PowerPoint’s equation editor trumps Keynote ‘08

19Jun08

Ever since I made the move to Mac I’ve been a heavy user of Keynote. I found it more elegant than PowerPoint (2004), it produced better looking images (the text just looked crisper) and it was dead easy to use. That was until recently.

Since making the move to Keynote I had never needed to create a presentation heavy in chemical and mathematical equations, and when I did I tended to already have what I needed in a PowerPoint slide. Now that I’ve been creating new content for my year 11 and 12 chemistry classes I’ve gone looking for the equation option in Keynote, and you know what? It’s not there. There is no equation editor in Keynote and that is a deal breaker for me.

A bout of Internet research revealed solutions, but none of them are very elegant, as they all result in a non-editable equation in my slide, plus they add about three steps to the process. If I want to make a change I have to go elsewhere, recreate the equation, then paste it back into the slide. I don’t feel the equations I currently write are complex enough to justify the added software and steps. Facing this situation I took at a look at PowerPoint 2008. I’d seen a few presentations done with the newest Windows version and was impressed by the quality of the text rendering. The fact that PowerPoint has an equation editor, combined with the fact that none of the major online presentation sharing sites accept Keynote files, really makes me re-think my commitment to Keynote. I feel menu overload when I use PowerPoint, and I’m not sure if I like the way it handles videos, graphics and the application of transitions, but this is a *small price to pay for a product that actually makes my job easier.

(* or is it.)