Rant

As usual, I have other things I should be doing (I'm obviously not), so I am going to try and keep this short, but I'm slightly (more than slightly?) bothered:

Background: Today, I had to do a PowerPoint presentation for a Spanish class I'm taking (stupid projects). Anyway, I spent an hour and made 20 slides on a country. As usual I used boring, but visible, black and white, with a few pictures. No transitions, sounds, animation or other annoying distractions. So far, So good.

The Presentation: When I went to actually present the PowerPoint, I set up the projector (for the teacher ;-) and got started. I had a map, so I went into the PowerPoint menu (found in the bottom, left corner of the screen while presenting) and started using the pen tool to point things out, at which point chaos started. I couldn't believe it, but no one had seen either that menu, or the pen tool before. It had never occurred to anyone to want to draw or do anything while presenting. This wouldn't seem so bad, except that in a mandatory class (8th grade "shop", and possibly some others) PowerPoint is taught as part of the class, requiring you to use all the irritating, distracting features and colors that result in an unreadable mess. Apparently they don't teach how to actually present your slide show (I wouldn't know as I missed a lot of that year due to illness).

Now that my rant is done, A few PowerPoint tips:

First off, If you don't have PowerPoint, and want it, try OpenOffice.org Impress which runs on most modern computers and operating systems.

Number 2: don't use any transitions that make noise, take a long time, or are otherwise distracting.

3.) Don't use weird colors, backgrounds or gradients that make the presentation unreadable (you are trying to get information out, not be artistic)
4.) Practice before hand, if you haven't done this before. Look through the menu on the left (Slideshow menu -> View Show, to display full screen and make the presentation tools available). It seems to help grab people's attention if you are actively drawing/pointing things out, etc.
5.) Don't just read the slides, Present them. Talk about them, etc. People can (mostly, I hope) read for them selves, try and keep them occupied.


Enough for now, Back to my homework (Java Programming right now, which brings me to another comment:)

Java:
Check the java homepage, they are giving out free copies of their commercial IDE and have a beta of the next version out. Check the right side of the page for the IDE (its marked free in red), not sure how long this will last, but for now all you need is a valid sun website account (free)