Hummm did I say how much I *loathe* PowerPoint?!?!?! Aaarrrrggggghhhhh stupid thing would not save changes in a preso I’m working on!! :-//

I was focusing on some other part of my computer screen at the time, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean (where it was cold and dark and dreary and rainy) from where Luis was working in Gran Canaria, Spain (where, I suspect, it was warm and sunny, and everyone but him was in a good mood) — and I didn’t notice his message as it scrolled down the window of Twitter messages from the various people I follow. But a few minutes later, I did happen to notice a follow-on tweet from Luis:

That’s it… Enough of it… Moving to Keynote and exporting preso to PDF. Had enough with the PPT hell at work!!

It occurred to me that perhaps this was the first time he was going to use the “export” feature in Apple’s Keynote presentation program in this manner, so I quickly typed the following tweet to him:

With Keynote, you can export each bullet-point “build” as a separate PDF page. Then [you] can use the PDF for a sophisticated preso …

Indeed, it turned out that Luis had not heard of this simple trick; he thanked me for the “hat trick,” as he called it, and suggested that I blog about it. Which, as you can tell, is exactly what I’m doing.

Aside from one’s dislike of Powerpoint, there’s another reason this export-to-PDF feature can be useful: you might be using Keynote and a Mac to create a presentation, but you might nevertheless find yourself forced to use a Windows-Powerpoint platform to present the presentation. That has happened to me several times in the past year, primarily because the conference organizer was understandably reluctant to waste the time that would have been required for six different speakers, during the course of a one-day conference, to “swap” their own computer with the one used for the previous presentation. (Of course, if the conference organizer had used a Mac, and required that all of the speakers do likewise, the problem could have been avoided altogether. But I digress.)

The brute-force solution is to tell Keynote to export your presentation into a Powerpoint format; then you can use the Powerpoint file in either a Mac or a Windows environment, depending on which one they actually use for the conference audio-visual environment. But there’s another, more subtle, problem with this approach: there’s no guarantee that the fonts on your Macintosh are identical to (or even compatible with) the fonts on the Windows platform.

I need to pause for a moment here, and remind the legions of Windows fans that there are … gasp! … more fonts in the world than Arial. Really! Lots, lots more! For example, here’s a random page from one of my presentations, using a “default” font suggested by Keynote:

This font happens to be something called “Marker Felt”, which is available in either “thin” or “wide” format — and while I had never heard of it before, I thought it looked really cool. I don’t know where it comes from, and I don’t know whether it’s available for Windows platforms; but I’d be willing to be a zillion dollars that the typical stripped-down Windows laptop used at a conference site won’t have such a font.

So what to do? Simple: export the whole thing, using one of the options in Keynote, to a PDF file. You can preserve the fonts that way, and you can be 100% certain that even the most brain-dead Windows laptop will have Adobe Acrobat installed.

That all works fine, and the typical presenter need not do anything more. But I can’t stand displaying an entire page of detailed material, with a dozen different bullet points, in one fell swoop to an audience. First, it overwhelms them; second, it tempts them to read ahead of what I’m talking about (e.g., they’re looking at the second bullet point on the page, while I’m still saying something about the first bullet point). And third, it removes whatever dramatic impact you might have wanted to add to the presentation.

Well, you can’t get Adobe Acrobat to mimic all of the dramatic effects available in Keynote (e.g., graphic elements like the little YouTube clips in the slide shown above, which come “whooshing” onto the screen from outer space), but you can at least make the presentation somewhat less primitive than the everything-on-the-page-at-once approach … by simply checking one extra box in the Keynote export command, which says “Print each stage of builds.” I’ve shown it here:

For the slide shown above, this means that Keynote will generate not one PDF page, but rather approximately 15 separate pages — which each page showing the cumulative results of each additional “build” element in the presentation. Admittedly, this can lead to a fairly large export file — but who cares? You can burn it onto a CD, or copy it onto a USB flash disk, and simply give it to the conference organizer without any explanations or apologies. Chances are they won’t even look at it; they’ll simply copy it onto the laptop that contains all of the presentations, and reassure you that it will be visible on the screen when it’s your turn to speak.

