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PowerPoint… So much to say about the world’s most amazing software. There is a certain level of maturity one should go through while blossoming from PP-peon to PP-master. Sadly, some people never mature and thus most of us have to sit through horrible shitty slides for hours. To start out, to the left there, is a slide I may have given for one of my first group meetings. This is a “typical” slide that we commonly see. It doesn’t have much to it – the vocabulary on the slide is simple but overall the presentation is boring and I’m sure it will degrade into white pages of sequential steps. Sadly, the structures were “cut and paste” from ChemDraw, which makes them look thin and dimensionless. In short: It kinda sucks. It’s a step up from some of the trash you will occasionally see. With barf colored backgrounds and huge swaths of jargon filled text, which the presenter just reads off of.
Now check out a slide that I may have used at my last ACS meeting. HOT! Note the bold lines in the structure. You accomplish them in ChemDraw by highlighting your structure, selecting “object settings” and adjusting the line thickness to .018in. Then you save it as a 600 dpi .png and import it as an image into PowerPoint. Your structures will be hot. Also notice the pretty blue bar. Nice but not ostentatious. Of course, if you really want to be awesome, you can follow Paul Docherty’s formula for generating awesome pics. But… no matter what… do not just copy right out of chemdraw! Your structures look like garbage and I will hate you and shit in your face if I see you. The resolution is too low. Cutting and pasting feature of Chemdraw is for Word documents only.
Finally, the most mature effort on behalf of this junior scientist. My version of the web 2.0 of PowerPoint presentations. This is exactly how most of my slides will look. Sleek design, short text, vivid contrast so people can easily see what is happening. Images of cells and gels and pretty pics of cartoon machines made in Adobe Illustrator. The text is a wee bit small, but it’ll be legible on the large screens at the ACS. My animations (Oh yes… animations) are smooth, unobtrusive and illustrative. (The image was yanked from Holly Goodson’s group)
You needn’t fear animations. Some people say “animations are gaudy and distracting” and in general that’s right. There’s no point to flying in text from off the screen when a simple ‘fade in’ will do. Likewise it’s unhelpful to plaster as much shit onto one slide as you can. The only man I’ve ever seen pull that off to any great effect was William Goddard the III. And you’re no William Goddard the III. Animations will allow slow introduction of components to the slide. Again, they don’t have to be stupid shit like “fly in pinwheel from left of screen then bold and make fart noise.” A simple fade in is perfect for most applications. For instance, I would fade in point two of the slide above after explaining point one.
Anyway, that’s just my two cents. PowerPoint can be a dangerous weapon in the untrained hand, which is why it has no business in the classroom.
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You know, if you had a Mac, you could just cut-and-paste and it would look fine. The anti-aliasing is hella better, and you don’t need to make any fancy files to keep the lines clean. It’s really obvious to anybody with a mixed mac-pc group that the mac guys have nicer looking presentations. You’re also less likely to crash during your presentation, and there will be fewer puppies killed during the manufacture of your computer.
The last slide looks like something Phil Baran would put up. Most people don’t need to make their structures glow in order to draw attention to them. He needs to do it to make us look at the slide and not at his muscles.
agreed. c/p from chemdraw to powerpoint works fine cause macs automatically anti-alias the drawings when pasting into word/pp/etc. Little things like that make me love Macs. Like, for the pics on my blog, all I do is a selected screen capture (Command+Shift+4) and upload. I think they look pretty good. Not TotSyn good, but good, and much less work.
I like that last slide. Though I think Baran would be hotter if he was… less greasy.
I have seminar coming up in a few months, and I think I’m gonna try out Keynote. Karl Scheidt gave a talk here with Keynote and it was delicious.
Big fan of bolding up the lines on my Mac for a presentation before I cut and paste directly.
My advisor and I saw Phil Baran at the last ACS meeting, and after I was raving about him, my advisor mentioned Baran was “too polished” as if having shitty slides and not being an interesting speaker is a point of pride.
Maybe when your advisor said “too polished”, s/he meant that he was too rehearsed? That was my take anyhow… obviously it’s impressive work, but I felt as if the presentation was recited from memory.
As opposed to making up shit as you go and running 10 minutes over. Yeah, I’m a big fan of that (irony/sarcasm alert).
