Slideware

The ethos of slideware: good or evil?

Below, you’ll find a debate from a couple of angles on whether it’s possible to create emotionally compelling, rich content in an intrinsically limiting program. If you’ve ever had an opportunity to use slideware, it’s time to rethink what’s possible with a ubiquitous and often poorly used class of software:

• In this corner: Edward Tufte, the da Vinci of infographics, claims nothing less than PowerPoint is Evil
  
• In the other corner: David Byrne, former Talking Heads frontman and performance artist, is Learning to Love PowerPoint
  

View articles here if you encounter difficulty

What are your conclusions about this class of software after reading these opposing viewpoints?

Three case studies: your choice

Byrne found PowerPoint “limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software.” Yet he was able to make compelling artwork using it. One goal of our project is to learn how to do good things with bad software as Byrne did. We can do this by doing things NOT in the way the programmers envisioned. But to do that, we need to know what they envisioned!

Below, you’ll find examples of slideware that are not PowerPoint, but which suffer from the same intrinsic limitations found in that product: Apple’s Keynote, Google’s Slides, and Adobe’s Express.

The wiki will demonstrate the use of these to build a project. Depending on the specific functionality of the software, the demonstrations will show:

• Basic exploration of user interface
• Working with graphic shapes
• Working with image, sound, and video elements
• Performing basic layout tasks—alignment, stacking order, etc.
• Applying transitions—animation between slides or clips
• Applying builds and actions—animation within one slide
• Exporting to a movie and/or presenting in a blog

Take a look at the following case studies and select ONE to use for your project. If you already know one of these applications well, you have a couple of options:

• The tutorials are short videos broken down by topic. Look over the titles to see if there is a skill you are missing. For example, you may never have placed an audio file in a slideshow before — watch that!
• If you’re an expert already, you may skip the tutorial. But beware: software changes all the time! There may be something new you aren’t aware of. So look over the topic titles to make sure.

Whether you take the whole tutorial, cherry-pick a familiar application, or claim expertise, note your experience in the reflective writing of your process journal.

Case study 1: Keynote

People who typically work in the Apple ecosystem will want to consider Keynote. It delivers a more refined graphic sensibility with more emphasis on multimedia than PowerPoint. Keynote is exclusively available for the Apple OS. There is a cloud means to access Keynote on a PC, but it’s not as robust.

Software access

We have Keynote installed on our networked Macs at our school, so if you’re working there you already have access. If you have a Mac laptop or workstation of your own, you can install the app here:

NOTE: While there are mobile and browser versions of Keynote, we strongly recommend NOT using them for this project. These tutorials are for the more fully functional desktop version of the software.

Tutorial

We’ll start with tutorials to learn the software. If you are a PSU user, you have free access to LinkedIn Learning software tutorials by logging in first:

After log-in, go to the tutorials:

The entire Keynote Essential Training session is a whopping 3.5 hours long, but the excerpts below should only set you back about 2 hours.

Demonstration

The demonstration file above was created in response to a keyword prompt: WAR. It was built in response to the aftermath of the Iraq War in 2015. At the top of this title, find the Sample Files. You can download the entire build file and decompress it to see not only how a folder of multimedia assets should be organized, but you’ll also see a sample Keynote file that you can play around with. A brief demo video will show how some of the items in this video were constructed.

Danger! Saving a .key file to the cloud

A Keynote file is odd. Technically, it’s not a file at all, but rather a kind of folder (which Mac OS refers to as a Package) that also happens to have an extension, .key, appended to it. This is fine if you are staying inside Mac’s walled garden, where Packages with extensions are recognized by OSX.

But just try and save a .key file to a non-OSX environment: mayhem ensues! Cloud servers like Box, Dropbox, and the like aren’t “aware” of this OSX trick, so when you try to save the .key file to the non-iCloud cloud, it breaks and shows up as a folder.