When you get called up to the podium to begin your presentation, some helpful assistant will double-click on what he assumes to be your Powerpoint presentation … and the fact that what is really being shown is a Keynote-generated PDF document, presented by Adobe Acrobat, will be a secret that only you know about.

As for everyone else: they’ll be happily seduced into believing that you’re using Powerpoint. But … they will wonder where you got that strange font, and why you’re not willing to use Arial, like the rest of the world …

Well, it’s been four years since we’ve seen a new version of Word, Excel, and Powerpoint for the Mac; and I’ve been increasingly annoyed by how often Word 2004 crashes on my Mac. So I went ahead and ordered it, and I now look forward, with mixed feelings, to its arrival next week. I was a little surprised to see that even an upgrade costs $299.95, and a full version of the software (i.e., for first-time customers) is $499.95. Admittedly, that’s for the high-end “special media” edition of the product; but it does make you wonder whether more and more people will be tempted by Apple’s own alternative, iWork (containing Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) for a mere $79.00.

I don’t even know what kind of features I should expect to see in Office 2008, so I surfed around the Internet and skimmed through some articles like “First Look: Word 2008” and “First Look:Excel 2008“. What surprised me most was not the glib, superficial review of features, functions, and overall “look-and-feel” of the new products, but rather the emotional, vituperative comments from dozens of readers that appeared at the end of each article. I realize that some of this — perhaps even most of this — comes from Apple fanatics who are opposed to just about anything that Microsoft does; but at the same time, many of the comments seemed valid. Cluttered user interface? Sluggish performance? Less compatibility between Windows and Mac platforms than ever before, because of the removal of VBA? With all these negatives, were are the positives?

It makes me wonder whether the overall market reaction to Office 2008 will be similar to the reaction to Windows Vista — not just a loud “yawn,” but a growing awareness that maybe we should look more closely at the Apple alternative. The comparison between Microsoft’s Vista and Apple’s new Leopard OS has to be at least part of the reason for the increased popularity of Mac computers; and I think the comparison between Word and Pages, or Powerpoint and Keynote, could do the same thing.

In my case, I ignored the first two versions of Apple’s Keynote presentation program when it first came out; there were too many limitations and problems. But the latest version is awesome (not perfect, just awesome), and I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to use Powerpoint in its place. And I’ve started taking another look at Apple’s latest Pages word-processor, and was surprised to see that “advanced” features like change-tracking (or “red-lining,” so you can see what changes have been made to an existing document) and creating a Table of Contents are now there. I know that Pages doesn’t have every feature that’s available in Word — for example, I don’t think it can create an index of all words found in a document, which is very handy if you happen to be writing a 500-page book — but it’s gone from having just 80-90% of Word’s features to something closer to 95-99%. And it imports/exports traditional Microsoft Word documents, so I can still exchange documents with my less fortunate Windows colleagues.

In the long run, of course, my personal opinions, likes, and dislikes won’t have any noticeable impact on the success of Office 2008. And since Office 2004 is even less stable under Apple’s Leopard operating system than ever before (Excel, for example, sometimes refuses to let me enter data into random spreadsheet cells), I guess my decision to spent $299.95 for an upgrade was reasonable. After all, if Microsoft only creates such upgrades every four years, that works out to about 20 cents a day.

But if it does take another four years for Microsoft to produce the next version of Office on the Mac, I wonder whether anyone will notice at all … in which case, I wonder whether Microsoft will even bother. If Office 2008 does indeed elicit a combination of yawns and outraged complaints, maybe we will finally shift over to Apple’s iWork.

It will be interesting to hear the early reactions to Office 2008 next week …

If you’d like to download a 18.4-megabyte PDF of the one-page mind-map for the presentation, click here. And if you’d like to see the Google Docs version of the presentation, click here. Because Google Docs presentations are sharable, there’s an opportunity for you to revise, enhance, correct, and generally improve the material. In order to do that, you’ll need to be added to the list of “collaborators” for the document; send me an email at ed-at-yourdon-to-com, and I’ll add you to the list.

