PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

jpatokal writes "The New York Times confirms what we've suspected all along: PowerPoint makes you dumb. In a new essay, information theorist Edward Tufte outlines why PowerPoint 'forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension.' The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA agrees, noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.'" Tufte's essay (and the shuttle/PowerPoint critique) has been available for sale since earlier this year, but the NYT article gives a greater sampling of its content than Tufte's website does.

Comments

Impress

[m00nun1t]

...yet Open Office Impress copies all these flaws faithfully.

Re:Impress

[t0ny]

I heard that MS Word makes people stupid too, because if you want to write something, you have to type it yourself!

You also have to spell correctly if you cant use the spell checker, you need to make coherent sentences, and actually possess some sort of writing skill to make people understand what you are saying!

Oh, the humanity!

Re:Impress

[Da Fokka]

I think it's pretty short-sighted to blame this on PowerPoint. It's very difficult to condense a lot of information into a comprehensible presentation. That many fail is not the fault of PowerPoint, but simply because there are a lot of people out there who are simply not very good at translating something complex into a few comprehensible slides.

Re:Impress

[Zork the Almighty]

...yet Open Office Impress copies all these flaws faithfully.
+1, Inciteful.

Re:Impress

[Geek of Tech]

Or here is another amazing idea.... Maybe slide presentations just aren't the best form for the information to be presented in. Truthfully, I don't see why most people use any form of slide presentation. Most of the time the data put on the slide isn't suited for that form of media. Most of the time it's too complex.

Of course this isn't Microsoft's fault. Nor Open-Office. This is the fault of people who decide to start using new technology (or new at the time) without really thinking if it helps or hinders the information being presented. And for years I was one of those people.

Re:Impress

[arose]

MS Word shares a serious flaw with PowerPoint -- it disatracts people from the content. The proof is right here in this 300MB avi that slashcode won't insert.

Re:Impress

[BoneFlower]

Slide presentations are supposed to cover the key points and critical details, and to display diagrams that are difficult to explain. They *are not* meant to convey all of your information- that is what your notes are for and why you should have something to draw on that everyone can see.

Properly used, they can aid virtually any presentation of information. Used poorly however... they are worthless.

Re:Impress

[crmsndude]

No, it makes you dumb because of the AutoCorrect feature that isn't always automatically correct.

Re:Impress

[darthlurker]

Power Point is meant for SALES presentations. It is meant to SELL you on something. I am unfamiliar with Office Impress. But I expect it is meant to SELL something. If a product is misused. Blame the abusers; not the product.

Re:Impress

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow! It's rare I see such crap on /., and that's really saying something.

Power point is meant for any damn presentation you want. Not a week goes by when I don't see a presentation in power point, but I'd be hard pressed to name a single sales presentation in power point in the last year.

Re:Impress

[darthlurker]

Title of thread: PowerPoint makes you dumb. Your response drives home that point better than any example I can give.

n-e-w-s ?

[after]

PowerPoint was aimed at regular Joes, what's new?

I do agree that PowerPoint makes you dumb.

The only way to report data is through bare, sheer, raw data!

No fancy graphics, no 3d pies, and definitely NO graphs.

Using regular, sorted information presented in a table is the best method - as a Wire article states.

Re:n-e-w-s ?

[calyphus]

You don't know Tufte.

Don't go too far down the 'text is all you need route.' Nothing but text is a great way to hide information. Presenting data in graphs is an aid to understanding, but those graphics need to be well-designed, information rich, non-manipulative and visually enlightening. For example, compare a table of numbers showing GDP for 100 years to a line graph with the numbers in a table beneath - the numbers specify, but the line illuminates the pattern.

Graphs aren't the problem, bad information design is. Powerpoint doesn't help with design. It does help add clutter, however.

Re:n-e-w-s ?

[Pflipp]

definitely NO graphs

mmmKay, so I just finished making 24-hour emergency patient's overviews in graph AND tabular, for a LOT of critical parameters (or so I'm told, I'm no doctor :-).

It takes 1 landscape A4 to put these in tab, but that A4 would be filled from its left top to its right bottom with numbers, numbers, numbers.

It takes 1 1/3 A4 to represent the same info in five large resolution, highly readable graphs. For some reason, people preferred to keep the graph version in, and I know why: peaks can be read out in an instance of a second.

Re:n-e-w-s ?

[YouHaveSnail]

I attended one of Tufte's seminars, and I've still got a handout that shows a patient "chart" that Tufte helped design. The patient's name, location, admission date, and the current date are printed clearly at the top of the page, followed by a very brief synopsis. The right 1/3 of the page is a list of notes followed clearly by the initials of the person who entered the note, their role, the time, and the date of the note.

The most striking thing about this chart is the left 2/3 of the page, which is a 4 x 6 cluster of small pictures. Most of the pictures are graphs, each graph representing measurements of one thing (Na, K, Ca, Lithium, Mood, Psychosis, Temerature, Respirations, etc.). A few of the pictures are small representations of chest x-rays because in this case, the patient had pneumonia. The result is clear information about 24 different items plus clear notes all on a single sheet of paper.

The same information presented in tabular form would be much more difficult to read. Indeed, most of the numbers on a page full of tables wouldn't even be useful... a doc doesn't care what your precise glucose measurements over the last week have been; she wants mainly to know whether they've been high, normal, or low. Tufte's graphs are each labelled at the top with the most recent measurement, but the y-axis is labelled only with ++, +, (normal), -, --.

So the important difference between this chart and a list of tables is that the tables present a lot of data but hides some important information, while the graphical chart presents a lot of information, but hides a lot of unimportant data.

Re:n-e-w-s ?

[YouHaveSnail]

I should have mentioned that the work described above seems to be that of Dr. Seth Powsner along with Dr. Tufte. I presume that Powsner was one of Tufte's students. In any case, there's much more information about the graphical chart in Powsner and Tufte's paper, including a picture of the same chart I was looking at above.

Powsner and Tufte have another paper with a chart design that's tailored for psychiatric patients. There's less space devoted to graphs, and more space for background, notes, and other textual data.

Re:n-e-w-s ?

[spikev]

If PowerPoint is aimed at regular Joes, I don't think it makes you dumb if you use it.

It just proves that most people are dumb already.

It's not software

[October_30th]

That's not a software problem.

It's a people problem. I do and watch scientific presentations as a part of my job and I am constantly appalled at the low quality of presentations.

There are few simple rules on how to make a good presentation: 1) Use a projector - stop using transparencies, 2) avoid text on your slides at all costs 3) use plenty of full colour figures and simple animation but don't overdo it and 4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience.

Re:It's not software

[nagora]

That's not a software problem.

It's a people problem.

Yes, and it was a "people problem" when ATM's used to pay out the cash before returning your card and people kept laving their cards behind. But sometimes you need to change your software to allow for the "people problems".

TWW

Re:It's not software

[October_30th]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

LaTeX? Don't make me laugh.

Re:It's not software

[wfberg]

There are few simple rules on how to make a good presentation: 1) Use a projector - stop using transparencies, 2) avoid text on your slides at all costs 3) use plenty of full colour figures and simple animation but don't overdo it and 4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience.

Add to that;
5) only add major points on your slides, but don't forget to include a full text in the "notes" section, and make sure that if you distribute the presentation electronically it displays notes by default.
6) the presentation is not your report; distribute a separate, full-text, full-detail report. You can refer to this report for answering any intricate questions the audience might have.
7) if you're giving a presentation in a language that is not your, or the audiences, mothertongue (such as; jargonese), make sure that complicated or hard-to-pronounce words appear on the slides, and are referred to in the spoken part of the presentation in multiple ways (i.e. synonyms, explanations).
8) colors should work in black and white as well, for print-outs and crappy projectors.
9) the last slide WILL include your e-mail and web address.
10) the audience is NOT wearing any clothes.

that's all I can think of right now..

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, and it was a "people problem" when ATM's used to pay out the cash before returning your card and people kept laving their cards behind.

Here in scandinavia, most ATMs work that way. I haven't noticed a big problem with people leaving their cards..

So I suppose it's more of an "american" problem than a "people" problem.. ;-)

Re:It's not software

[Daggie]

4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart

I beg to differ. Do NOT learn your presentation by heart. Make sure you understand the subject. Make sure you know it thoroughly. If your slides are good, just interact with them. Show your audience what you're saying (many people like to SEE it). Short strong words are (imho) necessary on a presentation for the audience to keep focus)

There is nothing more boring then a presentation where somebody just rattles on about a subject. PLUS when you are asked a question, you often forget what you were saying. You loose track of your text like that.

If you have no clue what you are saying, then learn it by heart and watch your audience fall asleep.

Re:It's not software

[DoraLives]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

Well...since everyone is well aware that ninety-eight percent of all meetings/presentations are either useless or downright counterproductive, perhaps we should ditch the lot of it. Such losses as would be incurred by the deletion of the two percent of productive meetings/presentations would be far more than offset by the gains of not having to countenance the rest of it.

I suppose if you MUST deal in pretty pictures and a bit of text, a printed handout that people could follow along with should do nicely. Hell, they might even be able to go back and refer to some of the material later on and even (gasp) take notes upon it!

This eventuality, of course, stands no chance of ever taking place in the world of wingtip shoes, horrid ties, and all the rest of the Form Over Function world of grown-up weenies and their damnable inclinations to impress with mere looks as opposed to actual substance. Sigh.

Re:It's not software

[October_30th]

If you have no clue what you are saying, then learn it by heart and watch your audience fall asleep

If you have no clue what you are saying, you have absolutely no business being up there giving the talk in the first place.

The learning I was talking about was knowing the order of slides and their contents so that you don't have to keep on glancing over your shoulder to see what's coming up next.

Re:It's not software

[GregWebb]

I take it you've never done a presentation...

Some things you can handle with diagrams and illustrations, sure. Some things are worse than useless presented diagramattically. At which point you need to explain what you're talking about using plain, simple English as a series of points.

Try and do all PowerPoint presentations with graphics explaining every slide and you'll have confused delegates.

Re:It's not software

[gnu-generation-one]

"So what should we use to make presentations then?"

I tend to use HTML, with big centred titles, and use one of my desktop backgrounds to add some style. It fits easily on a disk, it's easy to add graphics, you've got a full-screen mode on every browser, and when you're done, it can go on a website without making you look like an idiot who uses 150KB graphics to display 10 words.

One thing I notice about lecturers (who actually need to convey information in their slides) is that they tend to use the rolls of acetate, and have "slides" that are several metres long, scrolling down all the time to reveal new information while leaving the last few lines visible for anyone taking notes. You can't do this in Impress, but it's easy enough if you're using HTML.

