Friend or nemesis?

I’ve done my best to make presentation software my friend, but I despair of ever using it well.

They seem so flexible, those presentation software programs, don’t they? Entertaining to play with and fun to manipulate, but . . . it’s challenging to make a presentation program do what you want it to do. Possibly I have a mind set that leads me to expect the program will be as flexible as the word processor or the database that bundles with it. Perhaps they were never designed to be explored and manipulated with quite as much stretch and reach as I imagine they are capable of. Or, maybe what I’m really trying to make is a music video!

Don’t get me wrong: I have managed some quite satisfactory PowerPoints. For the most part, they are montages of events at work, or series of photographs arranged in a tasteful way, with the understanding the music that plays along with them will be on a CD playing in a separate piece of technology. But make the thing useful in spicing up a dull bit of information? It just seems beyond me.

In my first creative attempt, I tried to cram just some basic points into a 10-minute slide show. I programmed each slide for a length of time which would allow the presentation to be completed in that time frame (a seductive feature) - which it did; but, when it came to presenting the thing, we raced through so fast, the basic points got scrambled and I ended up with egg on my face. This was user-unfriendly.

I have tried other “shows” with different timings and came to the conclusion using a mouse click to proceed to the next slide gives the most flexibility and control. You can allow for

spontaneous questions and other diversions and not lose the train of thought. Timings work when the show runs on its own, without a presenter.

One of the seemingly interesting things you can do with presentation software is insert a

hyperlink, which acts like a worldwide web bookmark, and jumps the presentation directly to the linked web page (beguiling concept). When, the night before I was to present the thing, I did something to make the hyperlinks already in the program inoperable . . . those 80 minutes while I persuaded the help button to retrain me were some of the longest of my life. This was definitely user-unchummy.

When playing the “show” on a personal computer, the hyperlink skips you there in under a

second; when the presentation is processed through a projector onto a big screen, it loses some of its agility. The shock of this unexpected pause makes the system quite user-unsympathetic and, it seems to me now, if all you want is a giant note pad, why wouldn’t you use an overhead projector? The overhead projector does not mislead you with the capacity to make sound clips, animations and keep-me-on-track-timings part of the production. All it does is enlarge your notes.

That seems very user-friendly to me!