The fine art of storytelling started with people scratching stick figures on cave walls. It has reached new levels with Microsoft Corp.’s PowerPoint software.
A new PowerPoint add-on, Apreso, can take presentation slide shows to the next level.
Many users will be delighted. Many will be dismayed.
Apreso lets you use a video camera or a microphone to record yourself conducting a PowerPoint presentation. It then burns the show onto a CD for handing out or lets you distribute it over the Internet for playback using a Web browser.
It’s easy. It works. It’s going to make a lot of people happy and it’s going to make a lot of other folks even madder about the PowerPoint craze than they were before.
Here’s some background:
It should be clear that PowerPoint will soon become the primary method we use for telling stories, making pitches and even teaching children. I’m looking to the day when these shows are rented at Blockbuster or downloaded from Amazon.com on DVDs.
But let’s get back to the more modest present.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint creates presentations by letting users drag and drop clip art, typefaces, colors, sounds and even film clips into a file. That file can be replayed and projected onto a screen where a user talks and clicks the slides as needed.
Already PowerPoint is the second most-used element of Office, second only to Word.
And the power base grows daily. People are starting to use PowerPoint instead of Word to create things like diaries, home movies and even elaborate little slide shows that get e-mailed to friends.
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Even public relations operatives are sending reporters PowerPoint files to tout their wares instead of conventional press releases.
Young bloods in the cubicles of corporate America are using these .ppt files instead of Word’s .doc files to fire off memos to their bosses to promote the scheme of the moment.
School kids use the software for show-and-tell assignments. Already some teachers require PowerPoint homework.
Yet many cultural critics, English professors and scholars disdain the snappy multimedia use of computers to communicate.
It’s simple-minded, they say.
Those fanny-numbing shows typically start with a stack of cliches–each in a fancy typeface–and followed by a customized bullet, perhaps a happy face or the respectable dash:
–Decrease inefficiency
–Increase productivity
–Enhance shareholder value
–Retire
And maybe there will be music in the background. If it comes from tech industry types, expect churning bass and drum riffs to indicate youthful exuberance. Or maybe it will be a snippet from “Ode to Joy” or some other audio cliche to accompany the excruciatingly obvious text.
PowerPoint, say its well-educated critics, makes people lazy at communicating their ideas. It oversimplifies and disguises shallowness by distracting the viewer with music, animation, fancy fonts and other tricks that belong in game machines.
That’s what they once said about slide rules, electronic calculators and note-taking laptops.
At $200 for an audio/video version and $150 for audio only, Apreso will not be in your kid’s backpack anytime soon. But already it’s creating a stir in the industry.
Corporations and even small businesses can recover the $200 the first time they send an Apreso CD to a client instead of buying an airplane ticket.
Apreso users also can post their PowerPoint recordings on Web servers to be viewed in real time or downloaded by others. A trial version of the software can be downloaded at www.apreso.com–you need PowerPoint as well.
Apreso’s owner, Anystream Inc. of Virginia, is supported by Microsoft for an obvious reason: It’s going to sell more copies of PowerPoint.
Bill Gates’ think tank already is crusading to make PowerPoint a universal format for things like enhanced movies. Microsoft offers a plug-in called Producer for PowerPoint that lets users import presentations into a moviemaking timeline or storyboard and then convert them into full-frame video files.
Producer is a free download at www.microsoft.com/producer and a joy to play–but it definitely lacks the touch that only Apreso can furnish. Apreso records the maker’s actual presentation word by word, frame by frame.
Afterwards those Apreso files can be exported to Producer, which permits one to incorporate recorded PowerPoint shows into a larger production that plays as a movie.
The first time this reviewer used Apreso to record one of his own presentations, he knew he was seeing the future. Not just of business communications but of movies and TV.
To me it’s clear as PowerPoint.
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Binary beat readers can participate in the column at chicagotribune.com/askjim, or e-mail [email protected]. Snail-mail him in Room 400, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60611. Monday in Ask Jim: Moving files can become tricky when worms lurk in networks.
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