Re:It's not software

[Daggie]

If you have no clue what you are saying, you have absolutely no business being up there giving the talk in the first place

True, but admit that often the manager gives the presentation instead off the person most suited for the job. Presentations often have a PR-function too.

As I also said, the most important factor is to know what you are talking about, the slides offer a means of help for yourself and for the audience. When you said "learning by heart" I tought you meant that you should just say what you learned : the exact same words etc... as 17 year old students mostly tend to do when they are feeling insecure.

When you understand the content, you will feel more secure and your audience will be more interested. That's my personal experience with giving presentations ..

Re:It's not software

[October_30th]

I take it you've never done a presentation

As I said, I do them for a living.

At which point you need to explain what you're talking about using plain, simple English as a series of points

Text in general is bad because:

1) Audience will have to spend time reading it. While they are reading, they are not listening to you. When you have an audience that's not listening you, then you have confused delegates.
2) Text is boring. Data tables are horrendously boring and outright impossible to digest.
3) If you can express something in writing, you can tell it to the audience. If you can tell it to the audience, why write it on the slide in the first place?

The most common mistake I see a new PhD student do is to make a presentation that helps him to remember what he's supposed to say (by having a lot of text) - he makes the presentation for himself, not for the audience. That's a recipe for a boring presentation.

Re:It's not software

[tommy_teardrop]

I go to regular scientific meetings that occur one a fortnight, that usually have 12 speakers, and roughly 50 people in the audience. Now, lets say each of these people really squeeze their talk down to about 5 slides, at least half those used in most presentations.

That's 3000 pages a meeting, or about 150,000 pages a year. For one group!

Powerpoint is a pain, transparancies don't work well in showing what you want, but printing everything out is a crazy waste of paper.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux has a whole bunch of problems then!!!

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

In Finland all the machines give you your card before you get the cash. Once you think about it, of course it should work like this, it's a text-book usability design case. The user won't ever leave before getting what he came for, in this case the cash. If the machine only returns the card as the very last step a significant percentage will forget it.

Re:It's not software

[GregWebb]

My apologies, misread part of your post.

Text can be good, though, because:

1) Your audience don't have to remember everything that you say. If you're getting complex points across, leaving something on screen that gives people the headline to what you're actually saying helps them remember it.
2) Some points can't be usefully conveyed graphically. By putting headlines on the screen while you explain the points in detail, you give the audience something relevant to watch rather than leaving up the last picture and distracting them.
3) Not everyone needs the detail. If you write the text and speak the detail, those who need it can get it while those who don't can still have a rough idea what you're saying, which is all they need.

Your Ph.D students clearly aren't doing this right - but there are many points where text is absolutely the way to go. And while I agree you shouldn't normally use a data table as part of a presentation, if there's that volume of data to get through would you _really_ advocate reading it instead? Far better to stick a table on screen and let the delegates see the overview properly themselves.

Re:It's not software

[ergo98]

2) avoid text on your slides at all costs

Any graphics that require interpretation will basically lose the audience, as the vast majority of people will tune you out and interpret it themselves. I've seen this in action at quite a few presentations.

Your points seem to propose a technique of "presenting to people who don't really care", and my experience is that such people don't really care regardless of how "jazzed up" your presentation is. If people care they're really there to listen and absorb a lecture of sorts, and the presentation is just something to point your eyes at rather than staring at the presenter, or as a medium to present data that's best formed as graphics, which is a subset.

Having said all of that, I have two pieces of advice for powerpoint presentations-

1) Never provide a hand-out of the presentation -- this is a way for people to escape your presentation and they'll just skim ahead, making presumptions about everything you're going to say, and then ignore the rest.

2) This is totally contrary to the whole subject of this article, but I truly believe that a presentation is a multimedia display, and in no way should the presentation have to hold up on its own -- i.e. If people weren't there, they shouldn't expect the same absorption or understanding skimming the presentation without the supporting presenter (unless you provide a full video recording of the presentation when you distribute it). Many people propose that presentations have to be fully self-supporting and that is just wrong.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

Works fine for my university. Also, you can print on both sides of paper (as opposed to slides), and if they're designed for a screen, you can probably fit four on each side, or 8 on one piece of paper.

Re:It's not software

[gnu-generation-one]

Perhaps you need a different set of information for your audience handouts / course website, with all the text that you don't want to put on the projected slides?

If the handout is essentially a text document, a transcript, occasionally punctuated by the diagrams at about the same time as you change slides for real, then readers will get the gist of what was said. Nothing worse than finding the slides to a presentation that would have been very useful, only to realise that all of the transcript is missing.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

2) avoid text on your slides at all costs 3) use plenty of full colour figures and simple animation but don't overdo it

and here, my friend is part of the problem. Too often, the color figures and animations become the presentation. People get caught up in the damned mechanics of the presentation and forget the information that the presentation was meant to convey!

I object to your use of "full colour figures" and "avoid text at all costs" statements beacuse text can serve up so much more information than pictres (witness the stupid array of little graphic buttons in popular software nowadays that are soooo confusing comapred to the drop-down menus they are meant to replace).

I generally use bulleted text with lots of verbal exposition on each of the bullets during the talk. Some things cannot be easily explained with speech, however, and that's where simple illustrations and animations may take place. But to fill an entire presentation with color pictures and simple animations with no text? I'd rather watch, and would probably get more out of, cartoons!

Re:It's not software

[useosx]

So when Steve Jobs uses Keynote to tell us about the latest Reality Distortion Field (product) at Macworld, is that a people problem or a software problem? Which people: Steve Jobs or We the Indoctrinated? Or is Keynote just a better product than PowerPoint?

Re:It's not software

[Henk Poley]

10) the audience is NOT wearing any clothes.
That's the most wierd statement I've seen in a post modded +4, Insightful

Re:It's not software

[hodet]

Right on. It's not the software making people stupid. It's user laziness. It irritates me when a manager calls us in for a meeting and just before he begins he has his assistant load the PowerPoint Presentation that head office sent them. They haven't even read it themselves and then they go on to bore the hell out of you for the next hour. If they are going to do that then just email me the file and I'll read it myself.

The RCMP gave us a networking security presentation and those guys really knew how to use powerpoint. Were they masters of the software? No. But they knew their content inside out and their use of powerpoint was excellent. The slides used were never to present bullets packed with useless info. They were used to make a point or recap key steps, or present graphs with interesting statistics. They could give a course on the proper use of powerpoint.

In any event rule 1 should be; "Before you step up in front of a crowd, at least know what the hell you are talking about." If you don't, there ain't no stickin' whiz-bang light show that will ever save you.

Re:It's not software

[GregWebb]

Not quite sure I follow you but if I do then yes, a bit but not quite.

I _want_ people watching the presentation carefully. If I hand out notes at the beginning with complete transcripts then people switch off from listening to what I say, which will normally include ad-libs based on what I'm getting from the audience. I'll make it relevant to them, stress the details they need and take questions at any point.

All of which is severely limited by handouts appearing right at the start of the process.

Re:It's not software

[elmegil]

And people would just print out powerpoint slides anyway.

Re:It's not software

[Jmstuckman]

In the US, the ATMs that I've seen give you your cash before your card, but if you leave your card in for an excessive amount of time after taking the cash, the card will be disabled.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

In Sweden all the machines give you your card before you get the cash. I can not remember that they have ever done it in the opposite order.

Re:It's not software

[fruitbatUK]

1) Use a projector - stop using transparencies

Why? One advantage I've noticed with transparencies is that the presenter can look at the slide while still facing the audience. When using an LCD projector far too many presenters face the screen when talking. Of course the ideal setup (LCD projector for slides, 2nd screen for presenter showing notes view) would eliminate this problem, but I've never been lucky enough to use such a system. (Do they exist?)

4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience.

Actually I reckon that should be "know what you want to say". I use a crib sheet otherwise I'd forget the important points, but I do agree that just reading the slide makes a boring presentation.

Re:It's not software

[Waffle Iron]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

In the dark days before laser printers, we usually used a pencil. Draw your picture, xerox it onto a transparancy, and you're all set. (In the darker days befor cheap xerox machines, my school teachers used to do the same thing with special transparancies that worked in those purple mimeograph machines.)

As for text, that was often jotted on a blank transparancy or a chalkboard in the form of notes during the presentation itself.

It may be hard to believe, but that system worked just fine. The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

somtimes u need text to reinforce a point
somtimes you need a table to convince people that you really are honest and have the data
depends on the audience and the point.
one sure fire way to give a bad talk: stick to rigid rules that do not take into account the nature of the material and the audience and the point(s) to be conveyed.
no matter what, be comfortable with your talk - u have to give it not some consultant with "rules" for a good talk. if you are unable to give a talk without reading some points off the slide, betterr to do that then give a really bad talk.. as Orwell famously said, better to break any rule of grammar then do somthing truly barbarous

Re:It's not software

[nagora]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

You are assuming that we should be making presentations at all.

TWW

Re:It's not software

[PastaQueen]

Huh, my ATM still gives out cash before giving me my card. I didn't know that was a big problem.

Re:It's not software

[nehril]

Creating and delivering good presentations (with or without powerpoint or any other software) is a skill that is learned. nobody is born knowing how to ride a bicycle.

the main problem is not that "powerpoint makes you dumb" or even that "people are already dumb," but rather the fact that few people take the time to learn ANYTHING about how to create good slides and presentations. they think that powerpoint will do it all for them, no need to learn.

Power Point will NOT make you a good or bad public speaker!

Re:It's not software

[Reziac]

When I go to some software vendor's seminar, and the presenter breaks out Powerpoint, I immediately know that there will be NO hard information, and that the whole event is a waste of time. I've yet to see anything actually useful come out of a Powerpoint presentation at a seminar!!

Even worse -- when the seminar handout is nothing but a printout of all the Powerpoint slides!

Re:It's not software

[Crispen]

> 2) avoid text on your slides at all costs

Well, it depends on what you goal is. At best, pictures do no harm. At best. If you want to entertain, go crazy with the pictures. If you want to TEACH, however, you should only use pictures that truly demonstrate the point you are trying to make on a particular slide.

The problem is that the human brain processes images (text on the slide, pictures, etc) separately from audible speech. Using an unrelated picture on a PowerPoint slide (like, say, that stupid duck with the sledgehammer) causes interference on the visual channel -- the text on the screen doesn't match the picture -- and actually impedes learning and retention.

