{"id":839,"date":"2011-01-06T10:12:14","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T09:12:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elementally.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/?p=839"},"modified":"2011-01-06T10:12:14","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T09:12:14","slug":"theres-something-about-keynote-presentations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/theres-something-about-keynote-presentations\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s something about Keynote presentations"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mashable is reporting the most popular presentations for 2010 (see here<\/a>) 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u00c2\u00a0That’s a massive<\/strong> over-representation!<\/p>\n

Now, I fully take the point that the definition of ‘best’ is somewhat tenuous here but, even so……<\/p>\n

So what is it about Keynote that creates better presentations? \u00c2\u00a0Well, 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. \u00c2\u00a0Maybe it’s that – the things which make for better presentations are perhaps easier to do in Keynote.<\/p>\n

In my experience, things like inserting images \u00c2\u00a0and positioning images is much, much easier in Keynote. Perhaps it’s things like that….?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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! :)<\/p>\n

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<\/em>… How about that<\/strong> for a controversial question! ;)<\/p>\n

What say you, gentle reader, why is it easier to produce a good presentation in Keynote than Powerpoint – or is it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-powerpoint-and-other-packages","category-presentation-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.awareplus.co.uk\/presentation-skills-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}