newspeak

Readers’ Choice Awards 2012 | Linux Journal.

So here’s a simple test I undergo from time to time: Create a simple, informative presentation with charts and images. Do this while travelling to the conference via plane or train. Assume that the venue will offer a rich choice of incompatibilities and idiosyncratic setups. So save it as a PDF, and, for fun, as a SWF file. Further, put it on a USB stick or, as I also do now, slot it into one of the many slide-sharing and storage sites.

And, if you are like me, the presentation is likely to be fairly skeletal and won’t include the language you use in the actual lecture. But the conference organizers (or panel organizers) will want that, and you may also want to stay on script, so you’ll need notes.

I am quite sure–no, actually, I’m just guessing–that one can do all this with Keynote or PowerPoint. But could you do it for free? No doubt, the experts among us could do it speedily. But my experiences with MSFT have been anything but speedy; the opposite. Whereas I have never really had frustrations with OpenOffice, though I’ve surely encountered oddities. But I’ve also encountered, and indeed helped to form, a community of sympathetic and friendly experts who have generously offered their help. And also created some terrifically useful templates–and then sent them to me, at 1 AM, when I really really needed them.