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Apple may have saved me my job - Keynote

johny5

johny5

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 31, 2007
751
11
UK
So I manage quite a lot of people and got told that my job was been merged the other day and myself or another guy was going to be made redundant.
We had to create individual presentations on a new single structure and that that night I started to put mine together using Keynote (for the first time).
I have used powerpoint before, but I wanted to see how glitzy Keynote was...
Just after I had created 2 slides I impressed myself with all the flashy 3d transitions etc compared to powerpoint (I had only ever created 1 powerpoint presentation in my time) and was starting to get very confident and learnt Keynote very fast. The 3d charts that you can have build up are very cool!
I also noticed that you can buy the keynote remote app, so I used my iphone to flick to the next slides in the presentation and hold my notes. This was a very cheap and impressive solution to using a mouse!
To cut a long story, I had to present to 6 directors, and they seemed very impressed with the result! even 2 that I thought I might have trouble with were blown away with it.
I think work may be buying a couple of macbooks for future presentations ;)
i wont know about my job for a few days, but at the end of my presentation I thanked them for putting me through the process as I learnt Keynote in 5 nights :D
So thank you Apple, lets see what happens now...
 
Sounds like you've done all you can - with a bit of help from Apple... :)

I hope it goes your way, sounds like you deserve it to!
 
Glad to hear the great news! I've always disliked powerpoint myself. It seems like everyone uses the same transitions and lame sounds, often very poorly, when making a presentation. I'm happy to hear that you were able to learn keynote quickly. Hope everything works out with your job. Congrats! :)
 
Hopefully the content of your presentations was impressive since that's most important, but either way, nobody can deny the impact of good visuals. Good luck!
 
Guys thanks for all your support, I really do appreciate it :)
It worked really well as I do extremely detailed stats on the employees I manage and one of the slides i threw in had a 3d growing graph based on these stats :)
also our site locations I used mappoint to import postcode locations (sized on resource per site) then screen grabbed the uk map and dragged that into keynote. This for me was the other major point for keynote...the fact that you can import any graphic and apply a chroma key like effect to any colour using the "alpha" magic wand tool. So I didn't have to import my graphics into photoshop and then into keynote.
 
johny5 said:
So I manage quite a lot of people and got told that my job was been merged the other day and myself or another guy was going to be made redundant.
We had to create individual presentations on a new single structure and that that night I started to put mine together using Keynote (for the first time).
I have used powerpoint before, but I wanted to see how glitzy Keynote was...
Just after I had created 2 slides I impressed myself with all the flashy 3d transitions etc compared to powerpoint (I had only ever created 1 powerpoint presentation in my time) and was starting to get very confident and learnt Keynote very fast. The 3d charts that you can have build up are very cool!
I also noticed that you can buy the keynote remote app, so I used my iphone to flick to the next slides in the presentation and hold my notes. This was a very cheap and impressive solution to using a mouse!
To cut a long story, I had to present to 6 directors, and they seemed very impressed with the result! even 2 that I thought I might have trouble with were blown away with it.
I think work may be buying a couple of macbooks for future presentations ;)
i wont know about my job for a few days, but at the end of my presentation I thanked them for putting me through the process as I learnt Keynote in 5 nights :D
So thank you Apple, lets see what happens now...
Click to expand...

To quote Dwight Schrute from The Office "PowerPoint is boring!"
 
Best of luck to you man!

I do have to say that Keynote does give off a better... feel, I guess.
When done right the effect can be breathtaking! (and I sure hope it helped with your job situation. Good to hear the content was there, too.

That being said, with all the options and glitzy effects out there, Keynote certainly has the potential to allow people to make some god-awful presentations (see: How NOT to use Powerpoint :D)
 
illegallydead said:
That being said, with all the options and glitzy effects out there, Keynote certainly has the potential to allow people to make some god-awful presentations (see: How NOT to use Powerpoint :D)
Click to expand...

Exactly.

