Sudheendra Raghav Neela

June 12, 2024

The Reason I Still Dual-Boot Windows on My Computer: PowerPoint

Table of contents

Tags:  #Design, #Praise, #Software, #Windows

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During the past few months, I’ve had many, many conversations about why I use PowerPoint. I’m usually an anti-BigTech kind of person and my dislike of Windows is relatively well known. Thus, my vehement support for a mere presentation software bewilders many I converse with. Why do I still have Windows when I’m very against Microsoft and MANY of their practices? What is it about PowerPoint that makes me still have a Windows system whose connection to the internet shall never be granted?

The answer: The Morph Transition.

The Morph Transition

The Backstory

When I first discovered the morph transition some years ago, I didn’t realize how much of a game changer it could be for presentations. At the time, I predominantly used PowerPoint in high school for final presentations because I didn’t know about other software. We were allowed to bring the PPT file in a pen drive and jack it in the class computer only to take it back with a gajillion viruses. I used animations, transitions, themes, typefaces, images, videos (no audio), and memes to make the presentation as ‘hip’ as possible (it definitely wasn’t obnoxious).

I found newer methods to present during my undergrad. Some of these were suggested by professors while others were suggested by friends. I tried Prezi, Google Slides, Canva, Haiku Deck, Beamer, Figma, and some javascript stuff to program presentations.

These were good… and that’s it. I felt like I couldn’t do things as fast as I could in PowerPoint and as custom as I could in PowerPoint. I eventually went back to relying on PowerPoint and that’s when I discovered the morph transition.

A Few Examples

The morph transition morphs elements between slides.

For example, take a look at this slide transition I used for a lecture about TLS. You don’t even need to know what I’m attempting to say in the next slide because of the intuitive nature of the animation. It’s evident that we were looking at something before, and now we’re zooming in to a part to take a closer look.

Figure 1. "Zooming" into a part of the TLS protocol

I could say, “let’s look at part 4 of the protocol next — change cipher spec” and go to the next slide, but that sudden jump from a messy slide to a clean slide makes you have to keep track of certain things mentally. Not only would you have had to been paying attention to what I was saying, you would have had to pay attention to the slide in order to anticipate what was coming next. Unless I give you time to register what was said, take a look at the slide knowing what’s supposed to come next, and piece together what was before and after on the slide, there’s a certain catching up that you have to do. How ever small and inconsequential that may seem, mental fatigue adds up over time.

This may sound dramatic and perhaps may even seem silly, but this is what I feel during lectures. Some classes are extremely theoretical and require a lot of mental stamina to keep up with what’s being said at a particular moment during the class, all the while having the understanding of where this falls into the big picture and why this is even being taught.

I want to focus on the content of the presentation and understand the big picture instead of being slightly mentally engaged with minute details in parallel. Imagine I used no zoom-ins and zoom-outs for all four of those messages in Figure 1. There would be 8 snappy changes in total and it would just feel disconnected as compared to inherently understood zoom-ins and zoom-outs. If I lost you at message 2, there’s still a chance that you understand the big picture when I zoom out at message 2 while you’re still processing what happened.

Here is another example of a long sequence of events made using the morph transition:

Figure 2. A long sequence of events

Although this may seem very theatrical, the following sequence was presented over 7-8 minutes so it didn’t seem that way. The script roughly went as follows:

“Keep in mind that the objective is hybrid encryption. Now that the server says hello with its certificates, it needs to send its key [transition to three components of blue box]. Once the server sends this to the client, the client sends its keys back to the server. There’s some asymmetric crypto key exchange computation happening [asymm key circular animation begins]… but what’s the point of it all? Why are we doing this? What’s the result of hybrid encryption? (Wait for answers) [transition to yellow key]. Yes, a symmetric key. What’s this symmetric key used for? (Wait for answers) [transition to smaller yellow key over application data]. Application data, yes.”

“So you see how hybrid encryption, with the aid of certificates, helped the server and the client communicate securely. But, let’s take a closer look at that blue box in the middle [transition to just the blue box in focus] — the one with the server sending its hello, certificates and key exchange material. Over what are these messages being sent? (Wait for answers) [transition to blue box over internet]. The switches and the routers of the internet; these are components that neither the server nor the client control. What’s to prevent a malicious network switch tamper with the certificates [transition shows red box over certificates]? Focus on the key exchange material [transition shows red box move to key exchange from certificates]. What if the malicious network switch tampered with the key exchange and replaced the server’s private key with its private key to launch a person-in-the-middle attack”.

Simple Morphing

This page isn’t a tutorial on how to morph; it’s just to demonstrate that morphing is pretty easy and powerful. There are tons of tutorials out there (see useful links), so watch those for in-depth explanations. This page is for trying to convince you that the morph transition could be used well in formal settings.

By itself, morphing is pretty simple. You duplicate a slide and make your transformations to the objects on the slides and Powerpoint takes care of the rest.

Advanced Morphing

One thing I’ve used the morph transition in the past is for zooming into different parts of the images as shown below in Figure 3. This technique was employed for the presentation of The Workings of WhatsApp’s Backups to bring attention to what I was talking about. For this, I duplicated the slide and cropped + resize the image thrice.

Figure 3. "Moving" around within an image

For the Heck of It

Here is a moderately advanced set of morphs to demonstrate what can be done. There are a lot of changes happening — we’ll take a look at them individually below.

Figure 4. An advanced set of morphs

There are three elements — “basil plant box”, “I use Debian, btw”, and a “star”.

  • Basil Plant Box: The box itself undergoes three color changes from red to dark blue to green. It translates thrice, becomes larger once, and rotates 180 degrees. The font inside changes from normal to italics. I don’t think the font change is true morphing, but a cross-fade.
  • “I use Debian, btw”: The font color changes thrice. The font size changes thrice and the typeface changes once. Notice that the typeface change is a cross-fade.
  • “Star”: The star changes color thrice, translates once, and rotates once. All three times, the inner points that dictate the star’s ‘chonkiness’ change.

Powerpoint can also morph shapes e.g., from a rectangle to a circle. This can be achieved by forcing the name of the objects in the selection pane1 to be prefixed with two exclamation points i.e., “!!”. The result is shown below in Figure 5 and the steps required to achieve this shown in Figure 6.

Figure 5. Morphing a rectangle into a circle

Figure 6. Steps required to morph a rectangle into a circle

Conclusion

It’s easy to go overboard with transitions, so much so that they may end up being distracting. The morph transition isn’t just for eye candy, it can be used effectively too. If employed well, it can be an excellent method to preserve context between complex slides. Just morphing elements isn’t enough as the presenter’s presenting style will have to be adapted to match transitions. Use it at your discretion.

This is a feature request that, as far as I can tell, is being worked on for LibreOffice. When this gets added and if it works nicely, I may finally ditch Windows.

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Footnotes

1 Check https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/morph-transition-tips-and-tricks-bc7f48ff-f152-4ee8-9081-d3121788024f for bringing up the selection pane.↩