More and more presentations are given on plasma/LCD screens with a wide aspect ratio. Most PowerPoint presentations are designed for a narrow 4:3 ratio (a traditional computer monitor). Most of the time, the screen will automatically stretch you image to create a bigger picture. I never understand this habit: the distorted proportions look horrible. (Judging by my own experience, this is how most people watch TV nowadays as well).

A week with an iPad has shown me how poor presentations and other documents get rendered on a PC (or a Mac). Leaving the touch screen aside, and even for a PDF viewer, navigating between pages is incredibly slow and the borders of the screen are packed with distracting menus.Maybe this can all be brought back to the roots of these applications: they were designed for editing text line by line, changing data cell by cell. Each page is built up real time from its components.

When I design my slides I usually leave the outline pane open on the left side of the screen, so I get a sense of what an audience member sitting in the back row might see when the slide gets presented.

This interactive map is amazing: click a US county and it shows you were people who live their move to, and from where people are moving into this area. This is a (very cool) tool, but some serious DIY analysis is required to tell the story though.I clicked around a bit and discovered some patterns: