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The Trouble With KeyNote

By drorzel on May 7, 2007.

I was buried in work last week in part because of the annual Steinmetz Symposium, in which we cancel a day of classes and have students report on their undergraduate research projects. Both of my students were giving talks, and there was all sorts of running around involved in the preparation.

One of my students was very fired up to switch from PowerPoint on the PC to KeyNote on the Mac for this talk, and who am I to get in the way of constructive enthusiasm? His talk was the best I've heard him give, which is saying something. Of course, I would've been happier with a different opening joke...

He started off with a formal title slide, then switched to one that said "Krypton Sources for Dummies," copying the look and color scheme from the books. He explained that he was taking care to pitch the talk for non-physicists, because he was well aware of how difficult it was to sit through a colloquium when you didn't understand anything.

Then he clicked to the next slide, which was a picture of one of the senior majors sleeping during a colloquium talk.

Of course, he went on, he didn't want to pick on just one student, because it can happen to anyone...

And the next slides showed one of the junior majors sleeping during a colloquium.

But it's not just students, he continued...

And up popped a picture of me, sleeping during a colloquium talk.

Of course, I get the last laugh-- I get to grade his thesis...

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Academia

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You're going to give him an A, right?

PowerPoint seems to encourage cramming as much text onto each slide as possible. I've never used Keynote, but in my experience as an audience member, Keynote presentations have much less text per slide than PowerPoint presentations. Not coincidentally, they also tend to be better presentations.

I'm not sure how much of that is due to the presenters and how much to the presentation software though.

Keynote's default font is larger than PowerPoint's, so there's less text on a slide and it's larger and clearer. That's one of the major reasons why presentations done with Keynote tend to be better in general. Don't tell Microsoft. ;-)