I don’t know about you people, but when I give ACS talks, I try to remember what the hell is on my slides and I practice at least five times to get the timing just right. However, to be fair, I do put in a couple of jokes or conversational statements so that the presentation feels a little impromptu and lively. To those who know me though, all that is well rehearsed in advance as well.
Obviously, a presentation recited from memory about stuff you’ve already read in the literature is not worth it no matter how famous the person is and how good the chemistry. You might as well just show up for question period and at least you won’t have lost a 1/2 hour of your life. Unless you haven’t read the literature and want a quick overview. That’s why it’s not worth it to go see most famous people at ACS, but rather their students and postdocs. Even though, some of the student presentation are not that great…
I think that in my field, most of the famous people throw in a few goodies that are not reported yet, so it’s not that much of a problem. But a Collum or Stoddard talk is useless if you’ve read the literature; it’s still very entertaining though in a non-intellectual way (especially in the former case).
Some speakers, indeed, fart a dozen times in one presentation.
Thanks for the ’spec! Actually, the two latest versions of ChemOffice for the PC allow great antialiasing joy. The trick is to go into File/Preferences, and turn on OLE antialiasing. Then any structures you stick into Word or Powerpoint look far better.
This is clearly the case. I stand corrected. Increasing the line thickness is nevertheless a priority or your structures will still look shitty.
Thanks, the suggestions are making my Boston presentation look better by the minute.
The problem is not just boring chemdraw plots (though this is undoubtably a factor), but the fact that sometimes one has to do boring stuff. Churning out starting material, running reactions that don’t work, comparing UV-vis spectra that are only marginally different. The web2.0 slide above could be someones entire masters thesis in one slide, somewhat difficult to translate into a 45 minute presentation.
Hah hah! I so don’t care about that advice. I’ve got that OLE thingy turned on all the time and I copy and paste from Chemdraw and will continue to do so just to spite you. In fact some of my structures still look bad, but I don’t care because I am a jerk.
Your scheme for the bad slide would look better if it took up the entire slide as well. You don’t need that pointless text since you can say it all during the presentation. I think you have way too much text.
I dare you to come to my talk and say that you couldn’t see my structures because they looked copied and pasted. I will laugh at you and say that I did it on purpose because I hate everyone. Mwa ha ha ha ha!
PowerPoint – when you have nothing to say and an hour in which to say it Wanna bet that the Tree of Knowledge was a PowerPoint presentation by the worm in Eden?. Sodom had sodomy, Gomorrah had PowerPoint. Uncle Al has B&W overhead transparencies. Lick my Mylar, Homeland Severity.
i agree, the slides shown above have too much text to begin with. two other things are bothering me too (being that i’ve had a couple of beers), its annonying that people, namely academmics, kiss so much rear wrt big names, and pi’s in particular. you must remove yourself from the small world of academia and the idealistic views that dominate college campuses. big fish small tank syndrome. also, talk all you want about the pretty pictures macs can produce…..because thats all they got, lets hear some other POWERFUL applications of a mac. no offense to anyone….
Let’s be honest here. As an organic chemist, all I really need to run are chemdraw, word, powerpoint, a web browser, and scifinder/beilstein. My mac does that just fine in OSX.
If I need to run Gaussian, I can bring up a unix shell, but that doesn’t happen very often. If I need Spartan, I can boot windows. I have the horsepower, I just don’t really have the need.
At this point arguing Mac vs. PC is like arguing democrat vs. republican; there are significant differences, but the discussion is mostly partisan rhetoric.
Hey TheEdge,
I happen to know for a fact, that YOUR mac does not run windows… or did you get a new one now?
I do agree though that mac and pcs have become so simliar, that the real differences lie in what your tastes are and what you can afford to pay for.
But I know that Dave would disagree and remain firm on the point that macs are made in heavan.
Take’er easy for the rest of us sinners,
the dude
It is true that my 5 year old mac is missing many features of more modern Apple products. Things like bootcamp, a high-speed internet card, and the key that comes between 2 and 4.
I think the best reason to buy a Mac is that there is significantly less malware developed for OS X. I just hate that mother$(%(*@) purple monkey.
If the cult of Mac were an actual religion, Dave would be a high priest. Probably the one in charge of enforcement.