But if you think Google Docs presentations look ugly, you can download the 6.2 megabyte Powerpoint file created as an export from my mind-mapping tool, by clicking here. And if that’s not enough, you can download the original 13.7-megabyte mind-map itself, by clicking here. But the mind-map document won’t do you much good if you don’t have the mind-mapping tool with which to open it and manipulate it; it’s called MindMap ConceptDraw. You can buy it for $119 (or get a free trial copy for 30 days) by visiting the ConceptDraw website (I have no business relationship with ConceptDraw, and receive no commissions, royalties, or financial remuneration of any kind from sales of their products).

Let me know if you have any questions or problems…

But I then embarked upon a far more ambitious project: I converted the enormous “mind-map” representation I’ve been creating on the subject of Web 2.0 into the Google Docs format. To accomplish this, I first created a presentation document in Apple Keynote, and manually created 108 pages of material from the latest mind-map that I had published (to see more details about that mind-map, click here). This was a tedious, time-consuming process, and there was no practical way to automate it; I’ll answer the obvious question of “Why Keynote?” a little later.

Once the Keynote document was finished, I then exported into a Powerpoint document; this is one of many standard export options available in Powerpoint, and it was … well, somewhat crude, but acceptably adequate. The resulting Powerpoint file required an hour or two of “tweaking” to make it look presentable; and if I had intended to use the Powerpoint file on any kind of long-term basis, I probably would have been more critical of the job Keynote did.

But in fact, the only reason for creating the Powerpoint file was that Google doesn’t know anything about Apple Keynote; it’s only willing to accept Powerpoint, and it limits the import to 10 megabytes. My Keynote file was just under 30 megabytes, and the exported Powerpoint file was about 12 megabytes — so I had to delete some of the JPG graphics to get it down to an acceptable size. After that, it was a purely mechanical process, and I had a rough version of what’s now available as a sharable, modifiable Google Docs presentation on Web 2.0. But even after a couple of hours of tweaking, I still ended up with something I referred to as “Ugly Betty” when I first blogged about it a couple days ago; take a look at that blog posting to get a sense of the different “look and feel” of the Google Docs material, versus the Apple Keynote material.

Here’s a summary of what seems to be lacking in the “presentation documents” created in Google Docs — which may or may not be similar to the strengths/weaknesses of word-processing documents and spreadsheets created by Google Docs:

1. The choice of fonts is very limited in Google Docs — a grand total of six: normal, normal/serif, courier new, trebuchet, and verdana. Maybe this is adequate for people who assume that all Powerpoint presentations should be created in Helvetica or Arial fonts, but it’s pretty boring.
2. The choice of font sizes also seemed limited — but perhaps that’s just because I’m accustomed to using 36-point fonts in a lot of my presentations, and that choice wasn’t available.
3. There’s no way to adjust the spacing between paragraphs on a page. If I have only a few bullet points in a list, I like to spread them out; and if I’m determined to cram a bunch of bullet points into a list on a single page, I need the ability to scrunch the paragraphs together.
4. As far as I can tell, external links (i.e., hyperlinks in the form of a URL) can only be attached to text strings, not to graphic images. This seems like such a major oversight that I’m still convinced that it must be an error on my part; but if so, it means that Google Docs is incredibly user-hostile, because I spent a lot of time unsuccessfully attempting to make it work.
5. While you can attach an external hyperlink to a text string, it doesn’t seem possible to create an internal hyperlink — i.e., a link to some other page in the document. Again, this is so incredibly stupid that I’m still convinced that I just haven’t figured out how to do it. Or maybe it’s on a list of “obvious” features that will show up in some future release of Google Docs. Powerpoint certainly has the features, as does Apple’s Keynote — and it’s very handy if you want to allow people to navigate through your presentation in a non-linear fashion.
6. The biggest limitation: no animation, no “build” capability. Everything that’s on the page just shows up in one fell swoop. I guess I’m not surprised, since roughly 90% of the mind-numbing Powerpoint presentations I’ve seen in the past 20 years (yes, 20 years: Powerpoint was first released as a Macintosh product in 1987) have ignored the use of animations and builds.