In fact, if you take a simple text PowerPoint presentation; pretty it up with text, transitions, and multimedia; and then compare the test scores of students who view the plain and enhanced versions, the students who view the enhanced presentation do 10% worse.

I am in the early stages of writing a textbook on how to teach with PowerPoint [anyone know a good publisher?], and I have found a BUNCH of research on PowerPoint effectiveness. A nice place to start is:

Bartsch, R. A., & Cobern, K. M. (2003). Effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations in lectures. Computers & Education, 41, 77-86.

Re:It's not software

[fermion]

While this advice is useful for some presentations, heeding such advice as a rule of thumb, particularly 2 and 3, probably just makes the presentation more lame. #4 of course is always important.

The nice thing about powerpoint is that it allows people who would ordinarily drone on without visuals or manipulative to have both. The bad thing is that these people believe that because they have visuals and manipulative they have a good presentation. They believe that because they have animated text, which will in general bring a distracted person back to the presentation, they have an engaging presentation.

These people miss the reason for powerpoint. To address a wider range of learning styles, not just to be cool. Too much animation will distract the learner that just wants to read the handout and listen to the speaker. Too much color will distract the visual learner that the images are supposed to draw in. The use of a overhead or projector is often irrelevant because the presentation is seldom strong enough for such a choice to make a significant difference.

That said, the article appears to be mostly about the fact that most presentation focus on low quality cognitive presentations, and make little effort to encourage analysis, synthesis and evaluation in the audience. It is unfair to blame powerpoint for this. Encouraging such thinking is the responsibility of the presenter. he or she must ask the proper questions, present discrepant events, or otherwise cause the audience members to leave the dumdum state of regurgitation.

If this does not happen it is either because the presenter does not know how, or is afraid to do so. The later is often the case. Forcing more complex questions may lead to those that the presenter can not answer, and some may capitalized on such a situation to assert personal dogma. Likewise, discrepant events may be interpreted not as an opportunity to explore, but as an indication of incompetence.

As an example of the importance of visual presentation styles, look at these first two links from google on blooms taxonomy. Some will prefer the first, and some will prefer the second.
http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom. html
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/bloo m.html

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say, don't add your email address if you are the type that has no time to read and reply to your email. You can give a great presentation, but if your email address is a black hole, you'll leave a bad impression overall.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

The most useful "non chalkboard" presentations that
I ever received was Dr Kapoor(you rule) writing
Calculus examples on transparencies, on an overhead projector with a felt-tipped pen. I learned more math(not just calculus) in those 3 semesters than ever before. Powerpoint presentations tend to detach the presenter from really being in synch with what they are presenting.

Re:It's not software

[Chris Y Taylor]

"Well...since everyone is well aware that ninety-eight percent of all meetings/presentations are either useless or downright counterproductive, perhaps we should ditch the lot of it."

Staff meetings and status updates may be mostly useless, but the presentations at technical conferences are VERY productive "meetings" where PowerPoint is frequently used, and they aren't just put on for the benifit of the wingtip shoe crowd.

Re:It's not software

[danila]

Chosing the best approach to the presentation

• Know your strong sides
• • You are a good speaker
  • You are good with PowerPoint
• Use your powers
• • Either prepare the slides as illustrations to your self-contained energetic speech...
  • ...or place most of the information in bulleted slides, so that you only need to read them and provide a few bits of extra info

A multimedia display is the best, but most people can neither make a good .ppt file, nor prepare a good speech, much less do both things and successfully integrate them.

Re:It's not software

[Ed Avis]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

Writing them as web pages works fairly well.

Re:It's not software

[file-exists-p]

4) rehearse your presentation so that you know it by heart - nothing irritates me as much as someone who just reads his slides to the audience

In term of irritativness, maybe. But I can't help thinking speakers who know their talk "by heart" tend to forget the critical points where they may lose their auditory.

--
Go Debian!!!

Re:It's not software

[Coryoth]

My preferred technique for making presentations is as follows: when writing up my report in LaTeX (I'm a math person, so LaTeX is the natural choice) I include an extra \summary{ summary of paragraph } at the start of every paragraph, long equation array, etc. It's very little work to do this while writing the full report. My standard document class simply ignores summary content. I have another document class, however, that ignores the paragraph content and simply renders the section headings etc. and summary content to prettily rendered pdf slides. It takes some work setting up the document classes so that both versions look as elegant in each form, but once that's done you run LaTeX once and get your full report, then run it again, and get your presentation. Very easy, and it keeps the content much better.

Jedidiah.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you still end up with the same end result, you just spent much more time getting there. And they're saying PowerPoint makes you stupid?

Re:It's not software

[Daniel]

So what should we use to make presentations then?

LaTeX?

Yes.

Daniel

Re:It's not software

[jc42]

I tend to use HTML.... It fits easily on a disk, it's easy to add graphics, you've got a full-screen mode on every browser, and when you're done, it can go on a website without making you look like an idiot ...

And, most important, the web pages can contain hyperlinks. Then those who want just the idiot level can look at the main pages, while those who want actual information can start clicking and get all the detailed pages that you have included to support your top-level pages.

And, of course, the presentation and any handouts should prominently display the URL, for the benefit of the non-idiots in the audience.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a reference to an old (even cliche) joke/technique for reducing anxiety for public speaking engagements. "Imagine the audience in their underwear/naked."

Re:It's not software

[adam872]

I don't think it's all Powerpoint's fault. If you don't have a clue how to present to people then even the best tool isn't going to help. A lot of people whom I see present need to take some kind of course or at least practice amongst peers before presenting in an important meeting. This is what I did to try and hone my skills as I found myself presenting more often. I still wouln't regard myself as an expert by any means, but at least I can be understood by the audience most of the time.

Some things that I have found to be effective over time have been whiteboard/flipcharts and handouts. On a whiteboard, I feel I'm much better equiped to handle the ad-hoc question, or explain a concept more fully. Too many presenters paint themselves into the slideware corner, by not having any other visual aids. The best lecturers I had at University used the whiteboard as much as the overheads/PPT slides. The other thing I do when giving a presentation, particularly if it's rather dense, is to provide a handout, either in the form of a white paper or a summary of the presentation with the speakers notes. In fact, most of my presentations are actually a summary of the technical paper I wrote in the first place. A PDF or printed copy is much easier for the audience to digest later, when they've forgotten everything I just talked about :) The other big factor is the presenter voice. If you just drone on and on, people are going to switch off in the first minute or two.

All of that said, I have major issues with PPT on a usability and document portability front. A lot of Tufte's ideas are valid in my view and at least some of them I hope to incorporate into my work...

Re:It's not software

[sogoodsofarsowhat]

Well um ATM around here dispense the cash ask for another tansaction then return receipt then card. Yup....so you were saying what.....

Re:It's not software

[Cipster]

I like PDF's. I have yet to use them at a meeting but I have been experimenting with turning everything into a pdf and using the full screen mode for the presentation.
I have a lot of Power Point slides from different Office versions and importing those into Open Office sometimes causes formatting problems, especially for tables.
You can't do annimations in pdf format but I think that's a good thing anyway. I hate presentations with stuff flying in on the screen and cute animated clip art.

Re:It's not software

[adam872]

Agreed. The best presenters are well versed in their subject area and are confident enough to not only put that across to the audience, but handle tricky questions while in mid presentation. I've always been impressed by folks who can stop what their saying, answer a difficult question, then pick up where they left off.

The best recent example I can think of was a guy from NetAPP who basically didn't have anything prepared and just stood up and talked for 45 minutes. That sounds boring on the face of it, but I came away knowing a lot more about their technology than before and actually enjoyed listening to him. He clearly knew what he was talking about and this came across in how passionate he was when speaking about it.

Re:It's not software

[nsda's_deviant]

i agree with you that software itself doesn't cause people to make bad presentations but i think a culture of bad presentations are the norm. people who don't realize that their presentation is overly complicated and difficult to understand. issues like that should deal with a presenter fully equipped to deal with those issues with a great oral presentation. I've never thought that the actual slide content would ever be as important as the oral because you can't condense your entire speech into slides.

powerpoint doesn't make you dumb, i think the problem lies with the people who frequentlly give dumb powerpoint presentations. i've never seen a real scientific look at how powerpoint slides should be used in any setting but I would imagine it would not to be a complete script and should be easy to follow.

Re:It's not software

[forgotmypassword]

Speaking as a person who attends conferences and has also had to help students with presentations.

Transparencies are fine. Infact they much easier to read than PP files because the resolution is soooo much higher. Of course you need to switch your style to "Slides" in LaTeX so that it will ...

1) Use a large font size
2) Use a sans serif like ariel font and NOT a serif font like times

Those rules should be held when using PP too, also

a) use the highest resolution that the projector allows
b) turn the font smoothing on
c) avoid using colored backgrounds as they make it hard to read

As for your number (2) I find that text is fine as long as it is limited to consise statements. Too many students put paragraphs of text on their slides and read them right off the screen.

The particular reason that I prefer transparencies to PP in my field of study is that equations look horrid in PP, graphs don't look good, and none of their fancy features are needed. I wouldn't go as far as recommending them to everyone though, as you did with PP. I think it really depends on your field of study.

Re:It's not software

[hemanman]

You never attended Microsoft TechEd, have you?

-H

Re:It's not software

[EvanED]

I'm not particularily trying to nitpick, but PPT can have hyperlinks too.

Re:It's not software

[pballsim]

Avoid text on a slide?! In otherwords just have graphs with no meaning information? "Big bar good".

All these are human issues. When you design a graph you must LABEL EVERYTHING otherwise the graph is bogus. They do this all the time on the news, show a graph with nothing on it.

Even going to lots of presentation the problem are human users not the presentation software. I see people throw 30 lines of text on a spreadsheet! You either ax some lines or split the information into new pages.

I think it's funny that Slashdot will attack Microsoft just because, no rhyme or reason. Some people write a bad presentation and it's PowerPoints fault!

And plus PowerPoint IS NOT YOUR DOCUMENT. PowerPoint is a SUMMARY of results. You should be producing your data in a Document (Word or whatever) and then copy it over. I actually don't like the copy/paste functinality of pictures in any of Office. I store my pictures as jpegs, gifs or pngs and import them. That way I have the original data. I usually keep a SPSS (statistics program) file to all my graphs.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

Well...since everyone is well aware that ninety-eight percent of all meetings/presentations are either useless or downright counterproductive, perhaps we should ditch the lot of it.

YEAH!!

Re:It's not software

[ThePhin]

And of course it doesn't hurt to review Mark Jason Dominus' Conference Presentation Judo, linked to here previously.