You, sir, have me at a disadvantage, Mr. Lebowski.
OH. I get it. The Edge’s name is Dave Evans.
That’ll teach me to lapse on my pop education. If it weren’t for Wikipedia I’d still have no idea who this “Fergie” woman is.
Just to be clear, I’m not actually Dave Evan’s.
Don’t feel bad, Kyle. I’ve had to explain it to everyone who knows it’s me.
Oh, I don’t feel bad at all. I figured it out by myself. It just took me… like… 8 months or something.
I’m fairly certain your point is that I bought a mac because my PI has one. yeah, ok. It really has nothing to do with quality, stability or anything like that. I really am a tool of academia. Damn, you caught me redhanded.
Like excimer, I bought a mac during grad school because that’s what we had in the lab and I still use one. However, I am not a militant mac user. There is no question that PCs are a lot more personalizable and there is a lot more shareware and freeware out there. One area where mac does destroy PC is in presentation software. If you have ever used Keynote then you know what I mean. It’s faster to build slides, easier to use and stuff just looks better. I used PP for years and was perfectly happy with it until I tried Keynote. I’ll never go back.
Papers is a worthwhile program found only on Mac.
I have always felt that if you can’t give an interesting talk using plain black and white slides, then you should go back and practice a bit more. The slides should not be the focus of the talk, the speaker should be. The slides are only there to highlight the information.
Besides, real scientists use chalk.
Bah. Openoffice 2.0, Inkscape, and Gimp are all I need to make a presentation. Yes, to get perfect structrue images, you need to code the coordinates of all of your bonds by hand.
I just loaded Keynote ‘08 onto my Mac. Oh my, how sweet. It is sooooo much nicer that PP. Building and manipulating a presentation is so much easier. I’m never going back.
PowerPoint 2007 is essentially a copy of Keynote. That’s just how Microsoft rolls.
Re: Darksyde
I’d recommend BKChem (or running Chemdraw under Wine) to coding them by hand – unless you really enjoy doing it that way.
Last slide looking good, I would maybe space the bullet points from each other slightly for legibility.
Adobe Illustrator is the way to go for professional-looking graphics. PowerPoint is just not designed for anything other than basic tasks.
Although I don’t mind a well thought out PP presentation, I have to say the lectures I always gained the most information from were my old synth prof’s combo overhead/Sharpies/colored chalk talks. He had just enough info on the overheads that he didn’t have to write the entire class, and had a variety of colored pens and chalk to draw mechanisms/intermediates/transition states. I never really understood organic until I took that man’s class. He was truly a skilled lecturer, and did not use his presentation materials as a crutch (like many a presentation I have seen).
Shameless plug of my molecular graphic skills: http://www.chemicalforums.com/.....ic=18699.0
Mitch
Mitch, if you take a look carefully at your graphic, you can see Maxwell’s demon in the reflection off of Rutherfordium.
eh
I got to stop you are slide #2. #3 is way over the top – it looks like a marketer did it, that you need color and visual attractiveness to compensate for a lack of true content.
I would have thought everyone would have seen this site and this one too by now, but maybe not.
Sorry, but that’s a nonsensical argument. You think it’s logical to assume visual attractiveness is found where content is absent? What kind of shuttered existence does one have to have in order to be mislead into thinking that science (and your career) isn’t guided by persuasion, not just in a logical argument, but in delivery as well. The idea that you think YOUR research is so goddamn awesome people are going to remember it through a shitty, prosaic litany of seemingly identical presentations is retarded.
It serves you better to be remembered for being ostentatious and too flashy than simply forgotten altogether.
potassium hydroxide reacts with hydrofluoric acid to yield neon nitride. What say you chemblogger?
Completely agree with Kyle on this one – no problem in presenting work in an attractive and memorable way so long as the science is still described well. Slide #3 conveys visual evidence of the compound’s effects in cells. That’s hard to convey in chalk or the b&w minimalism that many seem to favor. Admittedly, the structure is a little annoying since it’s hard to see the atom labels.
K.C. Nicolau is the all time master of graphic design in chemistry. Has anyone ever seen his mad slides? Check out the group website for a taste, but it’s nothing compared to seeing them on those huge ACS screens.