My sabbatical is coming to an end, so I’ve begun prepping my class for the term that starts Monday. I’m teaching the honors section of introductory E&M, and for the intro classes, I lecture off PowerPoint. We’re starting an entirely new syllabus this year, and I plan to use my spiffy tablet PC to do my lectures, so I’ve been making up new lecture slides.
At times like this, I wish I got paid an hourly wage, because I’d be tempted to send Microsoft a bill for the time I’ve wasted because of their redesign of Office. I spent an hour figuring out how to get things back to the way I want them, after wasting probably two hours trying to work within their new paradigm.
In the old Office, a large number of drawing tools were available on the standard tool bar at the bottom of the screen, and I could customize the tools that appeared in the main tool bar at the top to include things I use all the time (superscript, subscript, insert symbol) and remove things I never use (pretty much all of the line-spacing and bulleted-list tools). Not so for the new Office, which has opted for minimum customizability, and maximum screen area taken up by toolbars.
The chief effect of this was to at least double the number of mouse-clicks required for any operation. Want to draw a rectangle? There’s no longer a rectangle-drawing button on the standard toolbar– you need to click the “Shapes” button on the fat new toolbar (excuse me, “Ribbon”), then select the rectangle tool from a pull-down menu. The same for inserting a text box, drawing a line, or an oval, or anything else. Want to change the thickness of a line? That used to be one pop-up menu, but now it’s two– click “Shape Outline,” then “Weight” then select the weight you want. Same for dashes and arrows.
Subscript and superscript were particularly nice– those went from one click to four: highlight the text, right-click on it, select “Format,” select “Font,” click the appropriate check-box.
Changing the defaults is even more fun– if you go to the “design” tab (which pops up a whole new “Ribbon”), you see a “fonts” button, which will get you a pull-down menu that has “create new fonts” as one of the options, and will let you set the default font for titles and regular text. It does not, however, allow you to select a default size for either of these, so I spent a while having every single text box I inserted come in at 18 point, which is a little too small to be read clearly from the back of the classroom.
It turns out that you can change the default font size and color for a given document (though not for the program as a whole, so it needs to be re-done for every new document), by the incredibly intuitive means of right-clicking on the border of a text box– not the text, the border of the box– and choosing “Set as Default Text Box.” I had to Google for that.
So, I spent an hour re-customizing PowerPoint to allow me to do the things I need to do in an efficient manner. I created a Custom Toolbar with all the commands I normally use, basically re-creating the old toolbar set-up. This was a fun experience as well, because as always with Microsoft, you need to know exactly what they call things in order to find them– it took a while to get “Oval” as the name for the ellipse-drawing tool (I’m a science nerd), and I wouldn’t’ve guessed “Straight Arrow Connector” for “line with an arrow at one end.”
So, I’ve had to give up another strip of screen real estate to make common commands readily accessible. Meanwhile, I have a huge block of the home “Ribbon” taken up with paragraph-formatting tools that I will never, ever use, because putting full paragraphs of text on lecture slides is death.
I’m sure the new paradigm works brilliantly, provided you only want to give the sort of “three bullet points to the left of one square graphic” talks that they provide standard layouts for. Of course, that’s also the quickest and easiest way to create a really bad talk that will turn your audience’s brains into cheese. It’s no use at all for physics talks.
My next giant time-sink project will be getting some LaTeX add-on to work, so I can do equations well and quickly. Yeah, I know, they have an Equation Editor built-in, and it does an OK job, with one problem: you can’t change the color of the equations. At least, you can’t change the color in any obvious way, and they’ve disabled the Help files for Equation Editor in keeping with their new approach to customer service…
The Equation Editor is a dumbed down version of a program called Math Type. For about $50 you can get the real one, colors, lots of other cool things.
Also there are programs (Latex equation editor, for macs) that let you enter TeX code and output a small .pdf with the equation in it. So nice TeX equations for posters and such.
As far as MS? Generally MuchoSucko
Serves you right for using Office. LaTeX rules!
if you’re going to go the latex anyway, go all the way to Beamer…MUCH prettier than powerpoint, and less annoying.
Use LaTeX for the slides, generate PDF and give your presentation using your favourite PDF viewer?
Or, variation, generate each slide using LaTeX, Word or whatever, export each page as PNG (or PDF if you want to be interesting), and show each slide as an image in an image viewer?
Of course, that’s also the quickest and easiest way to create a really bad talk that will turn your audience’s brains into cheese. It’s no use at all for physics talks.
No, but I’ll bet that Emmy would love to have a talk about brains made of cheese. Brainzzz! 😉
Didn’t you get a tablet recently?