Especially regarding the last item on the list, I know what the standard response is: “Google Docs is a simple, light-weight tool, which supports people who want to create simple documents.” Well, that makes a lot of sense with word-processing tools: there are a lot more people writing one-page memos than there are writing 600-page textbooks. And it makes reasonably good sense with spreadsheets: most of us build simple rows and columns of figures, with the “SUM” function to total or sub-total those rows and columns.

But presentations are, by definition, intended for presenting material to an audience. And in today’s TV-saturated, video-savvy, Hollywood-oriented society, the stuff that you can create with Google Docs looks … well, ugly. Or at the very least, pedestrian. Boring. Ho-hum. Just like the Helvetica/Arial-styled bullet-point Powerpoint presentations we’ve seen over and over and over again.

At the same time, the ability to let hundreds of people all over the world view and collaborate on a single document is incredibly powerful; and that alone was sufficient to persuade me to create and upload my Google Docs material on Web 2.0. However, I do present this material to live audiences from time to time — and I see no reason why I should subject them to ugliness. That is why I started with an Apple Keynote document; and that’s why I’ll keep the Apple Keynote document and the Google Docs document synchronized as I continue to update the material in the future. The synchronization process will be manual; I’m simply not willing to spend any more time going through the hours of tedious work to convert Keynote to Powerpoint, and then Powerpoint to Google Docs. To get a sense of what the Apple Keynote document looks like, you can download the 9.5-megabyte PDF document that I exported from Keynote, by clicking here.

It’s quite possible that some of my criticisms of Google Docs are incorrect; as noted above, I may have misunderstood some of its features, in which case I apologize. And I fully expect that some (if not all) of its limitations will be removed in future versions. But for now, all of this leads me to an interesting conclusion regarding the “web as platform” theme often associated with Web 2.0: there may be many scenarios where it’s practical for word-processing and spreadsheets; but it’s going to be a while before Web-based tools like Google Docs are adequate for making presentations to a live audience. Having said that, though, I’m looking forward to seeing what Microsoft has done with its Windows Office Live service, which was just announced today. I’ve registered to become a beta user, and if I succeed, I’ll let you know how it looks …

If you’d like to be added to the list of collaborators — for making additions, changes, enhancements, etc. — let me know.

Enjoy!

When I saw that Google Docs had introduced a new Powerpoint-clone presentation mechanism a couple weeks ago, I decided that it would be a good way to share the Web 2.0 presentation that I’ve been posting as a massive “mind-map” for the past year or so … indeed, not just share it, but also make it possible for people to collaborate, and make revisions, corrections, and improvements to the material that I’ve been posting. It took more work than I expected, and it was a tedious process; more about that in a later blog. But it’s now done, and you can see the results; more importantly, you’ll be able to register as a “collaborator” and make your own changes to the document.

To view the on-line GoogleDocs version of the presentation, click here. I’ll be sending out invitations to various bloggers, consultants, friends, and other Web 2.0-savvy people that I think may be interested in collaborating to help enhance/improve the material. In the meantime, if you would like to become a collaborator, please send me an email message describing who you are, what your interest is in Web 2.0, and what kind of additions, corrections, and improvements you’d like to make. There’s probably a way to do that automatically through the Google Docs mechanism, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

For those of you interested in seeing the material, but who don’t care about collaboration or Google Docs, the presentation is also available as a 9.5-megabyte downloadable PDF file, which you can access by clicking here. And there’s another reason for doing so: it’s a much prettier, user-friendly presentation of the material, with “internal” links that let you navigate in a non-linear fashion to various topics within the 108-page document. Indeed, the Google Docs version reminded me of the main character in the popular U.S. TV show, “Ugly Betty”: efficient and cooperative, but not very attractive. By contrast, the PDF version of the presentation is … well, whoever the gorgeous, sexy character is on that show.