Re:It's not software

[LauraScudder]

Perhaps you could post your document classes somewhere so that others can start doing this as well. I'm in physics and this system sounds pretty appealling.

Re:It's not software

[King_TJ]

Actually, the best comment I read recently about all of this "anti-PowerPoint" hoopla was this:

"The key to making a good PowerPoint presentation is to state your conclusion in the very beginning. Then use the rest of your presentation to back up those conclusions and explain them to your audience."

Most people start in on a rambling presentation, showing numerous statistics and charts, and the audience is either asleep or totally confused by the time the last slides bring it all to a conclusion.

Re:It's not software

[iabervon]

I hear spoken English works pretty well, unless you're actually have some visual information, in which case you should use the real thing or a set of photos or PDFs or something like that.

If you have to have slides, show pictures of your pets or your vacation or something. It'll distract less from your talk.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do they exist?

Most better laptops nowdays do dual head.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

I never liked that advice- I just get an erection on stage. Not good.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

As one who does, sees, and reviews engineering (IEEE) conference submissions, I'm returning your proposal for pre-publication corrections:

#1: Content, content, content! The coolest graphics and fanciest tools cannot conceal the utter lack of technical merit--not all the time, and not from all readers.

#2: Sometimes text is best, sometimes photos, sometimes line graphics. If you're discussing computer code, show the relevant parts of the source code as text. If it's a physical implementation, use photos. If it's an electrical schematic, use line graphics. When I'm reviewing your paper and you chose to use fluff rather than substance, your work is headed for a reaming.

#3: Full color figures and animation were clever for the first person who ever used them, and remained cool for about another year. Since then they have become trite, annoying, and the sign of somebody with nothing useful to say. After years of audiences retching from cuteness overload, they make you look stupid--avoid them (unless of course, you truly are stupid!).

#4: You got this one right. Please be sure the presenter knows the material and the presentation. No department heads presenting years of work done by graduate serf^H^H^Htudents as their own.

Re:It's not software

[Kanasta]

It takes 5 color pens and 2min to put together a good transparency on any topic, but 1hr to work out which way you want the text to animate in using PP.

Half the PP stuff I've seen was in design mode, cuz the presenter couldn't get the notebook/projector to work together in fullscreen mode.

Ppl love making their text scroll left, then right, then fizzly fuzzly. Then after the 3rd page, they get bored with it and skip all the animation on the rest of the 50pg thing.

Too bad neat handwriting is no longer acceptable in the business world. If they knew how many hours of fiddling they'd save = saved wages.

Re:It's not software

[zekt]

Yes, and it was a "people problem" when ATM's used to pay out the cash before returning your card

Yep, it's a UI problem. It takes a lot of time to aquire good presentation skills. It also takes a lot of time to aquire good UI design skills.

Re:It's not software

[TheDormouse]

Actually, if you can create a GOOD presentation on transparencies or a chalkboard, you probably would be better off putting the same presentation on a slide show like PowerPoint. That way you can easily edit the presentation without making more transparencies, screwing up pagination, etc. You also don't have to fiddle with loose transparencies or rewriting everything with chalk.

The best notes from teachers I had growing up were the ones who used the spinning roll of transparency film mounted on a projector. In a way this was the "low-tech version" of PowerPoint: premade slides, easily scrollable between pages.

Of course, if you don't have the right type of projector whereever you're giving a presentation it's mostly a moot point anyway. Although you could always just print out transparencies of your PowerPoint presentation slide by slide.

By the way, no one ever said PowerPoint presentation *must* be visually interesting. Focus on making the presentation equal to the hand-made one. If you can make them more visually interesting, however, they will be more memorble and your audience might retain more of the information.

Re:It's not software

[The Cydonian]

You want to look at OperaShow then. Ppt-like presentation through standards-compliant HTML.

Re:It's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never taken a Mercury Interactive course have you?

Re:It's not software

[instarx]

The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.

I agree with your post except for the above part. Most people use PP because they AREN"T cool and don't have an ounce of creativity in them. They wouldn't be able to present information in an interesting way if they had to. What PP does for them is level the playing field to a pitifully low common denominator, allowing them to 1)not be embarrassed and 2)present useless and biased information in a way that makes it look valid and useful.

Re:It's not software

[Reziac]

Let's see if I can get this typed before losing the connection this time...

TechNet yes, but not TechEd far as I recall. (Pretty much any free M$ seminar or presentation in the Los Angeles area, that I can manage to attend.) Some are very interesting and informative; sadly, others are nothing but hype. The hype-only variant can be spotted by one particular presenter being up front (Bootchk or whatever his name is), and by anyone brandishing PPT files. After a couple nothing-but-PPT seminars in a row, a bunch of us regulars complained about the lack of genuine content, and their next seminar was somewhat better.

Re:It's not software

[nelsonal]

I've seen two animations that I really liked, both were animated charts, one with gif files and the other with a macro, the most impressive one showed in a clear and consise manner how treasury yield curves changed over a 15 year period. On a side note, I get a ton of slides, Adobe seems to support some sort of export from PowerPoint to pdf.

Re:It's not software

[nagora]

It takes a lot of time to aquire good presentation skills. It also takes a lot of time to aquire good UI design skills.

Maybe we should all just go down the pub and discuss whatever it was the presentation was about.

TWW

Re:It's not software

[rev063]

Of course the ideal setup (LCD projector for slides, 2nd screen for presenter showing notes view) would eliminate this problem, but I've never been lucky enough to use such a system. (Do they exist?)

It's easy to do this with a modern laptop -- slides on the projector, notes on the laptop screen. Here's how.

Re: It's not software

[Black Parrot]

> 10) the audience is NOT wearing any clothes.

Not recommended if you're the headmaster at a girl's school.

I guess I'm immune

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

Powerpoint is the one app in Office I've never used, nor installed. Just never found it useful.

Saddam Captured

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm watching the PowerPoint presentation now.

Makes you dumb

[figjamjam]

And makes you fall asleep.
Well at least thats been my experience.

Powerpoint at fault, or users?

[mattjb0010]

In a new essay, information theorist Edward Tufte outlines why PowerPoint 'forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension.' The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA agrees, noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but powerpoint doesn't have a wizard that says "it looks like you're trying to insert text saying `life threatening situation' in size 44 text, would you like to Dilbertize this slide?".

Re:Powerpoint at fault, or users?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, you have to enable clippy to get that feature.

Re:Powerpoint at fault, or users?

[Anonymous Coward]

-1 overrated

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno.. I've seen numerous bums in the street which look suspiciously like that guy that's in the press...

just plain silly

[MadMirko]

How do you come from "noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation'" to "PowerPoint Makes You Dumb"?

We have seen so much bullshit in plain text / html / .rtf / .pdf (and this story goes right along), but would anyone state that "vi / tex / Acrobat makes you dumb"?

Please, no more...

Re:just plain silly

[Anonymous Coward]

precisely, tufte's point isn't product spcific its genre specific. he asserts that any presentation that follows the format of bullets and graphs will perforce devolve into a very noisy channel. he has many suggestions of alternate ways of conveying complex data, and yes MS is incorporating some of these into powerpoint.

real upshot is don't make lame presentations. times article should be headlined "NASA covers ass with tufte column"

Re:just plain silly

[SlashdotLemming]

Please, no more...

It's because this is Slashdot and PowerPoint is a Microsoft product. If Slashdot stopped posting super spun MS bash articles like this, their traffic would decrease. All part of knowing your customer.

Re:just plain silly

[Lumpy]

It's simple really.... go and look at the sales and marketing staff.

These people were hired as smart people, and now after a weekly exposure to powerpoint...

They are a bunch of blathering idiots...

Thus, Powerpoint makes you dumb.

Hey, explain the rampane stupidity in the sales and marketing departments! we checked the water, airconditioning system, even to see if they had their car exaust routed in their cars... this can be the ONLY explination...

Re:just plain silly

[Anonymous Coward]

this can be the ONLY explination....

I see you work for marketing yourself...do you use Powerpoint too?

Re:just plain silly

[Anonymous Coward]

exposed to powerpoint only slightly.... the exposure may be lethal next month and he will be regressed all the way down to a MCSE level.

This explains the consistent stupidity level in MCSE's.

they started as smart IT people and exposure to ppt files in the MCSE training makes them morons.

Re:just plain silly

[BardicStorm]

I feel it should be pointed out, that at least in this instance, the MS bashing spin was on the part of the NY Times people.

"Powerpoint Makes You Dumb", is in fact the NY Times title of the story. Please people, wait for the dupe to come out with "Using MS Office Products Significantly Lowers Your IQ" before bashing slashdot. :)

Re:just plain silly

[adrianbaugh]

vi just makes you look dumb (when you can't even figure out how to quit :-)

I love vi.

Re:just plain silly

[KillerHamster]

The average idiot couldn't figure out how to use vi or tex. However, anyone and his dog can throw together a PowerPoint presentation. Stupid people will make stupid presentations using any medium they can figure out how to use. This includes certain computer science professors I've had.

Re:just plain silly

[Zork the Almighty]

This is the most insightful post I've seen in the entire story.

Re:just plain silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, maybe the author took a little poetic license. But the point is PowerPoint encourages, even seduces, one to use frivolous and distracting presentation techniques. Certainly professional and pithy presentations can be produced with PowerPoint, but it's so much fun to play with page transitions. :-P

Re:just plain silly

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but I think using emacs makes you dumb.

Re:just plain silly

[sql*kitten]

It's because this is Slashdot and PowerPoint is a Microsoft product.

Very true. If you are useless at presenting (and this counts for about 90% of engineers, probably 99.5% of Slashdot readers) then PowerPoint can make you more useless faster. But, it's just a tool, and in the hands of a skilled presenter, can be very useful.

Powerpoint Flaws

[graystar]

What I find annoying is when you get those wannabe technophiles who think because they have a flashie animation and a cool sound they somehow have a good presentation.

It makes you not think of the content. "Here is plane, with a major design fault" BONG CRASH...laughter, no wonder.

Re:Powerpoint Flaws

[Amiga Lover]

What I find annoying is when you get those wannabe technophiles who think because they have a flashie animation and a cool sound they somehow have a good presentation.

I think you've hit the hammer on the head there.

Think back to when everyone first got homepages. Geocities. iridescent backgrounds, rainbow colours, huge text and animated gifs galore.

Fortunately the anonymity of the internet allowed us to email these people and go "Fuck your page sucks shit! burned my eyes. GAAAAAH".

Can't do that to the boss about his PPT presentation though.