You could just hand write your slides, then. The MS journal program is fairly decent, or at least it used to be. Multiple colors are easy, and equations are a piece of cake.
(That said, I preferred chalk when I was teaching. *Shrug*)
(In any event, that journal program w/ a tablet was great for
posting homework solutions: http://www.grantgoodyear.org/~grant/nonmajors/homework/StatmechtHW.html . Ignore the links on that page, as many are likely to be broken.)
In the case of text formatting, it’s always better to use keyboard shortcuts anyway… italics is CTRL-I, superscript is CTRL-+, subscript is CTRL-=. Those still work in Office 2007. Otherwise, yeah, I have no idea what’s with that damn ribbon anyway.
I think I’ve found the problem.
You see, PowerPoint is specifically designed to NOT engage your audience. It is designed to shut discussion down. If you are a corporate weenie presenting to other corporate weenies, this is probably what you want. In an academic setting, this is usually a bad thing.
Since you are doing LaTeX anyway, consider just doing the whole thing in LaTeX and converting to PDF.
I’m with you on the suckitude of Equation Editor. I actually find it harder to use than writing equations in raw (La)TeX source. The Equation Editor interface involves too many clicks and pulling down of menus, and it’s a “what you see is all you get” interface. Not to mention that (at least in the older version; I haven’t upgraded yet and will try to avoid doing so as long as I can) it takes some effort to get the default sizes right for posters or PowerPoint.
I hate that they took out the horseshoe logic symbol… I now have to copy and paste it from old documents. grrr.
Use LaTeX for the slides, generate PDF and give your presentation using your favourite PDF viewer?
I’m a big fan of LaTeX for equations– TeX4PPT was a life-saver, but alas, it doesn’t work with Office 2007– but doing graphics in LaTeX is more hassle than I’m down for. I know there are commands for drawing things in LaTeX, but it’s a giant pain in the ass, and importing graphics from other programs always turns into a gigantic nightmare.
I could generate slides that are mostly equations, but that’s just deadly dull. And for intro physcis, there are a lot of situations where you really need to show pictures.
Didn’t you get a tablet recently?
You could just hand write your slides, then. The MS journal program is fairly decent, or at least it used to be. Multiple colors are easy, and equations are a piece of cake.
I’m planning to use the tablet– it is, in fact, the only computer I have with the new Office on it– but I do sort of a hybrid thing– I make up slides with the graphics and basic lecture items on them, and then draw in vectors and work examples in “ink” during the lecture. Then I save the whole thing as a PDF, and post it on the course web site, so students can look at it when they’re studying.
I don’t like writing the whole thing out, because my handwriting isn’t all that good, and I can’t draw worth a damn. That’s one of the reasons I do PowerPoint in the first place.
The Equation Editor is a dumbed down version of a program called Math Type. For about $50 you can get the real one, colors, lots of other cool things.
Maybe I’ll look into that. I’m being thwarted in my attempts to incorporate LaTeX by the University of Wisconsin, who have throttled down their bandwidth so I can’t download GhostScript.
I don’t understand this oft-repeated claim. Are you talking about the default slide designs and layouts, or automatic presentation-generating wizzzzzards? But who uses those?
Powerpoint is a tool that projects whatever you want from a computer onto a screen, that’s all. Whatever you want. Start with a blank template, and put in the kind of stuff that makes for a good presentation in physics, or teaching biology, or whatever.
That said, I am in 100% agreement with all bitches and moans about the new Office 2007. What a pain in the ass.
Importing images in LaTeX is easy. Just convert them to postscript and use the graphicx package to do an includegraphics[width=something,keepaspectratio=]{picture.ps} …
I’m beginning to think that Microsoft either hired an Apple/Sun mole as their efficiency expert or else they used cheap labour from the looney bin to test new usability ideas against. Rule number one should be “don’t hide the most important functions behind a pretty thing that looks like an unclickable design element”, but that’s exactly what they did.
two words about all that.
“KEY”
“NOTE”
Sven, I’m sure that it’s possible to give a good PowerPoint talk. But it’s surprisingly difficult, even with a blank template (and forget about AutoContent Wizard, which leads to monstrosities like the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation). There are several necessary conditions that have to be met (but even all together, they are not sufficient) for a talk to be good. A partial list:
1. Lack of visual clutter on slides. Fortunately, I am not required to use a style sheet which puts trivia like date, title, slide count, and organization name on every slide. However, many institutions require some or all of these things (especially organization name), which means that anybody working there cannot give a good talk.