I’ll describe the process of creating the Google Docs and PDF documents in a later post, along with some impressions and experiences from the process, in a later posting. Meanwhile, enjoy the material — and let me know if you’d like to collaborate in future improvements to it!

… and I’m hooked. Make no mistake: this isn’t really Powerpoint, just as the word-processor and spreadsheet capabilities in Google Apps are not really the same as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel. But it’s okay for now, especially because it encourages sharing and collaboration. As far as I can tell, after some relatively brief experiments, the presentation package doesn’t support any of the animation or “build” features in Powerpoint, which means that it’s totally unsuitable for me as a mechanism for creating new presentations from scratch. However, it’s capable of importing existing Powerpoint files — which obviously means that I can create a new presentation in Powerpoint, with whatever animation/build features I want, and then import the finished result into Google Apps for viewing and collaboration. For the most part, that seems to work fine — except that JPEG images that I had created as clickable hyperlinks in the original Powerpoint file are no longer clickable in Google Apps. That’s moderately annoying, but not a show-stopper; hopefully, it’s somewhere on a list of improvements that the Google techies are planning for some future release…

I’ve decided to experiment with the Google Apps presentation package, and I’ve begun by importing the most recent version of my one-hour presentation on managing Death-March projects. You can view it by clicking here; let me know what you think. If you’re interested in updating/correcting/revising/refining the material, send me an email (at ed-at-yourdon-dot-com) and I’ll add you to the list of collaborators. That will give you the ability to change the presentation, add new slides, delete slides you don’t like, etc.

As I learn more about the strengths, weaknesses, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of Google Apps, I plan to add some more presentations to my publicly-available collection. Most important, I’m now seriously considering converting my massive Web 2.0 mind-map into this format, so that it can be uploaded, shared, and updated by the community at large … In general, the ability to share and collaborate with a large, worldwide community is such a powerful concept that it outweighs most (though not all) of the concerns that I would otherwise have about features and functions in a comparison between Microsoft Office and Google Apps.

If you have any suggestions or comments on how best to use this new Google product — or warnings and advice, based on your own experiences — please share them with me, so that I don’t waste any more time than necessary. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to share my experiences as I learn more about it myself…

It’s not really a relevant issue with regard to iLife: after all, if you’re taking photographs, composing music, or creating websites with a Mac, there’s not much chance that you’ll be remorseful that you’ve foresaken the Windows products in this area. For everyone but the serious power-users, tools like Apple’s iPhoto are more than sufficient; for example, I consider myself a reasonably competent digital photographer, and iPhoto is sufficient for 99% of the pictures that I need to edit, store, and catalog. For the rare exceptions, I’ve got the super-sophisticated tools like Adobe Photoshop; and while there may be obscure top-end photo-editing or catalog-management programs that only run on Windows, I haven’t missed them at all.

It’s iWork that’s going to be more interesting to watch. Most imporant, Apple has finally added a spreadsheet program, numbers, as a competitor for Excel. For my own work, 95% (or more) of Excel’s sophisticated features aren’t relevant; I don’t even use macros. So when my copy of iWork arrives in a couple of days (I ordered it this afternoon, of course), I’m planning to retire Excel unless there’s something seriously inadequate about Apple’s program.

As it turns out, I do much more writing and presentations than number-crunching, so I’m much more interested in Apple’s third-generation products “Pages” and “Keynote” (and because I didn’t think the first-generation or second-generation versions were quite powerful enough for my needs, I’m also aware that the first-generation version of Numbers may prove inadequate).  Briefly looking through the “new features” list, I noticed a huge new addition: change-tracking, which has been invaluable for many of the “shared” documents that I develop and edit collaboratively with co-workers. Interestingly, I thought that Pages 2006 and the new Pages 2008 were missing a “table of contents” feature, which I use frequently in Microsoft Word; but it turns out that that feature has existed since Pages 2006 without my even being aware of it. I think it still lacks the ability to automatically generate an index at the end of a long document, but I don’t use that feature very often; and there may well be a few other obscure features that I need once a month, but not on a day-to-day basis.