Re:Powerpoint Flaws

[Reziac]

Yeah, but I do complain on the evaluation forms we hand in after seminars...

For those that rely primarily on a Powerpoint presentation, my single most common complaint is that the seminar lacks hard info. I swear I'm gonna have a stamp made up to save myself writing over and over "More realtime product demos, fewer @!#$%^&* slides!"

Re:Powerpoint Flaws

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck off elitist

Re:Powerpoint Flaws

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why the Pentagon banned animated tanks from their network. So many huge Microsoft files, particularly PowerPoint, were being thrown around their encrypted net that the network was flooded.

You only need to look at SCO

[jonbryce]

Their powerpoint slide giving evidence of illegal copying of code into linux is a perfect example of this.

Makes you dumb?

[illuminata]

It seems to me like it doesn't actually make you dumb, but might not be the best way to represent data. Saying that it affects your intelligence is a bit of a low blow. Maybe the want to rub it in on Microsoft should be subdued.

On another note, is anything going to be reported on capturing Saddam Hussein? It seems like Slashdot would mention it for consistency's sake because they did report on Iraq before. I'll give them time, but it would only be right.

Re:Makes you dumb?

[NickFitz]

... is anything going to be reported on capturing Saddam Hussein?

FWIW, ITN here in the UK just came back from VT and the newsreader announced "America's top general there, clearly sober."

Re:Makes you dumb?

[SlashdotLemming]

On another note, is anything going to be reported on capturing Saddam Hussein? It seems like Slashdot would mention it for consistency's sake because they did report on Iraq before [slashdot.org]. I'll give them time, but it would only be right.

You're in Liberal news land my friend. If you want to see Saddam with the flashlight in his mouth and pictures of President Bush in front of a waving flag with eagles overhead, take a right turn over to FoxNews

So let's see...

[smittyoneeach]

1) PowerPoint makes you dumb
2) David Byrne has been getting his PowerPoint on, to produce art.
3) Therefore, art makes you dumb?
Hmmm... do we also believe guns kill people, not the people pulling the triggers?

Re:So let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

4) ...
5) Profit?

Re:So let's see...

[__past__]

do we also believe guns kill people, not the people pulling the triggers?

Right. It's not that PowerPoint makes people dumb, but you could certainly argue that dumb people make PowerPoint...

Re:So let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that the entire point of Byrne's power point art is that "business presentations" using powerpoint mutilate and distort information, and make us dumb...

One might think that you've watched one too many powerpoint presentations, and that's why you couldn't figure out tha that Byrne would agree with the article.

Re:So let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem quite PowerPoint-influenced yourself, since you seem to think making enumerated statements amount to logical reasoning.

1) Alcohol makes you dumb
2) Shakespeare drank alcohol
3) Therefore, reading Shakespeare makes you dumb?

Re:So let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

Non-sequitur. David Byrne was already dumb before using Powerpoint.

Re:So let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

AC, you need a new humor detector, as you completely missed the 'bogus syllogism' gag.

Re:So let's see...

[calyphus]

Bad design kills people. Whether it's a car or the information presented to managers about it's safety. Bad information design can hide, or just simply fail to reveal, salient facts.

Powerpoint gives people without a clue a way to add chartoonery to information. It helps people make bad design. It is only a tool, but it is a tool that gives too many a false sense that they are making good presentations.

Martin-Marietta didn't need PPT to make un-illuminating charts before the Challenger explosion that failed to show why taking off in freezing weather was a bad idea. Bad information design hid the facts.

Even having a good designer, one who knows how to present data that can be quickly and easily understood, can't help a presenter who doesn't honestly know how to communicate.

NASA and /.

[ErrorBase]

Have a lot in common :
If in doubt Blame Microsoft !
(or SCO but that was no option in this case)

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Richard A Lake]

http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/12/14/sprj.irq .main/index.html

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, when I first saw the film clip of Saddam, I thought it was Geraldo with makeup.

Great day for Iraq. Let's hope they can rebuild and live in peace now.

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[johnkp]

The real problem is that the NASA engineers choose the wrong means of communication, when trying to explain what I would suspect to be a rather complicated situation.
Who's fault is that?

You can say a lot about the guys at Redmond, but I doubt their PowerPoint team has any rocket scientists associated with them.
*pun intended*

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[nagora]

The real problem is that the NASA engineers choose the wrong means of communication, when trying to explain what I would suspect to be a rather complicated situation. Who's fault is that?

The managers who refuse to read any complex printed document and force everyone to try to encapsulate their ideas into a set of slides with as little text as possible?

TWW

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[EvilTwinSkippy]

So the question returns: How did someone who couldn't give a rat's ass about "techical details" get to be in charge of a project that is ALL "technical details?"

Whoever picked the managers, and supervised the managers, is as much to blame as the damn foam chunk.

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[goldstein]

This fits with my corollary to Murphy's Law - the more important the matter to be decided, the less information will be used to make it. In the limit, for matters of extreme importance, large amounts of disinformation (i.e., negative information) are used.

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[thrillseeker]

So the question returns: How did someone who couldn't give a rat's ass about "techical details" get to be in charge of a project that is ALL "technical details?"

Because in a world where the people are promoted to fill some perceived need other than proven technical competence (eg, "balance" in the workforce, plays a good game of golf, sucks up to the boss, etc.), then little effort is made to find those dedicated to really understanding a problem before acting on it. Instead, those who are able to look good in the shower vice those who are actually able to fly the jet / build the rocket / analyze complex data are the ones that are promoted and given executive level pay and perks.

Whenever I see a PPT presentation that has anything that moves, I realize the presenter probably doesn't know shit about his subject. The templates and gee-whiz gizmos of PPT encourage that sort of thing - se we end up with multimegabyte presentations (because of the gee-whizness thingies) that get read to us - if the information was important it should be presented in a research report with appropriate detail and actually read by those that need to make decisions.

We no longer teach that sort of thing - we encourage kids now from an early age to make PPT presentations of minimal facts - the famous bullet points - and such an approach to providing knowledge to others means more time is spent on seeing eye candy than on data collection, theory presentation, statistical analysis, historical references and professional-judgement recommendations.

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[hkfczrqj]

Whoever picked the managers, and supervised the managers, is as much to blame as the damn foam chunk.

Politicians?

Cheers...

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[noda132]

Whoever picked the managers, and supervised the managers, is as much to blame as the damn foam chunk.

I'd say they're entirely to blame. It's happened before, too, with the Challenger disaster. Management was told that Challenger would explode, but they launched anyway.

With the Columbia disaster, critical safety measures were being overlooked. Concerned engineers asked three times for satellite photographs of Columbia, and never got them. Management knew about the foam problem for ages but never helped fix it.

Re:PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

[jimhill]

At my job, that's usually the managers' collective fault. See, in my work environment a manager is all too often a person of minimal technical but supreme "people" skill. It's not what you know, it's whom you blow.

I do fairly complicated stuff. It's not incomprehensible, but it takes more than a bullet list with simple words and a line drawing to understand. Yet, at least once a month I receive orders to provide "a PowerPoint slide or two for a briefing". Last time I took four slides to discuss the topic in sufficient detail and submitted them to my boss. She let me know that the order was for one slide. I shrunk the font until all four fit on one. Petty, yes, but the equivalent of "teach me how to build an internal combustion engine in one slide" deserves nothing but contempt.

It does not make you dumb.

[arcanumas]

PowerPoint or any proesentations of this form was never intended to substitute normal means of presenting data.

A complicated and information rich report will always have to be read to be understood.
PowerPoint is useful for summarizng data, Assisting a speaker and other helpful functions.
So saying that PowerPoint makes you dumb makes no sense. It's a tool. If you use it in the wrong way then you already are dumb.
Kids can stick screwdrivers into electrical plugs. But do screwdrivers make kids dumb?

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[Amiga Lover]

> But do screwdrivers make kids dumb?

If you stab one in the head with a screwdriver, well, yes.

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[Ludoo]

A problem I see every day where I work (60k employees organization) is that PP is used for EVERYTHING, not only presentations. In fact, upper management EXPECTS complex issues to be analyzed with a short Power Point document. Anything longer, they just don't read it.

Power Point makes you dumb by giving you the illusion of performing a deep, logical analysis of an issue, when in fact all you're doing is presenting it in a very superficial way.

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[Tango42]

The point is, it would be the person doing the stabbing that was making them dumb, not the inanimate object.

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[MoreDruid]

Kids can stick screwdrivers into electrical plugs. But do screwdrivers make kids dumb?

No... they make 'm roasted and tasty... now where's my little brother? I'm hungry >:)

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[YouHaveSnail]

PowerPoint or any proesentations of this form was never intended to substitute normal means of presenting data.

Take a look at what Microsoft says about PowerPoint and then say that with a straight face.

Re:It does not make you dumb.

[rnd()]

PowerPoint is just software. It's only as shallow or deep as you are.

Do blame the messenger

[Space cowboy]

... assuming the deliverer of the presentation is the author, anyway...

It seems the art of delivering a coherent "story" for a message has been lost in this modern day of 10-second soundbites, and flashy presentations, but it's not the medium's fault that the message is confusing, it's the creator of the message.

There are rules for imparting highly-technical information to others who may not be as "up on it" as yourself...

• Take time to lay the foundations of your main point, build slowly and incrementally towards it.
  
• Deliver summaries on a regular basis so people can checkpoint their way through the technical ideas.
  
• Use graphics if they convey the message better than words, or if appropriate for humour. Understanding often arrives with a chuckle.
  
• Sound effects are (almost) always useless.
  
• Don't over-complicate, make it as detailed as it needs to be and no more.
  

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but I've found them useful guidelines...

Simon.

Re:Do blame the messenger

[Anonymous Coward]

nice

Re:Do blame the messenger

[Steve1952]

It seems to me that powerpoint works well. For example:

Is the wing intact?

• Impact mass outside our database
• Computer analysis inconclusive
• No data available on carbon edge
• Potential loss of vehicle

I think they got it backwards

[reboot246]

The truth is that only dumb people use PowerPoint. Smart people are bored to tears when dumb people force them to watch a PP presentation.

What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Amiga Lover]

> What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!

Tell me about it. My nephew just finished his highschool finals. Among them was a course entitled "Computer programming and Software Design". Half the damned textbook was how to use MS Office.

Mmmm, favourite text editor - vi, emacs or Word?

Re:I think they got it backwards

[I Be Hatin']

The truth is that only dumb people use PowerPoint.

Only on Slashdot would such a comment be moderated up as "insightful".

Tell me, reboot: what are you going to be doing 10 years from now? The same menial job you're doing now, or will you actually get promoted and become one of those "dumb people"?