2. Number of slides appropriate for length of presentation. Since PPT slides (unlike the transparencies they replaced) are effectively an infinite resource, it is very tempting to shove too many slides into a talk. General rule: if you are much beyond one slide per minute, you’re probably overdoing it.
3. Amount of content per slide appropriate. Rarely can you put a complete sentence or a moderately complex thought onto a slide without violating this rule. This is a problem because conveying one or more moderately complex thoughts is generally the point of a lecture/colloquium/seminar.
4. Font sizes appropriate. That’s why the new 18 point default for text objects is bad news. In Office 2004 for Mac (and earlier versions I have encountered) the default is 24 points for exactly the reason Chad gave in the original post.
5. Suitable graphics. Most scientists I know, myself included, have problems with graphics packages whose default settings are useless for presentations or publications (I’m looking at you, IDL). Even those of us who appreciate the problems (usually too-small fonts and too-thin lines) and try to anticipate/fix them either don’t always succeed, or work with collaborators who are blissfully ignorant of the problem.
6. Restraint on use of animation and fancy transitions. There are times when simple animations are appropriate, but most of the time these features don’t make sense.
7. Public speaking skill/talent. All too rare even among people who make a living doing presentations. Sometimes this can’t be helped: It’s even rarer that a non-native speaker can pull this off, but many will never be able to do this even in their native language.
Again: It’s not impossible to give a good PowerPoint talk. But plan on fighting PowerPoint (and other software packages) to do this.
In the old days of transparencies and (gasp) actually putting lecture notes on the blackboard, a newbie might make some of these mistakes, but with a little practice all of the above points (except possibly #7) could be dealt with. And of course #6 doesn’t arise when you put lecture notes on the blackboard.
I was going to second beamer. Then I remembered how much better the lectures started going once I began using online applets and videos and doing the rest on the board. Quasi-color-coded, simply to visually separate elements. It’s absurdly more effective and time-efficient than writing out anything in powerpoint or LaTeX.
Plus, hacking LaTeX is t3h suck. The documents come out beautifully, and sure, these days you can embed multimedia — video, flash applets, shockwave applets (::sigh:: — Windows only. Why the hell can’t textbook publishers stop using that monstrosity and switch completely to flash!), etc — but despite my strong computing background to draw on, it takes much longer to compose a presentation than it does to write notes and do the lecture improvising based on the observed level of confusion.
It’s not impossible to give a good PowerPoint talk. But plan on fighting PowerPoint (and other software packages) to do this.
Only someone who had never experienced lectures pre-PowerPoint would make this claim. If you really think watching some incipiently-senile physics professor (*) stumble through a half-remembered derivation at the chalkboard is preferable to PowerPoint, then you’re in luck, because you’re not going to have to fight a lot of other people for seats in that lecture.
(And most of your points have nothing to do with PowperPoint at any rate.)
(*) Any resemblance to blog author entirely coincidental; I was thinking of Moo-Moo’s father.
I’ve seen way too many examples of ppt being used to make up for the lack of a brain. There are lecturers who cannot get from one thought to the next without the crutch of ppt. I think we basically hired one new math prof on the spot when he gave his “sample” algebra lecture by just picking up a piece of chalk and doing it without notes. He actually knew algebra and how to teach it. The same should be true of physics if you know what you are doing and/or prepare for class.
I do not find ppt constraining because all I use it for is as a vehicle to transport pictures or diagrams, particularly those from a textbook problem. The physics goes on the board that is next to the SmartBoard after highlighting the key items in the diagram. Like #16 suggests, why not just put the animations in ppt and work the rest on the board? Or have them work it on the board in a cooperative learning exercise?
I mean, you should not really need to lecture on basic content. They paid $100+ for the textbook. They can read F=ma or whatever in there before they come to class and get quizzed to see if they did the reading before you explore what it means. If the book is crap, get a different book. I suppose you could put your ppt up before class so they can read it instead of the textbook, but then why even come to class?
It turns out that you can change the default font size and color for a given document (though not for the program as a whole, so it needs to be re-done for every new document), by the incredibly intuitive means of right-clicking on the border of a text box– not the text, the border of the box– and choosing “Set as Default Text Box.” I had to Google for that.
Wait, what? Why not go to “View->Slide Master”, which lets you change the master layout of your slides in a simple and elegant way. And then when you’re done, you can save your preferred layout as a theme to apply to other documents as you want.
I think this is just a case where the program’s model and your mental model of how the program works aren’t in sync — you weren’t thinking in terms of themes and slide masters, but doing so would have made the solution obvious.
