Forbes Compares Keynote To PowerPoint

A pple has been getting a lot of ink from the mainstream press of late, and today the financial magazine Forbes brings us a Keynote/PowerPoint comparison. The piece was penned by Paul Maidment, and it offers a fairly comprehensive look at the different feature sets of the two apps. Mr. Maidment also manages to squeeze in some commentary on the dangers of bad design instincts when it comes to making presentations that we found amusing. From the introduction for the piece:

PowerPoint presentations are a boom and bane of business life. They are easier to prepare, particularly at the last minute, than overhead slides or notes scribbled on index cards. We now all sit through more but better-organized pitches. But Microsoftis ubiquitous PowerPoint software has also put some awesome power of bad design in the hands of millions of business people.

Enter the design divas at Apple Computer. The companyis latest foray in to the office-suite software market is its new standalone presentation program dubbed Keynote. Unbeknownst to his audience, Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs has, they say, been quietly beta-testing it for the past year in his own eponymous speeches.

Appleis Keynote presentation software
Now itis in the hands of the rest of us: How does Keynote stack up against PowerPoint? The snapshot summary of our head-to-head user test of the two programs is that they fundamentally do the same thing, and do it well, but Keynote does it with a superior elegance and simplicity of use that is Appleis design trademark.

There is much more in the full article, including a frank assessment of how Keynoteis Mac roots make it a tough sell in the corporate market.