[PLUG-TALK] Greetings from Mordor

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Fri Aug 14 13:19:35 UTC 2009


On Thu, 13 Aug 2009, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> My wydiwys presentation, with raytraced animations, blew away all the
> Powerpoints. It is amazing what you can do with open source tools.

Keith,

   I've been preparing all my presentation visuals with LaTeX for years.
These, too, are recognized as better (not just "different") than PowerPoint
presentations. But, effective presentation visuals have another factor than
the tool used to prepare them: their content.

   Every visual I've seen done by someone who knows only PowerPoint fails in
one -- or both -- of two ways: "pretty" pictures as background into which
the text disappears due to lack of contrast, and too much text on each
"slide."

   Then you have the presentere who stand with their back to the audience and
read the slides; most in the audience know how to read for themselves. Or,
the'll introduce the slide with "I know there's a lot on here and you can't
read it all so I'll tell you what's important" rather than having only
what's important on that slide. Lawyers are among the worst presenters.
Government bureaucrats are a close second.

Rich

-- 
Richard B. Shepard, Ph.D.               |  Integrity            Credibility
Applied Ecosystem Services, Inc.        |            Innovation
<http://www.appl-ecosys.com>     Voice: 503-667-4517      Fax: 503-667-8863



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