I once used Keynote and don't think I impressed anybody. I had around 30 slides, and by the 3rd transition, people were just looking at each other and whispering something. They weren't listening to me anymore. They were just smiling because of the slides, and were waiting for the next slide change. They heard me, but not every word. The transitions were a distraction.

To make matters worse, I think they got bored of it by the time they saw the 3D cube transition for the 4th time. I felt as if they thought it was pretentious drivel, and to be honest, I kind of agree. :rolleyes: :eek: They add nothing to the presentation, and I was a bit twuntish for ever believing that the best way to present information was to make cool slide transitions.

I was presenting in front of doctors, surgeons, and researchers. I wasn't going to impress them with this, only with what I was saying.


P.S.: I'm not suggesting that we all make boring presentations so that people just focus on the slides. I guess it's OK to use Keynote for business, or for a presentation to a general audience. However, if I'm there to present my serious research, a blue background with large, white text is best. Honestly.

Add 3D graphs though. Those are OK.
 
Keynote has very low "presentation" marketshare
People get impressed with a Keynote presentation as they've never seen it
They go out and buy it for themselves
This continues until Keynote is the "norm" and the fact you use Keynote isn't impressive anymore.

So, for Keynote to be useful in the "wow" factor it has to stay at a low marketshare :confused:
 
Abstract said:
Exactly.

I once used Keynote and don't think I impressed anybody. I had around 30 slides, and by the 3rd transition, people were just looking at each other and whispering something. They weren't listening to me anymore. They were just smiling because of the slides, and were waiting for the next slide change. They heard me, but not every word. The transitions were a distraction.

To make matters worse, I think they got bored of it by the time they saw the 3D cube transition for the 4th time. I felt as if they thought it was pretentious drivel, and to be honest, I kind of agree. :rolleyes: :eek: They add nothing to the presentation, and I was a bit twuntish for ever believing that the best way to present information was to make cool slide transitions.

I was presenting in front of doctors, surgeons, and researchers. I wasn't going to impress them with this, only with what I was saying.


P.S.: I'm not suggesting that we all make boring presentations so that people just focus on the slides. I guess it's OK to use Keynote for business, or for a presentation to a general audience. However, if I'm there to present my serious research, a blue background with large, white text is best. Honestly.

Add 3D graphs though. Those are OK.
Click to expand...

If you put too many flashy transitions in then you have nobody to blame but yourself, you have to judge your presentation against who you're giving it to. For research or dry professional presentations I personally wouldn't use any transitions. It's not Keynote's failing, it can create beautiful, slides but you have to choose what you make! For research presentations go with something simple, but elegant. I just use reflections on my images to make them look nicer, but keep pretty much everything else plain on the "gradient" theme and it goes down a treat.
 
sushi said:
Don't forget that content is key, presentation is secondary. :)
Click to expand...

This is very true and keep in mind that if I were some douche who actually said you must prepare a presentation that basically begged for your job, I would be most impressed by the content and not the 3D ooh la la effects.

Keynote and PowerPoint and both create very nice presentations. It's those who decide they must use every feature possible to get a point across that make me want to puke. Bottom line is Keynote and PowerPoint have the potential to be that 1990's website with the dozens of animated GIFs.

Either way, best of luck with the job.
 
sushi said:
Don't forget that content is key, presentation is secondary. :)
Click to expand...

Ahh yes, but to quote Marshall McLuhan -- "The medium is the message."

I've done a half-dozen major presentations on Keynote and in each case, the feedback has been amazing. And like you, I'm presenting to a pretty grizzled group of senior staff. Everybody's seen PowerPoint a hundred times, but Keynote lets me do things they've never seen before. That keeps their attention and it makes me look good, standing next to the projection screen. And, it always works the first time -- which is something that rarely happens with PowerPoint. :apple:
 
eRondeau, this is exactly what I was trying to say :)
Ironically enough, we are an I.T. company as well but there is only a couple of staff that know how to use powerpoint to its max so when they saw my presentation they seemed impressed and want Mac's now :)
 
hayduke said:
Just look at what Jobs does. Very simple slides. Very clean. No "droplet" transitions. I *try* to have my presentations be as clean and rehearsed as his.
Click to expand...