Both iWork and iLife retail for $79, by the way, which is much cheaper than Microsoft Office. And not only are they cheaper, but they start up much more quickly, and operate in a frisky, user-friendly fashion that constantly makes me wonder why I’ve been willing to tolerate the ponderous, sluggish Office applications for such a long time. I suspect the same will be true of Keynote, Apple’s replacement for Powerpoint, but I won’t know that for sure until I have a chance to play with it a bit more.

Since I interact with a large number of people who are still captives of the Dark Side, I suspect that one of the larger issues for me may be the convenience and accuracy of document-exchange (i.e., imports and exports) between the Apple iWork universe and the Microsoft Office universe. In the 2006 version of Apple’s products, I found that the document exchange worked reasonably well for simple documents, but often hiccuped when dealing with somewhat more complex documents.  It will be interesting to see how well things work with the vintage-2008 products.

I’ll also be curious to see how well the iLife products (especially iPhoto and the WebGallery) products interface with my new iPhone … my hunch is that Apple will have done a pretty good job in this area, for the simple reason that they control all of the underlying technology.

All in all, it looks like a good day to be an Apple fan; over the next couple weeks, I’ll let you know how well the advertising matches up with reality…

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I recall seeing the first critical article about Powerpoint — in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. I haven’t been able to locate it in the WSJ archives, but I was amused by an anecdote in the article about kindergarten children who were bringing 40-megabyte Powerpoint presentations into school to describe their family’s summer vacation in “show and tell.” There was also an anecdote about a management consultant who lost her temper with her teenage kids, when they wouldn’t clean up their rooms or do their assigned chores. She announced that they would have to have a family meeting to discuss the problem; the teenagers howled, in unison, “Please, Mom, no Powerpoint presentations! We’ll clean our room!”

More recently, some really serious criticisms of Powerpoint have emerged; of these, perhaps the most significant is Edward Tufte’s essay, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” While you’re at it, read Tufte’s essay, “Powerpoint does Rocket Science,” about the technical analysis of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. And for a more light-hearted assessment, read “How PowerPoint Is Like Melvin,” and Norvig’s spoof on how Lincoln would have used Powerpoint for the Gettysburg address. And you can get a good, comprehensive overview of the whole subject at Wikipedia’s page on Powerpoint.

So, if Powerpoint is so bad (or so vulnerable to misuse and abuse), what should we do? The most attractive alternative, in my opinion, is computer-supported mind-maps. The philosophical concept, and the graphical notation, of mind-maps has been around since the 1960s, and has been popularized by Tony Buzan, among others. And while it never required anything more than paper and pencil (take a look at Tom DeMarco’s home page for a nice example of a hand-drawn mind-map) for note-taking, it wasn’t very practical for presentations. But the world of manually drawn mind-maps really is from a time long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Now there are lots of computer-supported mind-mapping tools. All you need to need to do is type “mind map” into your Google search engine, and you’ll see a wide range of choices. For a more organized list of tools, check out the Wikipedia page; it lists both freeware and commercial products.

It’s one thing to use an automated tool to create a mind-map; after all, you could manage a clumsy imitation even in Powerpoint — not to mention Visio and various other drawing programs like OmniGraffle on the Mac. But if you’re going to use a mind-map for a presentation to a live audience of Powerpoint-addled zombies, you’ll need something that provides some animation and the equivalent of Powerpoint’s “build” mechanism — so you can “build” the mind-map, piece by piece, before the dazzled audience. That seems obvious, but it’s surprising to see how few of the available tools actually provide such support.

