Serendipity35

As I write this post, Prezi is bragging they have over 50 million users and lots of higher education presentations. I'm still not a Prezi user and I've seen presentations using it that made me dizzy with all the movement. But I understand why people are looking to get out of PowerPoint which is so often criticized.



Honestly, I think the criticism of almost all bad PowerPoint presentations should be directed at its creator and/or the presenter rather than the software. "Death by PowerPoint" doesn't occur because of the program.



Web apps like Haiku Deck and Canva are getting some attention now and some people say this is the beginning of the end of PowerPoint as the main tool for slidedecks. Apple has always tried to make their Keynote program the other choice, but it was initially limited to Mac users. They have introduced other app versions and an iCloud version for the web.

Microsoft has also recently launched its Prezi competitor called Sway.

Do you remember the early days of PowerPoint? Did you know that it was originally designed for the Macintosh computer? The initial release was called "Presenter", but in 1987 it was renamed to "PowerPoint" due to problems with trademarks.

The idea of slides comes from what the program was designed to replace - 35 mm photo slides.

Back then, and still today, many of the best presentations using slidedecks focus on images rather than slides full of text.

When I started working at NJIT in 2000, professors were still bringing 35 mm slides to media services to be converted to .jpgs so that they could use them in PowerPoint. As you might imagine, the College of Architecture and Design had many tray of beautiful slides that they used in lectures.

There are plenty of online articles, tutorials and posts about how to make a good presentation, but I don't think that PowerPoint (or some web or app version of it) is going away.

That old phrase GIGO (Garbage in, garbage out) that came from computer science applies to presentations too. Input bad data ("garbage in") and produce bad  output ("garbage out"). Just add the presenter to the GIGO mix.