Let's put on a show

Forget clunky old Powerpoint: Apple's Keynote is the way to wow an audience, says Charles Arthur

The story is told and is sworn to be true (because it appeared in the New Yorker) of a professional mother who got so sick of telling her teenage children to tidy their rooms – to no effect – that she drew up a Powerpoint slide demonstration about why they should, and made them sit through a presentation on why tidier rooms would be good for the family. Result: the children tidied their rooms. Why? "We'd never want to have to endure that again," one explained.

Powerpoint, Microsoft's presentation program, has become synonymous with accountants in long, boring meetings examining the quarterly sales projections. It does sound effects for bullet points. It does animations of graphs. And most people use it with all the elegance of a little old lady driving a truck for the first time: progress is clunky and inelegant. Powerpoint does not encourage storytelling, which is the key to good presentations. It rewards spadework. (For more about producing good presentations, read Doc Searls's advice at http://www.searls.com/present.html.)

There are alternatives; personally I've been pleased in the past with Upresent, originated at the University of Minnesota but spun off and developed by Codeblazer Technologies (http://www.codeblazer.com/).

Upresent runs on both Windows ('95 upwards) and Macintosh machines (OS8 upwards, and natively in OS X), though it was initially developed for the Mac. It costs $99 (£60). By contrast, Powerpoint will cost you about £270 (inc VAT) bought alone.

Now Apple users looking to impress, or deter, audiences have another choice: Keynote, developed by Apple for a rather demanding customer – the chief executive, Steve Jobs (above). Priced at £79 (inc VAT), it's clearly intended to create presentations that stand out as being "not Powerpoint".

It can read Powerpoint files (Upresent can't) and save presentations in that format; it can generate PDFs, though its native format is XML – an advanced text markup format of which the web's HTML is a subset. It's elegant: for example, when you move text and images about, coloured "guide" lines show when you have the item centred for width and height, and you can choose other locations for the guides. Powerpoint doesn't do this. Compared to Keynote's "themes", Powerpoint's backgrounds look jagged, even amateurish.

Keynote has an outliner like Powerpoint's to plan your presentation, and swap slides around. With Upresent, it's slightly less obvious, though the end result – swapping slides about – is the same.

Keynote's strengths are the ease of creation of presentations, and the way it makes graphics look: you can make pictures semi-transparent and rotate text, and the underlying graphics strength of OS X makes it all look terrific – much better than Powerpoint on any flavour of Windows, or even Mac OS. If you've got a good story to tell, or bad news to gloss, this is a good way to get people gaping at the pictures.

Weaknesses? No clip-art, and no "gallery view" showing thumbnails of the slides you've made so far. Most glaringly, and unlike Powerpoint and Upresent, there's no way to create a hyperlink in a slide to go directly to a website during your presentation. It's a functionality that goes beyond just pretty pictures; and the XML format hints at the possibility in future versions. Still, even for version 1.0, it's excellent, and a damn sight prettier than Powerpoint.

You'll need some good hardware. Apple has recently refreshed all its products (apart from the iBook); they now start only in OS X (though they can still run old programs in Classic). They're faster, slightly cheaper, and do Bluetooth natively and super-fast 802.11g wireless links (which run about five times faster, yet are also compatible with the existing 802.11b Wi-Fi), and have Firewire running at 800Mbps, twice as fast as USB 2 or standard Firewire.

Portables are light and robust; there's a tiny, light new 12in Powerbook (an iBook in all but name and CPU) and a huge, slightly unwieldy 17in Powerbook that mobile film-makers and web jockeys will love. Aluminium, not titanium, is now the metal of choice, and doubtless the 15in Powerbook will soon wear the same clothes.

Yet the real attraction remainsOS X. The Powerbook and iBook designs haven't changed for a couple of years. But OS X is becoming a compelling reason for change. Unix geeks love it. Web designers love it. Biotechnologists love it (it does Perl – see left). Accountants, however, don't.

Why is this? I've never understood why, for instance, the preponderance of destructive viruses – where prevention ups the cost of running Windows machines by a few hundred pounds annually, while OS X has zero native viruses – doesn't count against Windows when people make buying decisions. But of course I'm not an accountant. Maybe someone could do me a presentation to explain it.

network@independent.co.uk