November 15, 2005  

There’s got to be a better way

For me these days it seems that the task of creating a presentation is really an act of merging and culling prior presentations, then creating new material to stitch it all together. Powerpoint is awful at this. What’s really needed is a way to view multiple presentations (trying … hard … not … to … say … “decks”) in a single window with all available slides so that you can mix and match and group. Sort of like the thumbnail view but with the flexibility to arrange stuff non-linearly. I don’t think Keynote does this either. I end up printing it all out and arranging on the floor. The GTD people surely love this low-tech information design, but I’m not convinced software couldn’t solve the problem (and free up my kid’s play area floor space)

Tinderbox for Windows where are you?

3 Responses to “There’s got to be a better way”

  1. J berg says :

    You’ll be wanting Office 12.
    http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=165570&s=1739&a=165566&po=10,00.asp

  2. J Berg says :

    Something is wrong with your comments. I get a build error. Anyhow, hopefully here’s the link properly formatted:
    Office 12 PowerPoint

  3. cbjg says :

    not sure office 12 will solve this problem since it too will only sort things linearly. your analog approach works quite very since (tho does take a lot of space) since it allows you to see the visuals but also the headlines.
    if you were cool enough to have at least 60″ of horizontal screen space for your mac, you could try opening multiple files, put them all in screen sorter mode and then tile the windows – certainly not perfect, but does save the floor space. (i did give this a try from home and it seems to work fairly well)