Anything But Power Point.

[GSZX1337]

Maybe Front Page

OMG... as a Web Developer...
I'm going to pretend I didn't read that lol

Same here, I had to use FrontPage in my High School Web Design class. It was TERRIBLE! After finishing the assignments, I had to go back and recode the damn thing because I felt dirty leaving the page so inefficient.

Flash would probably be the best alternative as you'd have great freedom if you're skilled with it. If you have a little bit, you can use the CS5 version. (Release date: April 10th)

[17DaysOlderThanNES]

Maybe Front Page

OMG... as a Web Developer...
I'm going to pretend I didn't read that lol

LOL! I totally know what you're talking about. I programmed a few websites in junior high in pure HTML back when the internet wasn't one big flash program (one of them is still up, full of plot holes and spelling errors: http://www.angelfire.com/la2/dmchammer/ ). When I took a technical writing class in college, the teacher suggested we use Front Page. I started using it just because it looked easy enough, then I looked at the code it generated. After pulling my jaw off of the floor from how obscenely excessive the code was, I just did it old school with HTML from my good ol' "HTML 4 the world wide web" reference book ( ).


As for Power Point, I agree with what most have said. Everyone just uses the same random combination of shitty fades, etc. and it looks like crap. The same can be said for people that use word art. At the same time, someone with a design-oriented mind can do interesting things that make it seem much less like a horrendous auto-generated slide show.

Example of proper Word Art use:


"waste of time" was done with Word Art, the rest were standard autoshape text boxes.

[puke_face]

As to why PowerPoint can suck, here's what the Gettysburg Address would have looked like if it had been done in PowerPoint:

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

Damn. That is just depressing.

[Duane Dibbley]

How about a musical song and dance?

[t0yrobo]

In all my classes at university we use illustrator and design proper slides, then export them as pdfs and present them that way. Powerpoint is not a good way to make presentations.

[Hatta]

Consider LaTeX Beamer. LaTeX is an open source type-setting language. It has the advantage of separating content from presentation, so it's easy to change the style of one slide or your entire presentation. It's not something you can pick up and use right away, but it's extremely powerful and worth learning. Books, journal articles, presentations, letters, etc, can all be typeset with LaTeX. You can compile it directly to PDF with pdflatex. If you program, you'll like it. If not, take a look you might still find it interesting.

[AmishSamurai]

Go oldschool. Get a huge-ass set of posterboards.

[Ack]

I would definitely suggest avoiding the Open Office equivalent program Impress. Let's just say it fails to live up to its title.

[Luke]

I guess power point it is.

Ugh.

[CRTGAMER]

Go oldschool. Get a huge-ass set of posterboards.

Large blank paper flip pad, along with toxic color markers.
Hallucinative smells might make you give a better presentation.