With great Power(Point) comes great responsiblity

Last week, I had a class in the 2007 version of PowerPoint for Windows.  Heh heh heh.

It was a lot easier than either Word or Excel.  By the time I got to PowerPoint, I had a pretty good idea where things would be on the ribbon.  (May I just say right now that I much prefer the structure of the Windows 2007 version of Office to that of the 2008 version for the Mac?  I hate pull-down menus.) While there were some things to learn, I was generally bored the first two days.  So much so that I checked out, and spent ten minutes (while the instructor was explaining find and replace and other commands common with other Office programs) creating a slide show for a friend.

Ahhh, but then we learned animation.  Heh heh heh.  I took my slide presentation and added several animation elements to each slide.  The original slide show took ten minutes to create; I spent two hours hunting through animation effects to find the ones I wanted.  It is a classic example of overkill: it has an animation approximately every two seconds, with multiple effects per page.  A six slide presentation had somewhere between 24 and 30 animations. I had an absolute blast.

For someone like me, who is very visual, and fascinated with creating complicated designs, PowerPoint is a drug. (Even worse than Word, although I have been known to spend ten minutes on a three-word sign ("Norton Gallery upstairs") trying to find the exactly right font.)  The temptation to try to overwhelm, to dazzle, is almost too strong to resist.

I am going to have a lot of fun with this, although I suspect  potential employers will not necessarily appreciate my mad skillz. Creating presentations that are so complicated that they become difficult to follow is not a good thing. And as the Rocket Scientist points out, it is often the case that the more complicated the presentation the worse the data.  Oh well.

So, I've done a simple (except for the insane animations) presentation.  Now, if only I can do a presentation which requires a 3-D exploded pie chart.  I love 3-D exploded pie charts....

Edited to add: I just, um, added two slides to my simple presentation, involving 8 more animations.  One of those was, er, a totally bogus 3-D exploded pie chart. *hangs head in mock shame*