is Julian Smart’s WxWindows Introduction
8 Web Individual Reading
- web should be good format for browsing (in theory)
- often not good (in practice)
- slide navigation usually awkward
Mark Jason Dominus’s Conference Presentation Judo is very recommended. It comes with excellent notes — but it takes far too long to read off-line, especially having to switch back and forth between the notes and the slides.
9 PDF Individual Reading
- generally more readable than PowerPoint or OpenOffice formats
- can search for text
- easier to flick through than separate webpages
- prints nicely
- can’t link to individual slides
- downloading a PDF requires more committment than browsing a webpage
10 Multiple Versions
- different full-screen and individual editions required
- several ways of achieving this
- multiple output one of XML’s supposed strengths
- full-screen version in OpenOffice or Latex or whatever
- separate version for individual reading
- single scrolling webpage or PDF
- notes inbetween slides
- one webpage with two style-sheets fulfills both rôles
- Bash tips: http://www.ukuug.org/events/linux2003/papers/bash_tips/
- OperaShow: http://xrl.us/hixieoperashow
Opera Show looks particularly nice, because everything is in
a single file: the style information is at the top of the HTML, and the
images are embedded with absurdly long data: URLs
Autrijus Tang’s PAR presentation first irritated me when it took so long to read on screen; I later discovered that Autrijus had prepared a separate edition for reading, so it was my fault for picking the wrong one.
11 Conclusion
- usability matters
- easy to pick OpenOffice by default
- audience of individual readers tend to be forgotten
- multiple formats does work in practice
Considering the audience of individual readers is the most important point I want to make here. It’s potentially bigger the the more-obvious audience, and it’s the way your talk will be remembered for posterity.
This does work in practice. I was amazed to discover that just using the materials from my Bash talk, somebody else in Nottingham was able to present a re-run!