Mashable is reporting the most popular presentations for 2010 (see here) and while I just laugh off a few of the statistics they cite (apparently women’s presentations are shorter than men’s on average – oh, yeah? 18 slides to 20 – Wow!) and the reasons for some things are obvious (such as the fact that Africa submits fewer presentations than America) there are some interesting observations worth thinking about.
For example, presentations written in English tend to have few slides in them than those than any other language. Japanese and Korean come in biggest and second biggest, so I’m guessing this has more to do with the structure of the language as much as anything, but it’s an interesting bit of trivia, never the less.
However, there’s something which really caught my eye as I scrolled through the slides: only 2% of presentations were written in Keynote (which is a surprising small number to me – but that probably says more about me!) but fully 16% of the top presentations were written in Keynote. Â That’s a massive over-representation!
Now, I fully take the point that the definition of ‘best’ is somewhat tenuous here but, even so……
So what is it about Keynote that creates better presentations? Â Well, it’s not totally a technical issue, in the sense that anything Keynote can do, Powerpoint can also do (more or less). Somethings are massively more simple to achieve in one of the programs than the other, however. Â Maybe it’s that – the things which make for better presentations are perhaps easier to do in Keynote.
In my experience, things like inserting images  and positioning images is much, much easier in Keynote. Perhaps it’s things like that….?
Certainly a conversation I was involved with on twitter (@presentations), kicked off by a review pointing out that Powerpoint had more ‘features’ in many areas the consensus was that many of these features weren’t really much ‘benefit’ to the typical user and that in some ways they were actually a hinderance, as they ‘clarted up’ (as we say in the North of England) the interface.
Interface is a word that’s banded around a lot WRT to Keynote (well, Macs in general!, TBH) and a lot of the people I talk to (professional presenters or professionals who present) suggest to me that the clean-ness of the way Keynote works means they can concentrate a lot more on the content/format/structure of their presentation and less on the mechanics of how to make that happen.
I’m inclined to agree – though I should also point out that things like content/format/structure should be decided using pencil/paper away from the keyboard! :)
Maybe it’s not the software at all but the people – perhaps people who tend to write better presentations tend to use Keynote, not that Keynote leads to better presentations per se… How about that for a controversial question! ;)
What say you, gentle reader, why is it easier to produce a good presentation in Keynote than Powerpoint – or is it?
Interesting…
Although I’ve been a Mac user for the best part of 10 years, I’ve only started using Keynote in the last 6 months; prior to that, I’d taken the nervous ex-corporate persons approach of installing MS Office onto my machine and using software I was more familiar with.
I think I generally support your reasoning behind the over-representation in top presentations of Keynote v Powerpoint:
1) Far less time is spend aligning things, re-sizing things, so more is available to think/write/re-write
2) The basic templates provided subtly encourage fewer words and more pictures/media
3) Due to the massive proportion of people who use Powerpoint, a significant number will be “non-professional” (or at least reluctant) presenters. Those using Keynote are, perhaps, more likely to be keen and/or professional presenters.
4) Perhaps a greater proportion of Keynote users have seen Steve Jobs present; his slides are usually beautifully simple, and have certainly inspired me to (try and) emulate them.
One note of warning though…I know I sometimes (often?) teeter on the edge of spending a disproportionate amount of time and effort on the “beauty” of a presentation rather than its content…!
I like your last point a lot. It makes sense that people who care about a well designed piece of equipment are more likely to pay attention to the design of a presentation.
For me, the UI is the biggest selling point for Keynote. While I can do most of the same things in PowerPoint, I can do them much faster and painlessly in Keynote.
I tend to agree with you about the ease of use in placing images and text in Keynote and that is likely the reason for a better looking (at least) presentation. It is for that simple reason that I very rarely use PowerPoint myself.
As for the Korean and Japanese slide number, while I know Korean (and as Japanese and Korean are very similar languages structurally and grammatically, Japanese too) is a much more descriptive language than English, there is a tendency for many Korean managers to still live in the 1990s when it comes to presenting. Their idea of a good presentation are slides filled with text and very small images. It is something that the younger generations here in Korea feel very frustrated with as they are becoming much more aware of the power of good quality images and spoken words. But sadly, the ‘old world’ managers still have the power.
It will change in Korea, but it will take time.
My hypothesis is that it has much more to do with the people, not the technology itself.
Macs have long been viewed as the preference of creative and artistic people. Designers, desktop publishers, artists, etc. seem to prefer Macs. These also seem like the types that would create better (or at least more beautiful) presentations.
I think there’s also a culture of creativity and artistry that surrounds Apple. Even though I’m a PC guy, I know that Apple makes beautiful, aesthetically pleasing objects. I suspect that has an effect.