Recently, my post about my SAT Challenge entry has leaped into the Top Five Most Emailed list over on the right, for what reason I can't really say. That gives me two of the top five, though-- eat my dust, Myers. Now there's only that Deltoid character between me and world domination...
The other Most Emailed post is my PowerPoint advice, which reminds me that I'm a terrible person for not linking to Dave Munger's Casual Friday study of PowerPoint technique. In my defense, it was posted at the very busiest point of the term for me, and I forgot about it by the time I managed to dig myself back out from work.
Dave put together a few short movie clips of PowerPoint presentations, designed to test various aspects of the advice I posted. One version presented results graphically, and another put them only in text, and so on. People were asked the view one of the movies, and then answer some questions about the content.
The results weren't exactly a dramatic confirmation of my advice (go over to Cognitive Daily to read them), but it's still cool to see an attempted test.
And, while I'm talking about PowerPoint advice, here's yet another set of advice, this one with step-by-step instructions for how to override some of the stupider default settings. What I'd really like is a way to replace the stupid defaults, so I don't have to go through this nonsense every time I start a new presentation, but Microsoft doesn't believe in that. If the linked post gets even a fraction of speakers to stop blindly accepting the deafult settings, though, that'll be an improvement.
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The standard Microsloth way to override defaults is to make a template file and open that (thereby generating a new empty file with all the defaults of that template). You can set fonts, animations, backgrounds, and the like.
Or you can just change over to Keynote on the Mac ;-)