Discussion

By Deb Haines on Sep 02, 2022

I used overhead slides at one time, and even taught Harvard Graphics for presentations, back in the 90's :)

By Andrew Tribute on Sep 03, 2022

Brings back lots of memories for me as I like you went through the same processes with overhead projector slides and 35 m transparencies and Kodak projectors. Frank however you forgot the earlier technologies before the two technologies you covered. I remember the situation of flip charts and the problems of carry a pack of flip charts to hang on an easel. I remember one of my colleagues who used two flip charts at the same time. This was in the 1950s and 60s before we went digital for presentations with Powerpoint and other apps.

By Dov Isaacs on Sep 06, 2022

(1) The reason why the Aldus Persuasion product was abandoned by Adobe shortly after Adobe acquired Aldus was very simple. At about the same time, Microsoft bundled Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint together as Microsoft Office. The fact was that if you licensed both Word and Excel, it was less expensive to license the Office product which included PowerPoint. Although many Persuasion customers did in fact like the features that Persuasion had versus PowerPoint at that time, PowerPoint was essentially a “freebie” and as such, the benefits of Persuasion were not sufficient to justify the extra cost involved in licensing Persuasion.

(2) Of course, there are those of us with a graphic arts orientation who already had the Adobe applications and used InDesign in lieu of PowerPoint. This was especially important since PowerPoint's text layout, vector operations, and typographic capabilities leave much to be desired (understatement). PowerPoint doesn't support ICC color management (or CMYK content), and PowerPoint's limited ability to properly place graphic arts content (especially PDF and even EPS) is limited or non-existent. After InDesign 2.0, I never used PowerPoint again for presentations. My presentations were done via PDF files exported directly from InDesign (specifically ICC-color-managed PDF/X-4 files). No problems with missing fonts, relayout, or even printing. Although I did get a few quizzical looks, after seeing the quality of these presentations, I never encountered any complaints!