Presentation Sux

Everyone does presentations, most likely on Powerpoint. Or maybe Keynote on the Mac. But they all have issues, and you don't even have to do presentations to see this. You just have to watch presentations.

The main problem is trying to do a demo. You have to stop your presentation, move to a new screen, continue, move back, and the audience gets to see all the presentation software, because, well, you can't easily imbed a window or screen in the middle of your presentation.

It's also difficult to back up correctly, especially with animations. You have to hunt around when someone says "Can you please go back". It seems the solution is that when you back up, you should skip over the animation, and force the person to have to restart it.

An interesting question is whether what you see, as the presenter, on your laptop, should match what is shown to the audience. After all, you might want to do all sorts of things the audience doesn't care about (take notes, for instance, or search through your slides).

It's interesting that this was one of the last "Office-like" items Google put into place, partly, I suppose, because compared to spreadsheets and word processing, it seems the least important.

And then there's simply the issue of displaying the information from the laptop, where you might have to tinker with resolution, and screen sizes, and how to mirror, and how this is far more difficult than it should be.

Indeed, Andrea O.K. Wright had to have her presentation postponed because no one could figure out how to get her laptop to display properly, leaving the audience vexed and confused.

Does anyone care about this, about how to make this kinda thing better?