On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 02:33 AM, David wrote:
Hello bw,
well, for me, you ignore two issues:
1. In case one has to prepare hundreds of graphs, copy/paste is not
really an efficient procedure
2. if one wants to prepare internet presentations, one has to save or
convert or whatever to an internet-capable image format, compatible with
as much browsers and generations.
Hope this helps to clarify
Best regards
David
In addition to these, and the comprehensive list Nick Cox provided, let me
add one more. PowerPoint files are the least transportable of the current
MS Office suite. I do not use it, but I often deal with students who have
prepared their presentations in PPT. They generally are _not_
cross-platform if any maths appear in the slides. A senior honors student
gave a presentation the other day in which he was not able to get his
Windows laptop to work with a digital video projector, so he displayed it
from the seminar leader's Mac OS X laptop, with Word X (latest version);
the maths were munged. There are ways to avoid this problem, and ensure
that a presentation will be equally usable by colleagues with Macs, Unix,
Linux, etc. They involve use of TeX, and avoidance of PowerPoint.
My experience with PowerPoint has been similar. When I did my very first
PowerPoint presentation, it was a stats lecture for first year medical
students. I realised that each equation I included would send to sleep half
of the students still awake, so I kept the maths to a minimum (ie a few
square root signs), and made lots of graphs. The students liked it, and
asked me if it could be placed on the Web. This was done by the authorised
people, who converted it to an Adobe Acrobat .pdf. When this was done, the
graphs came out horribly battered, and all the square root signs had
morphed to question marks. That was when I decided that I should have
listened to the inner voice that told me to use TeX. in the first place The
following year, I did this, creating a .pdf presentation using MiKTeX and
dfipdfm, and the graphics were a lot cleaner, and so were the square root
signs, and it could be placed on the Web directly with no trouble. On the
other hand, PowerPoint is OK if you are making presentations jointly with
colleagues who use PowerPoint, and know that it will only be presented in a
strictly Windows environment.
