A while ago I spoke with my friend and he inspired me to do a tech-talk here at work. There were no tech-talks or any such activity here so I decided to go speak to my boss, who incidentally was new and seems to want to change some things, and almost before I could get my question out he said “Go for it!”.
I had already decide on a topic so the next thing was to decide how to make the slides that I’ll use.
I had previously worked a little with PowerPoint and though it’s good I didn’t quite like it. My friend gave me a tip of S5 which he had used and liked a lot.
I decided to try it out and found I liked it as well. Why? Well, that’s what the post is about. A small comparison between PowerPoint and S5.
First out is PowerPoint.
PowerPoint:
- is quicker to create presentations in
- has a better support for presentations
- works better if you want to use slideshare
- works better if you want to send your presentation to someone without putting it on a public address.
- is not shown differently in different “browsers”
- has official support (since it’s a purchased application)
And now for S5.
S5:
- is open source
- is more easily manipulated
- requires knowledge in atleast HTML and preferably CSS
- can be put on a webpage and run from there
- only thing needed on the computer to run the show is a browser
- can be souce controlled (since it’s only text)
On a personal level I don’t like the drag-and-drop way of doing it that PowerPoint uses. I like seeing the code that’s behind. I guess it comes from being a developer.
So, to summarize the comparison:
If you have the time and the knowledge of html and css and want to try something new, go with S5.
If you want massive support and tutorials and need to get a presentation very quickly, go with PowerPoint.
A small note is that once you’ve fixed the look of your presentation in S5 you can reuse it in the next presentation you do, greatly cutting down the time. This is of course only applicable if you want the exact same look.
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