I’m with you on the suckitude of Equation Editor. I actually find it harder to use than writing equations in raw (La)TeX source. The Equation Editor interface involves too many clicks and pulling down of menus, and it’s a “what you see is all you get” interface.
The equation editing functionality in Word 2007 is about a zillion times better than it was before, and it actually lets you type in LaTeXy things (e.g., sum_(n=1)^3) and have them translated on the fly to the WYSIWYG. For whatever reason, though, that style of equation editing doesn’t work in PowerPoint, and pasting into PowerPoint just pastes an image, which indicates that it doesn’t even understand the equation stuff at all. I’d still lean toward doing equations in Word and pasting into PowerPoint, though, because that’s still going to be faster than doing equations in LaTex, compiling, opening up in GhostView, and then pasting into PowerPoint…
Wait, what? Why not go to “View->Slide Master”, which lets you change the master layout of your slides in a simple and elegant way. And then when you’re done, you can save your preferred layout as a theme to apply to other documents as you want.
That does seem like the obvious way to do it, yes. It does let you choose the fonts for titles and body text in there, and, in fact, I was able to set everything to my personal preference of Times New Roman from that.
It does not, however, appear to let you change the size of the fonts. At least, I couldn’t find it in any place that looked like it ought to contain that option.
Nor do the footer boxes that appear on the master view actually show up on the slides themselves, even after I edited the text so they weren’t greyed out. I’m sure there’s some secret trick to that, too, but it wasn’t obvious, and I’ve since decided not to waste the space.
As for the equations, Perry’s suggestion of MathType works a treat. It lets me type input in TeX format and converts it automatically, and has pull-down menus for symbols that I don’t know how to get in TeX. It’s even better than TeX4PPT, which I was using previously.
So, hey, blogging about this has been good for something.
It does not, however, appear to let you change the size of the fonts. At least, I couldn’t find it in any place that looked like it ought to contain that option.
If I go into the Master Slide view and just select the “Click here to edit text style” stuff, there’s the little floaty font-properties box. I change the font size in that, close the Master Edit, and then go create a new slide with that layout, and it has the new font size.
Maybe you were creating new slides with different layout than the one you edited in the master view?
(Also, Times New Roman? Sigh. Maybe Microsoft should have made it more difficult for people to change things. Their graphic designers are better at making things look attractive than physicists!)
If I go into the Master Slide view and just select the “Click here to edit text style” stuff, there’s the little floaty font-properties box. I change the font size in that, close the Master Edit, and then go create a new slide with that layout, and it has the new font size.
That changes the text properties for text typed in the locations specified by that particular layout. It doesn’t affect the properties of text boxes inserted at arbitrary points, which is what I need to change– I need to be able to draw and label diagrams at arbitrary points on the slide.
My default mode of operation is to work with the title-only layout, and add text boxes and graphics to the otherwise blank page. I do generate some slides that could be accomodated by a standard layout, but they’re a distinct minority.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I think it’s fair to say that they weren’t really aiming at your style of usage with the improvements in 2007…
I am not a huge Windows/MS basher, but I have got to say that these new releases (Word, PowerPoint, and Vista) are just … for lack of a more suitable word, I will say that they might have just done better to forget designing new programs altogether, and just focus on the damn’d security problems.
I will never install Office 2007 for PC. Never. It just frustrates me too much.
For inserting equations in Powerpoint, I’ve recently discovered the LaTeX equation editor from Hamline University. Basically, you type LaTeX equations into a web form and it returns an image.
I personally use OpenOffice. It sucks, but it sucks less. I also know someone who uses magicpoint, but I’ve no experience with it. OOo also exports to PDF and Flash, so you can always give your presentation with someone else’s notebook should the need arise.
At least PowerPoint doesn’t lock your presentation up in a secret format that others have to painstakingly reverse-engineer (with varying degrees of success). Well, sorta. Personally, OpenDocument is my hope for a good scientific Office file format set.
But OpenOffice also sucks. But at least it’s free. (and usable; all my my presentations to date have used it) 😉
Oh, and it’s available on most platforms that people care about, so it doesn’t lock you to an OS either.
Hi,
First, I sympathize with your plight regarding the newest version of Office. (I would add to your list of gripes the fact that OneNote, for the tablet PCs, does not make it easy to incorporate eqns, despite the large number of requests made since the original version came out.) All of this fits under the category of “wasn’t broke but they had to fix it” (or is that, “but they need to make more profits”?)
Anyhow, the point I wanted to make is that you can change the color in parts of an equation using equation editor if you have the latest version put out by Design Science. Not that expensive (esp if you are like me and write equations for a living), and it is a very nice tool to have. Worth the $, IMHO.
Cheers,
M