In early 2002, I found a reasonable solution: a product called ConceptDraw, from an Odessa (Ukraine)-based company with the same name. The basic product does the same thing as several other products, though it was reassuring to see that they had both a Windows and a Mac version. But what really made it attractive was a related program called ConceptDraw Presenter, which provides the aforementioned animation and “build” capabiities. Indeed, ConceptDraw provides support for MacroMedia Flash, as well as export to HTML; so it can be used to create interactive Web presentations, as well as the usual presentations before a live audience. Like all early-version products, ConceptDraw had its glitches and rough edges; and unfortunately, the company appears to have invested all of its resources in other drawing and diagramming tools; ConceptDraw Presenter has not been updated since 2002.

But now there’s another alternative — at least for us Mac enthusiasts. There’s a very nice mind-mapping tool called NovaMind, which supports both Mac and Windows; a new version came out a couple months ago, and bug-fix updates are released on almost a weekly basis.The graphics are very slick, and the output is very impressive … except for the lack of support for animation and build capabiities. NovaMind can export a mind-map to Powerpoint, but it comes across as one big, fat, bit-mapped image; you can’t really do anything useful with it in Powerpoint. However, it also exports its mind-maps into Apple’s new Keynote presentation program (including the new Keynote version-3); and that export can deconstructed into the various lines, boxes, and graphic elements of the mind-map, which can then be assigned animation and “build” properties with Keynote’s standard mechanisms.

One of the nice things about mind-maps for presentations is that they save trees: a Powerpoint presentation for, say, a one-hour presentation typically requires about 20 slides (using the rule of thumb that one slide takes three minutes to present); and I’ve seen fanatics with hundred-page presentations that they try (unsuccessfully) to cram into a manic one-hour talk. If you provide one copy of the handouts to every person in the audience, that’s a large pile of paper. It’s expensive, it’s clumsy, and it kills a lot of trees.

By contrast, a one-hour presentation with a mind-map typically takes one page; here, for example, is the mind-map that I’ve used for one-hour presentations about lawsuits associated with large software project failures (see details below on downloading the actual mind-map for this presentation). I can make a hundred copies at a modest cost, stick them into my briefcase, and everyone in the audience is happy that they don’t have to jam a large War and Peace-size document into their own briefcase. Yes, a fanatic can abuse this: most of the automated tools support “leveled” mind-maps, so you can have progressively more detailed mind-maps on separate pages. But it quickly becomes apparent that you can cram an enormous amount of detail into a mind-map on one page.

One last point: a typical 1-2 hour talk, on any technical subject, usually provides little more than an overview of the topic. There are always more details, and there’s often a long list of articles, books, and websites that can be consulted for additional information. A good speaker will typically mention this, and he/she may provide a list of such references, in textual form, in the handout document; but this is a nuisance for the audience, for they then have to retype all of those URLs into their own browser. Why not provide the lecture slides in electronic form, with the URLs embedded into the presentation? Powerpoint has supported that concept for a long time, but it basically means you have to provide the Powerpoint file to the attendees. In theory, you can’t even be sure that all attendees have access to Powerpoint (what if they’re using Linux?); and some presenters are too paranoid to distribute the Powerpoint file of what they regard as their own intellectual property.

Tools like ConceptDraw and NovaMind/Keynote provide an interesting alternative: export the presentation to a PDF file, with the hyperlinks preserved in the export. That file can be distributed to attendees, with much of the “creative” part of the presentation (especially the animation and build sequences) omitted; but the attendees can open the PDF file on their own computer (even on a Linux system!), and double-click the embedded URLs to access additional material recommended by the presenter. For example, the mind-map about software-related lawsuits, displayed above, was presented in November 2005 at the Boston chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN); you can download the PDF file for that mind-map from here.

It would be nice if the ConceptDraw people got around to updating their ConceptDraw presenter product; in the meantime, the vintage-2002 product does work. But for the latest, slickest, sexiest software support for mind-map presentations, I heartily recommend the combination of NovaMind and Keynote. (And in case you need the reassurance, I have no commercial or business involvement with ConceptDraw, NovaMind, or Apple).

Meanwhile, sayonara Powerpoint. You were great back in 1987, and you carried me through the 1990s in reasonably good form. But things have changed, and it’s time to move on.