There is a place and a time for all types of transitions. I used to work in TV production, and it's surprising how an effective multimedia presentation can mirror a well-directed television show. Simple cuts and dissolves are very effective transitions "within a scene" or "within a concept". But more dramatic transitions (yes even the dreaded droplet!) signal the end of one scene/concept and the beginning of a new one. So if my Keynote had 100 slides covering five central concepts, it might have 95 cuts/dissolves and 5 droplets to separate them. Used judiciously, even the most bizarre transition can be very effective. :apple:

(Good example: Watch Star Wars, the original from 1977. Every time the location changed, Lucas used a different wipe transition.)
 
johny5 said:
To cut a long story, I had to present to 6 directors, and they seemed very impressed with the result! even 2 that I thought I might have trouble with were blown away with it.
Click to expand...

give yourself more credit. good content is good content, whatever the program. the directors may have been impressed with the content of your presentation. whatever the program, you cannot dress up a turd, crap data or a whole bunch of content about nothing. i am sure you and your work had a lot to do with your presentation standing out.

it is either that or your directors are easily amused with pictures and flashy graphics, in which case, it may be advisable to learn final cut pro, flash and 3D applications to make an animation montage of your next "presentation."
 
Thanks sehnsucht77, I didnt want to big myself up but a bit more background on the scenario....
There is 2 of us involved in 2 jobs getting rolled into one (I am fully aware what they are doing may be wrong) but when we got told this and 1 position may be made redundant it felt like I was on "The Apprentice" and Alan Sugar was talking to me!
Anyway, so I figured I did have to sell myself so spent the first 5 slides showing the existing structure of mine and the oppositions job and then 1 slide with the new structure and the other 6 or 7 slides showing what I have done for the company and what I intended to do (basically selling myself and why they should continue to invest in me).
A large part of the first few slides were of data and analysis of the opposition as I figured I should get to know what they did and show that I did my homework.
Overall though as I didnt have long to both learn and present the Keynote show, I was impressed at how simple/straightforward it was :)
 
eRondeau said:
There is a place and a time for all types of transitions. I used to work in TV production, and it's surprising how an effective multimedia presentation can mirror a well-directed television show. Simple cuts and dissolves are very effective transitions "within a scene" or "within a concept". But more dramatic transitions (yes even the dreaded droplet!) signal the end of one scene/concept and the beginning of a new one. So if my Keynote had 100 slides covering five central concepts, it might have 95 cuts/dissolves and 5 droplets to separate them. Used judiciously, even the most bizarre transition can be very effective. :apple:

(Good example: Watch Star Wars, the original from 1977. Every time the location changed, Lucas used a different wipe transition.)
Click to expand...

Fair enough, but when Lucas did it, it was *way* cool. He was *wiping* after all with some serious analog hardware.
 
Good Luck, lets hope you keep your job! Keynote is great and i remember once at Uni I used keynote and i heard someone say wow when I used the cube effect.
 
I think you just convinced me to pick up iWork09' when I go to buy my new Alu MacBook. I'm really glad you wowed them, and I hope you get to keep your job. Admittedly I feel bad for the other guy though, :p.
 
There's a really, really old Apple commercial -- maybe even pre-Macintosh -- where two primary school pupils are comparing their homework assignments. The girl used her Apple and it's all in colour graphics and looks totally great, the boy used his PC and it's in B&W and looks like sh*t. So the boy looks completely shocked and says "My computer can't do any of that!"

I always loved that spot, even more than 1984. And now, decades later, the girl and boy have both grown-up into corporate Vice-Presidents, and presumably the boy is putting his Board of Directors to sleep with his PowerPoints while the girl is wowing them with her Keynotes. Some things never change. :apple:
 
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