Peter Flom <flom@NDRI.ORG> sagely replied: > Well, since finding out about LaTeX and the Beamer package, I plan on no > longer using Powerpoint unless I have to. > > But the differences are of degree, not kind. The end result is still a > set of slides.

Exactly. And we are limited in what we can display.

If we want to show the audience text (including lines of code). we are limited to what remains readable. There's no point in getting 25 lines of code on a slide, if viewers end up squinting at the screen and going "huh?" You sometimes see this in Coder's Corner sessions, where the room is about the size of my kitchen and people ten feet from the screen still can't read the font. I find that 12 lines of SAS code (with a header) is pretty much the max.

If we want to show a graphic, then we suddenly move into Ed's ballpark. PowerPunt isn't really the problem here. The problem is the things we use to generate the graphics which we then shove into PP. All those lamer graphs with extra-cute figures atop the bars - graphs which remind me of USA Today - are just reducing the signal-to-noise ratio. The sort of graphs now available from ODS Statistical Graphics are more the kinds of things we ought to be displaying.

David -- David Cassell, CSC Cassell.David@epa.gov Senior computing specialist mathematical statistician