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Alomex]

Which idiot moderated that comment up? Smart people are bored to tears by dumb people. The PP presentation is fully optional.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[chialea]

I'm still conflicted on PP. My advisor requires that I use it (instead of SliTex) for one simple reason: she can "borrow" my slides for her own presentations. However, I find that if you have any real sort of equations, it's going to get kinda scary when you move it from one computer to another.

But this is exactly why people use it for teaching. If you make a good set of slides (and they get changed some every year) you can use them to teach again and again. It saves work over the long run. (use white/blackboard for writing on as well)

One thing I do know for sure is that these people aren't dumb, they just have better things to do than to redo slides all the time.

Lea

Re:I think they got it backwards

[CaptnMArk]

I can only guess they are teaching them on mistakes.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[SStrungis]

Yep,

I am one of those educators that does teach PowerPoint. I was forced. I used to teach a Multimedia course that was actually fun. We used Hyperstudio as a base, and I had the time to teach them a little Photoshop, Illustrator, and SoundEdit when they needed those tools to make things better.

Then middle management came along and decreed that Thou Shalt use PowerPoint as it is what the Real World uses. They also decreed that I would integrate presentation topics with the academic teacher's classes to inject a little "reality" into my eighth grader's lives.

Now I have to teach wretched PowerPoint and the presentations generally bore me to tears. Plus with MM looking at me all the time I cannot have any fun anymore with other software. There is no time. Lately I have jazzed it up a lot, and the students have gotten better through the use of note cards, but PP still sucks.

I am trying really hard to drive home the important points of presentations, but stupid things like Word f'n Art get in the way.

Scott

Re:I think they got it backwards

[bishiraver]

What scares me is that the schools are actually teaching and using PowerPoint!

I just got finished with a CIS110 class (it has bored me to tears; the lab instructor spent two weeks instructing us on how to copy files and create folders in windows). The only reason I'm taking this class is because it is a prerequisit for high performance computing (which involves clustering *nix boxes and such).

The last unit in the lab section of the course was power point. Our project was to compare the pros and cons of different websites on the same subject, create a power point presentation, and present it to the class. I was appalled at not only how many people had absolutely ugly and overly complicated slides, but also how many people missed the entire point of the presentation - half the class simply did a little this-is-a-little-about-my-subject presentation, citing a few websites on the last slide. Not only that, but several people stood up there, facing the projector's screen, reading word for word the slides they had written.

It is not my conclusion that powerpoint makes people dumb; it is my conclusion that people are dumb, and giving them powerpoint is like giving a blind man paintbrushes or a digital camera.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[reboot246]

I'll be retired. What will you be doing? Watching PowerPoint presentations or presenting them?

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Radon Knight]

However, I find that if you have any real sort of equations, it's going to get kinda scary when you move it from one computer to another.

This is why Apple's Keynote software rocks. You can import PDF graphics (and it keeps them as vector graphics, rather than PP), which means you can use LaTeX to prepare the equations, export them as PDF, and drop them directly on the slide. For example, see the LaTeX Equation Editor

Re:I think they got it backwards

[I Be Hatin']

I'll be retired. What will you be doing? Watching PowerPoint presentations or presenting them?

Probably both... and making 10x the salary that you ever earned per year.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[g-doo]

Yeah, one of my professors loved his PowerPoint presentations too much. He'd put entire excerpts from our physics textbook onto the slide, so we as students ended up having to read the massive clusters of words on the slides as he spoke. Then he reduced complex equations with fractions into single line expressions on the PowerPoint slides. Argh! I really hate PowerPoint because most people don't use them professionally.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[reboot246]

and making 10x the salary that you ever earned per year.

It must be nice making $953,250.00 per year.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[I Be Hatin']

It must be nice making $953,250.00 per year.

It will be... so will retiring by 40.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[hankwang]

I've recently discovered Prosper, a LaTeX document class for generating slides. Most importantly, it is designed to generate PDFs with partial changes within a slide (e.g. a bulleted list that appears one point at a time).

It turns out that you can do rather complicated graphical tricks with LaTeX, as the example slide shows demonstrate. Furthermore, it has some rather nice background color schemes, that unfortunately don't always have good contrast.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

>Now I have to teach wretched PowerPoint
>[...] but PP still sucks

PowerPoint may make it hard to be original, but not impossible: http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61485,00. htm

Re:I think they got it backwards

[inf0stud]

I use Squeak instead of PP. By separating subtopics into projects, using large text, graphics and a touch of animation it make a great presentation tool.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[rnd()]

A PowerPoint presentation is only as interesting and boring as you are.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you can do what we do in my lab: we don't use PowerPoint to build presentations, only to present them.

We build our presentations exactly as detailed and well-laid-out as we like, using Photoshop, Freehand, DeltaGraph, etc, and import the resulting figures into Powerpoint.

All Powerpoint does it put them up on screen.

Though this doesn't help if you want stuff like animations.

Anyway, attempting to use Powerpoint's own tools really, really *does* make you stupid - it's always trying to make decisions for you, and getting in the way of what you want to do; usually you have to give up and do things the way it wants to. Which is usually lamer, and uglier.

So your expression of your thoughts becomes less clear. Which makes your thinking less clear. Which makes you stupider.

Bill has a lot to answer for.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Maserati]

Keynote has another advatntage, it can open corrupt PP docs and resave them so PP can read them. That's probably worth the license fee for saving ONE presentation.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[chialea]

How well does it save to PP? If slides with equation editor stuff in em save to good .ppt, I'll buy it tomorrow. (Especially since I REALLY do not want to convert my linux server to windows, and there's no powerpoint latex port yet, according to Necula's page)

Lea

Re:I think they got it backwards

[Radon Knight]

It saves to PP ok, but not great. Most text boxes, bullet points, etc. get translated more-or-less correctly, but (in my experience) one always needs to do some (in some cases, more) tweaking to make the exported PP look "right."

However, the equation editor exports present a greater problem: Keynote groks PDF out of the box, and keep it as PDF - so you get smoothly scalable graphics. PP cannot handle PDF - it *must* convert the PDF to a bitmap before adding the graphic to the slide. This not only loses the transparency, but can introduce jaggies. Overall, I think PP's handling of graphics is inferior to Keynote.

The main reason I use Keynote - even though it doesn't have all of the features of PP - are that (a) it has basically all of the features I need, (b) it's easier to create professional-looking presentations, and (c) (most importantly) I find that, unlike PP, when I create a presentation I work *with* the program, rather than against it. YMMV.

Re:I think they got it backwards

[chialea]

I've just used SliTex, which has been more than good enough for me. However, my advisor can't grab my slides, which makes this a no-go.

Lea

The dumbness spreads.

[questamor]

I worked in a print shop a few years ago, and people would bring in large .ppt documents to print

not as slides, mind, but they'd laid out BOOKS in powerpoint. Yes, blue shaded background in landscape mode and all, with large yellow text, they'd write a small booklet in powerpoint and come to us to have it printed in a professional looking booklet.

Of course they didn't want it to look like it did onscreen, they wanted it to look like any other novels.

Upper management were the worst, when they worked on something themselves, and would bring in a .ppt slide to be printed as a poster.

An embedded 72dpi powerpoint image does NOT scale up well at all to an A1 poster.

All other app users, from Quark XPress, pagemaker, acrobat, word, whatever... they knew what to expect and how to (generally) lay out a document, and when we'd have to do adjustments, they'd be relatively minor, but powerpoint people were bottom of the barrel.

Except for the guy who laid out all his print jobs in Frontpage. I think he was on acid.

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[JamesP]

Except for the guy who laid out all his print jobs in Frontpage. I think he was on acid.

Thank god he didn't use MS Paint...

BTW, where did you think we did our last A) posters for work???

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[EvilTwinSkippy]

My favorite are the ones who have picked out a blue on blue color scheme that looks great on a CRT.

Of course when they throw it up on an LCD projector it's completly illegible. Then it becomes my problem to figure out why the display isn't working.

(Goes back to cleaning gun collection.)

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[calyphus]

The worst tool I've every been directed to use for page layout: Excel.

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[naelurec]

I noticed you were +5 funny .. perhaps people don't realize you are dead serious. I use to work a very similar job ..

It is one thing for someone to uses the wrong tool for a job the first time --- perhaps they were unaware of the correct tools, etc.. but after they have to spend hundreds/thousands more to correct the problem (reformatting in Indesign, reworking the low resolution clipart/images, etc..), you'd think they would take our advise and run with it. But no .. they have continued to submit powerpoint.

augh. some people never learn.

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[rnd()]

Uh, I don't think it's generally debated that different people have different levels of experience with publishing software. Clearly, the people who used pagemaker had some experience, while the people who used powerpoint were more likely new to the whole idea of publishing (and maybe even computers).

So you sat there thinking how dumb they were just because they didn't understand scalable vector graphics, dpi, etc.

Maybe they were idiots, or maybe their expertise was in some other field and they were highly productive in that field but wanted to produce a publication. Perhaps as an "intelligent person" you could have written software to make the job of creating high quality books and posters easy... but no, you were just an ass with a chip on your shoulder working in a print shop thinking how dumb everyone else was...

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[King_TJ]

I don't know about that.... I think there should be a little "give and take" on both sides. Yes, people do expect their local print shop to provide some assistance in achieving their goals on the printed page. That means, if they've chosen color schemes that only work on a CRT but not on paper - the print shop guy/gal should gladly offer alternate suggestions and make it right. (Quite frankly, if it wasn't for this type of assistance, I'm not sure why most print shops would stay in business nowdays. I can buy a brand new Minolta color laser printer for about $400 after mail-in rebate right now, and for under $3000, have a top-of-the-line PowerMac G5 system to do my own desktop publishing on. The "hardware" isn't really *that* big a deal for someone to obtain if they want to do a lot of publishing. Print shops need to offer *knowledge* and *assistance* to keep customers!)

On the other hand, if you're too "computer-challenged" to figure out that text should be typed up in a word processing program, as opposed to a slide presentation program - you deserve to be told to go back and redo it using the right tool.

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is pretty difficult to rise to a high level of proficiency in some field, and have never created a poster to present at some conference or submitted a publication-ready document to a journal. The point is, you must learn these skills in parallel with the knowledge you gain about your field, or you will never progress.

Re:The dumbness spreads.

[rnd()]

That is true of gen X and Y, etc., but pre gen-X it's not necessarily true. People had (and still have) secretaries, underlings, etc., who often do the detail work.

Dangerous grounds...

