Programming Pauls of Wisdom

Reports, Presentations and having it easy

Procrastination. Thats what I would be doing right now if I was not wasting time on this blog.
However would I procrastinate as well as SUN employees who not so long ago were banned from using powerpoint as it just wasted time.

The thing is it is not having presentations that wastes time, its the amount of time it takes to write the presentation. And thats down to WHYSIWYG.

Powerpoint presentations are fundamentally boring. All the ones I see are linear, usually clip art, occassionally using a graph. And they take ages to write because you spend so long tweaking.

So I want a simpler approach, I want to avoid a presentation where I can, but if I must, I want it to take me no more time than a marker pen and a whiteboard.

tools:

1. docutils and reStrunctured text.
This is great
- I can write plain text like this which will be transformed into a bullet point
.. image: pics.jpg (will become a dropped in image)

this will be a title
-----------------

So I already produce web pages, reports and documents like this (through the useful docutils, although understanding the code has defeated my paultry attempts to read it).
http://docutils.sourceforge.net/docs/user/latex.html also delves into this, showing how to chunk out latex / pdf docs from plain text, using any amount of latex stylesheeting.

However making a word-like document is not the ultimate goal. I want to throw in presentations. And not boring slides

2. Graphics
My lowest level graphing production is to avoid excel wizards. I think something along the lines of plotutils with python is my thing. open in the window next to me I can produce a graph to just drop in when I need it. Probably

3. Diagrams
The difference between graphs and diagrams is probably one Edward Tufte would get upset about but i know what i mean. But making a diagram is torture. One flowchart - bang one hour gone. I have no idea why but any diagram, in visio, draw or heaven help me word, just becomes boring boxes and arrows and takes for ever. So why not use a wacom tablet and some draw package? I'll look around

4. SVG animation
Now the future of presentations must lie in animation, and especially animation of gra[hical data



I'll let you know how I get on creating my ideal report making environement

There is probably business in writing animated presentations for investment banks overnight btw.

posted by paul @ 1:49 PM