The solution is simple: right-click on your .key file and select Compress “yourFileName.key” from the contextual menu. This copies the original to a .zip file, which is recognized as a file by a cloud server. 

Case study 2: Slides

If you like making slideshows without managing PowerPoint bloatware, you can’t do better than Google Slides. I’ve pretty much moved all my workaday presentations there because they are mindlessly simple to share. Yes, PowerPoint looks shareable, but administrators often limit this to institutional access if you are using an institutional account. And please don’t get me started on the horrors of PowerPoint Online…

Software access

Google Slides is a browser-based software and is available if you have a Google account. Just go to your Google Drive and you can create a new Slides file there.

NOTE: It’s fine to use your PSU Google Workspace, but be aware there is an institutional log-in wall if you share your file. Non-PSU users cannot access it, even at the “anyone with the link” level.

So that said: if you are a PSU user, you understand the risk, you don’t want the work in your drive, and you want to use your school Google account to do this, go here:

NOTE: Since the software is browser-based, it’s tempting to work on a phone or tablet. Don’t. You’ll be managing too much information to make that work.

Tutorial

We’ll start with tutorials to learn the software. If you are a PSU user, you have free access to LinkedIn Learning software tutorials by logging in first:

After log-in, go to the tutorials:

The entire Google Slides Essential Training session is just over an hour in length, so do it all.

Demonstration

NOTE: To make the slideshow STOP, refresh your screen or right-click and choose an option like Reload Frame from a drop-out menu!

Case study 3: Express

It comes as a bit of a surprise that Adobe, the 800-pound gorilla in the visual media software ecosystem, has taken so long to ramp up a slide deck authoring tool, but with the latest iteration of Express, it has come close.

Express has been a bit of a moving target. Originally debuting as Adobe Spark in 2016, it rebranded as Express in 2021, expanding its offerings to allow authors to create a variety of media formats: social media graphics, flyers, and “videos” which functioned a bit like a mashup between PowerPoint and iMovie.

As of this writing, Express is on the move again: by August 9, 2023, a new version with a completely different editing interface will come online. At this point, a pretty straightforward slide-deck function will exist, as well as a very iMovie-like video editor.

SO: if you want a very bleeding edge experience, but want to get deeper knowledge of Adobe, choose Express. LinkedIn Learning and other tutorial platforms will NOT have curated content on this software for some time to come.

Having said that, I took a test drive of the beta version of the video and slide-deck creators and I found them to be 1) pretty intuitive and 2) fairly in line with the user interfaces of like-kind software, so the learning curve is not steep if you have experience with something like PowerPoint or iMovie. I will say though: assuming the beta is a predictor, if you choose anything to work with for this project, get to know the Video function. Right now, there’s no reasonable way to auto-forward a slideshow and therefore export a video from it, the way one can from Keynote.

Software access

Adobe Express is a browser-based software and is available if you have an Adobe account. If you are a PSU user, you can create a free Creative Cloud account here:

• Find and select the Sign Up button.
• This opens a decision page: find and select the Penn State button. It may require a log-in.
• This opens a Browse Software Titles page. Find and select the Adobe Creative Cloud Order button.

You need a PSU Adobe account to open ANY Creative Cloud application, including Express.

NOTE: Since the software is browser-based, it’s tempting to work on a phone or tablet. Don’t. You’ll be managing too much information to make that work.

Tutorial

We’ll start off with tutorials to learn the software. There won’t be any LinkedIn Learning tutorials that are current with the most recent update, so instead you’ll peruse these offerings at Adobe:

Do an in-browser search for the term video. As of this writing, about 7 titles exist, including:

• Guide to creating quality photos and videos for social media
• Getting Started with Video Editing in Adobe Express
• Customizing a video template to share on social media
• How to add audio to a video
• Add effects or filters to a video
• How to speed up or slow down your video
• How to export a video

The entire group is about 40 minutes of video.

Demonstration

NOTE: While this is a good documentation of the previous version of Express, after August 9, 2023, it will no longer be relevant.