[DeepDarkSky]

It is not the tool that makes people dumb, it is the people using the tool.

Hey, remember this one? "Guns don't kill people, people do".

Why do people insist on blaming the tool instead of the people who wield them?

Perhaps (and this is where I betray my bias against sales people), it is sales people who started using Powerpoint in simple gloss-over-all-details-in-a-strategy-to-confuse-an d-misinform strategies that started the whole problem?

This is the same problem when people start blaming Windows for every little problem, some of which, of course are well deserved, but it merely shifts the blame from proper responsible network/system administration to the product itself.

Or is it that Microsoft is evil because it is hellbent on creating these simpler tools that don't do enough to prevent people from doing stupid things with them? Or is it that because the tools are easy to use it attracts stupid people to use them instead of using another set of tools that are harder to use and therefore requires more thought and effort?

Quite frankly, it's not just Powerpoint, it could have been any other slideshow presentation program. That Powerpoint is the most commonly used slideshow presentation program made by the evil Microsoft makes it an easy target.

If the proper information was not communicated by the slides, maybe, just MAYBE the people who created them are to blame? Maybe?

Re:Dangerous grounds...

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite frankly, it's not just Powerpoint, it could have been any other slideshow presentation program. That Powerpoint is the most commonly used slideshow presentation program made by the evil Microsoft makes it an easy target.

I take it you haven't used many other presentation programs before. Powerpoint is setup to allow you to only pass minimal amounts of information.

Re:Dangerous grounds...

[MikeCapone]

Hey, remember this one? "Guns don't kill people, people do".

Why do people insist on blaming the tool instead of the people who wield them?

Maybe it's because the tool makes it really easy for people to do bad things while thinking that they are doing good things and feeling proud of themselves?

Re:Dangerous grounds...

[FurryFeet]

Dear God, can you open source my brain?

Dear son, your brain is already open source. It has, in fact, a BSD license. Of course, you need to learn to code God++.

Information Density

[hkwatergypsy]

In the medical field a huge amount of research is produced everyday and any (or none) of it could have an impact on patient care. While the use of PowerPoint does does often oversimplify some research its use in journal clubs does allow a much larger range of research to be sampled by a group. PowerPoint is a useful tool but it is not intended to be the sole medium of information, it is an easily accessable format that aids group understanding of the information. That being said it does seem that people spend more time getting PowerPoint to do what they want than composing a good presentation.

Slashdot makes you dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

Using the same logic as in this article, one can easily conclude that Slashdot makes you dumb. Intersting isn't it? :P

Did anyone get it?

[daraknor]

All of the replies I've read so far seem to miss the point of the article (that they may or may not have read). Briefly stated, by only allowing a mimimal amount of data with only one obvious conclusion, presentations are skipping the analytical process.

Let's say a presentation was done about shipping lanes in the pacific ocean. There are millions of combinations of potential routes, but all routes are essentially 'dumbed down' to either arrows or circles. The presenter's opinion is the only one that will fit on screen and the presentation must be tailored to whatever conclusion the presenter has made. PowerPoint is the method of getting an audience to agree with obvious solutions - because when you only have a single piece of data on the screen, that is the only conclusion you can make.

I don't think that the method of using a projector and presentations is to blame. I think the problem is we can't fit any real statistics, design or model schematics onto the presentation in a viewable format. What if the web was 320x 240 resolution, with a next button at the bottom of each page?

I think we need to start using UML in presentations. Universal Markup Language is able to model any data or action flow in a way that is readily apparent to most people. There are some specific features that take a bit of training (inheritance or reference) when discussing code, but it is always more comprehensible than one arrow pointing to a box. I may get flamed for the last comment, but realize that I actually mean "you comprehend the data" instead of you "saw a box and remembered it"

I agree. PowerPoint makes us dumb because it disallows independent evaluation, thought, logical processes and retention of information or assessment related data.

Re:Did anyone get it?

[Phleg]

It's "Universal Modeling Language".

Re:Did anyone get it?

[daraknor]

You're right obviously. I blame being awake at 6am and posting this shortly after waking up. If anyone wants more information on UML, there is a lot of data at www.rational.com. It is IBM, and I hold that against them but not very much. The people who created UML as a spec wrote Rational Rose, later purchased by IBM.

Re:Did anyone get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's "Universal Modeling Language".

Actually it's "Unified Modeling Language". :)

Re:Did anyone get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

you completely missunderstand why people do presentations. A presentation is a summary of the points, by definition. There is nothing wrong with a summary, if it is good, and the subject matter is appropriate.
The ppt presentation ideally represents your distillation of complex technical matter into a 15 - 60 minute talk, so that people can get the main points, and can get some guidance for finding there way around the primary literature if they need to do that. So, ideally, all the complex analytical stuff has already happened by the time you give a talk. That most people are to lazy or stupid to do this is on them, not on pppts or talks

Re:Did anyone get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

That could be useful. For some things. But there are also many things that UML can't cleanly express.

And like PowerPoint conventions, UML is also often a method of "dumbing down" information. There is a school of thought that says that a design should be such that it can be expressed nicely in UML, but in my experience, the advocates of this don't have a lot of experience in different programming languages and methodologies, and think that OOP and OOD are the only good way of doing things.

I think that the belief that anything is a one-size-fits-all solution is almost always due to either lack of broader experience or closed-mindedness. Why do people want to oversimplify so much? Why do they want to believe that there exists "one true way"?

Re:Did anyone get it?

[tmortn]

and you do not seem to understand the context of the examples discussed in the article. Go get a copy of the CAIB report and go take a gander at the offending slide. Its ludicrous that the information of such importance is in such a 'presentation'to begin with. It was ludicrous when it was used and monumentally ludicrous in hindsight.

Pitching a new soda and explaining the culmination of several engineers work anylizing debris impacts are two very very very very differnt cases. They are however both presntations. One calls for catchy quick information and the other calls for nitty gritty in depth information that simply is impossible to convey with such a limited tool as M$ Power Point.

Granted I agree the problem isn't so much the program as the decision to use it so inapporprately by many people that would be better served choosing other means of presentation more geared to passing on more detailed information.

Re:Did anyone get it?

[dunstan]

My 11 year old son came home from school with an assignment to put together a short presentation on the subject of refugees. I sat down with him and started discussing the points he wanted to make ... about how to tell genuine refugees from economic migrants, the flow of refugees over the years, about how groups of refugees over the years have helped shape our society, and we started taking notes into an emacs buffer to marshall ideas

He ran off to his mother saying "I'm meant to be making a powerpoint presentation, and Dad won't help me", whereupon his mother came and took over - as I stormed out of the room I heard the words "now what font would you like it to be in" ...

Me, I can't present to an audience without interacting, and I can't interact with Powerpoint/Magicpoint, so while there may be some prepared content on acetate/PP, a board with pens is a must.

Powerpoint/Magicpoint may well be OK for persuasive presentations - e.g. sales pitches - but is a hopeless means of presenting analysis and explanation. If people need to read an article by information theorist Edward Tufte to work this out, we're in trouble.

Duntan

Re:Did anyone get it?

[Anonymous Coward]

UML is terrible. Tabular representations are more inteligible than UML. http://www.computer.org/proceedings/icsm/1819/1819 0572.pdf

Re:Did anyone get it?

[daraknor]

There is something even scarier about your story. Children are required to use Microsoft products.

I devised a method of organizing and disseminating information based on references and algorithms. The end-all version would be where the relation of information is documented in a way that allows the client browser to weight the data based on about a dozen generic criteria. Most of it is XML and XML-RPC but we also need presentation methods, and that brings in the subsets of XML.

XML can be used to draw equations, do UML, and any number of other things (the SWIFT network for banking transactions is pure XML). A few of the clients have been written, but not unified or anywhere near compatible (Dia does UML with XML and Python)

Everyone (well almost) knows it is possible to lie with statistics, but nothing is being done to solve that problem. I propose that linking and weighting relevance of data is the only method to defeat modern "spin"

As noted by other people in this discussion... Powerpoint is very Spin-Positive.

Side note: Emacs doesn't have presentation software? It has everything else, a pretty feature rich operating system. All it needs now is a good text editor.

Re:You people are unbelivable!

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL!!!

The Buzzword of the Day is...

[Anonymous Coward]

"spider hole"

a good presentation has nothing to do with PP

[water-and-sewer]

Giving a good presentation involves the same elements as it always did: good organization, clear points, engaging presentation and delivery, timing, and even your own vocal quality. It's like teaching. If you can't give a good presentation without powerpoint, you'll never be able to give a good presentation with powerpoint. The software will never compensate for your own inability to make the point. That said, PP in the right hands can be an effective tool. I'm taking an econ class taught by a guy who uses PP to his advantage to show graphs and so on. But he's using it because it saves him time. Endless bullet point presentations are as painful as always, but the people who deliver them are the same people who used to just deliver their presentation by reading the text from printed copy.

Meanwhile, I can't resist linking to these classic powerpoint cartoons, c/o Dilbert: Powerpoint poisoning and There was content?

Why "PowerPoint makes you dumb"?

[mongbot]

This criticism applies to any slide show, performed with software or without. Just because MIcrosoft have produced a popular and highly selling slideshow program is no reason to single them out.

Regular users and graphics

[nemaispuke]

I did PowerPoint and Persuasion presentations for Joint Intelligence for four years, if what I saw on a daily basis there is any indication of the "skill" of the regular user, a lot of people need help!

The average user does not know how to make effective graphics, and even when they are assisted by someone who does, they tend to ignore their advice. some of the bigger mistakes I saw were:

A briefer handed me message traffic and said "make slides of these". I told him he had to summarize the traffic inot four or five small bullets. He looked at me as if I was nuts! This unfortunately became the norm, lots of text regardless of whether or not you could read it.

Every slide had to have a command seal in it, as if the viewer couldn't figure out where the presentation came from?

And of course the non graphics "professional" who would use such things as silly effects and screen dumps to create a presentation. I once had to come in on a Saturday to assist in a download of a 69 MB PowerPoint presentation that consisted entirely of screen dumps! And this was over a poor ISDN line so it took over three hours!

Until people are made to realize that they have no "skillz" in graphics, this kind of nonsense will continue. It makes me glad that I don't have to sit through those briefs anymore!

Re:Regular users and graphics

[calyphus]

I can't count the number of times I've had to ask a presenter, whom I was re-designing slides for, what are you trying to communicate here? Only to have them either look at me blankly or get mad at me for pointing out, indirectly, that there was no information to be gotten from their jumble of animated arrows, boxes, 11pt text, and senselessly over-contrasted colors.

Wha?

[Kjella]

If I've had a good idea of how to present something, I haven't been stopped by Powerpoint yet. The reason 98% of all presentations look crappy is because a) The maker don't know how to make a good presentation or b) The maker doesn't know the subject well enough to make a good presentation. Then again, the default "Click here to add text" don't exactly help either.

The key is to have figures. Good figures, not the first piechart you found in Excel. Figures should explain things that'd be difficult to put down in words. If not, key points. Never ever put the full text on the slide. If you're going to send it out, make a PDF of the full text instead. In general, forget animations. Please. Unless it significantly adds to the clarity, not the "I know powerpoint"-l33tness.

The best rule is KISS. Keep It Simple, Stupid. And yes, I've stood in front of a consulting firm and presented our thesis work to them (long story, but kinda cool that the consultants consult us ;). And if you know consulting firms, when they felt we managed to do a very good presentation, I think we did something right...

Kjella

Re:Wha?

[calyphus]

Here the blame can leveled on PPT, and Excel for that matter, for guiding idiots toward making bad presentations. They guide the average person away from KISS. Default chart styles add so much visual noise that data becomes secondary.

No I don't know what's goin on...

[Anonymous Coward]

In IT everyone is happy about presentations and slides and Powerpoint and stuff.

But when *I* dare say, that all this blablabla stuff makes me a worse programmer because I don't like these neverending discussions and planning and opportunities to listen to execs who feel good by pulling their latest crap out their asses in front of me, here at slashdot I get modded down as someone who's unable to think/work in groups.

I, personally, think groupwork is a innovation killer because innovation comes from controversial thinking and controversial thinking is discussed (sometimes with the colourful-buzzy-buzz help of Powerpoint) in groups until it's gone(!)

However, I sence that IT is fucked up by to much talk anyways. And I dare say that this blablabla-buzzy-buzz-talk is already influlencing my comments here. Buzz-IT has eaten me and shitten me out several times.

Thank you?

This is totally obvious

[heironymouscoward]

After sitting through one too many PowerPoint presentations, in which the supplier actually spent fifteen minutes (out of a total of 90 or so) explaining the organigram of his company to an audience that had been stunned into sleep by boredom and darkness, I came to the decision that PowerPoint was actually harmful and it has now been banned in our company.

Basically, our rule is to use the screen for pictures and images, but not text. If the speaker wants bulleted notes, fine. But the audience has to watch the speaker, not the screen.

Slideware bad compared to what ?

[rcastro0]

Tufte's thesis is expressed as:

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis.

One thing I am trying to understand is... slideware reduces the analytical quality of presentations as compared to what ? Let me see some alternatives:

1) Oral presentations with no slide back-up.
This can only be worse, unless using powerpoint the presenter sees his job as "orally supporting a visual presentation", instead of the other way around. I mean, no matter how bad graphical data is, it must be better than no data at all. Plus having a slide behind the presenter can help one look back at the sequence of thought, and appreciate how many angles were explored.

2) Presentation of a full, dense and well structured textual report.
Such a thing was made to read, and perhaps talked about, not be presented. To use it raw in a public forum would require IMHO that either everyone reads the report before coming in, or that the presenter shows the conclusions and tells everyone "trust me, I have 250 pages of 10-point print to back it up".

Reminds me of the old Churchill saying about Democracy: "Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried."

Re:Slideware bad compared to what ?

[amcguinn]

You're asking the right question.

And you've got the right answer. It's 2. Some things are too complicated to push into a couple of dozen slides. Some things do have to be actually studied before you can make good decisions. You might want to give a half-hour talk to a group to tell them what they have to study and what they have to decide, and Powerpoint or equivalent is a great help to that, but you can't say that keeping the space shuttle in the sky isn't rocket science. You give them maybe twenty pages of analysis, including charts or whatever, that is going to take a few hours to study and understand, and if you need to talk to them you make a brief presentation that talks about the report.

Re:Slideware bad compared to what ?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, answer your own question: Which modality best presents technical and scientific information?

It is very hard to present large and very technical datasets in a comprehensible manner. We're not talking about marketing presentations. Graphical display of technical information is very time consuming and requires commitment. Most technical powerpoint presentations I've seen are usually thrown together. Presentations should be made after a report has been written, however often this activity is inverted.

Re:Slideware bad compared to what ?

[bluGill]

You forgot: blackboards where the presenter writes the details on the board as he goes. Powerpoint, or any pre-prepared slide is much worse for this situation. I've only seen a few cases where someone can use pre-prepared slides (powerpoint or not) as the content of their talk and pull it off.

Re:Slideware bad compared to what ?

[gumbi west]

While Tufte is often longer on criticism than he is on constructive thought (aren't we all), on this one he does give us one example. See the figure near the bottom on the left.

Re:Slideware bad compared to what ?

[dunstan]

And we've developed a culture where close reason and analysis are treated with suspicion, while glib assertion and oversimplification is celebrated.

IMHO, Powerpointitis is a symptom rather than cause - it just makes it easier to pass off the latter. The acid test: if the information I was just presented was handwritten on a piece of paper, would it be of interest to me?

Favorite PowerPoint pseudonyms:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) PowerPointless
2) PowerPuke
<your entry here>

Yes, just like the Israelis

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of which had no problem with 9/11.

I knew

[michiel.h]

I knew! I knew! I knew!

That's why I Switched to Open Office Presentation Long ago.

HAHA!
I'm smart, you're dumb!
I'm big, you're small!
I'm strong, you're weak!

I'm smarter, I'm smarter, I'm smarter!
*dancing around, doing the I'm-smarter-than-you-and-am-going-to-annoy-the-cra p-out-of-you-untill-you-kick-me-in-the-nuts dance*

It's not true

[Lonath]

Powerpoint

• Tool
• Use Correctly
• Knowledge
• Audience

Part of Whole

• Text
• Graphics
• Verbal
• Handouts
• Followup

Proper Use

• Overview
• Review
• Preview
• !In-Depth

Wrapup

• Tool
• Component
• Condensed
• Followup

I think I've made myself clear.

Re:It's not true

[kurosawdust]

Excellent point. If I may add my own little endorsement, I could never make heads or tails of Finnegan's Wake until I saw a version of it where every sentence kinda sorta zooms in from the right.

Re:It's not true

[dilger]

Very good. See also this a hilarious summary of Tufte's essay in PowerPoint style.

cbd.

Re:It's not true

[adrianbaugh]

Dammit, where are the pictures? This presentation stinks :-)

Re:It's not true

[Anonymous Coward]

That post was pure gold. Thanks.

Re:It's not true

[cooldev]

Mod parent up! (I've always wanted to say that)

Ironically, the satiric slidewarization of Tufte's essay communicates his main points better than the NYT article or other Slashdot posts. Slideware in the generic sense is the problem, not just Microsoft's implementation: low data density, choppy and linear flow, deeply hierarchical structure, data ends up broken up to prevent comparisons and analysis, etc.

I hate most slideware presentations as much as the next guy, but I have seen them done well. If you use higher resolution projectors (at least 1024x768) and have a good speaker that correctly uses the slides as supplemental information instead of an outline then it's not all bad.

(And yes, I have read the whole essay. Out of curiosity I bought it along with one of Tufte's other books a few months ago. It has some good points, but I was dissapointed by the lack of depth and convincing analysis.)

Tufte's money machine

[Peter Van Roy]

Tufte has come a long way from being a pure scientist: you have to pay $7 to get his 28 page essay on PowerPoint. Isn't scientific information usually published in journals or conference proceedings, for a nominal fee? Aren't papers usually put on the Web for free?

Usually, science advances best when information can be exchanged freely. Tufte seems to have forgotten this.

Re:Tufte's money machine

[tommy_teardrop]

Well - an academic can put their papers on the web for free, as long as the journal they sent it to, who take the copyright for it as a condition for publication, allow you to.

Are online papers free? A few are, but the vast majority are not, like Nature, which makes you pay directly, or Science , that makes you pay indirectly through society memberships.

Re:Tufte's money machine

[ChaosDiscord]

Isn't scientific information usually published in journals or conference proceedings, for a nominal fee?

If you're gettting your journals and conference proceedings for a nominal fee, you're clearly getting a much better deal than the rest of us.

Re:Tufte's money machine

[Zebra_X]

No they aren't. In fact most scientific research papers are available starting at at least 30 dollars.

Go try to find more than an abstract on the latest Fusion research...

Re:no, /. does

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, don't these /.-ers realize that this portends the end of SCOs open warfare on the GPL and Free and Open software?

Re:Iraqis dance like Palistinians did on 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

Those picture were stock footage.

Pure propaganda and you bought it. Asshat.

Now, wouldn't it be ironic...

[JFMulder]

If the results of the study were available in PowerPoint?

Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint

[Uggy]

What if Abe had use Powerpoint to "present" the Gettysburg Address?

Re:Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint

[mariox19]

I've seen this before, and the most horrifying thing is that it is held up as an example that's supposed to get you excited about PowerPoint. Okay, I know the link that you gave holds it up as an object of ridicule, but I swear I saw it on a site once where someone obviously did not get the joke.

Can people get any more clueless?

Re:Gettysburg Address in Powerpoint

[bluGill]

Fortunatly for Abe, the Gerrysburg address was written on the train there. The organizers didn't want to invite him, but couldn't come up with a good reason not to invite the president to an event so close to where he was. The key speaker that day spoke for two hours, and is forgotten (I'm to understand he was a good speaker), while Abe spoke for the couple minutes they gave him and said something that is still memorized today.

In other words, they might have required powerpoint, but Abe wouldn't have been given a chance to use the technology because that would be reserved for other speakers. In any case he wouldn't have had time to prepare his slides.

Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report

[An Anonymous Hero]

Tufte's analysis quoted by the NYT is in Chapter 7 of the CAIB report.

For a concise summary see also here ;-)

You only need to look at the UN

[Anonymous Coward]

The UN Presentation by Colin Powell is a better example of compressing a very complicated chain of ideas into 6 bulleted pages. The bullets are the sound bites that dilute the effect

Asian approaches to Presentations

[davejenkins]

I work in Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong, and I have noticed an interesting trend: Asians (especially Japanese) pack their presentations with enourmous amounts of text, and very convoluted diagrams. In meetings, Asians tend to read through these laboriously heavy presentations, and the audience usually sleeps.

I have made presentations here and there for my Japanese and Korean audiences, and I have often been complimented afterwards on the brevity, clarity, and "to the point" quality of my slides.

I fully agree that presentations should not become policy, nor should they be treated as written documents-- sides are only there to outline and organize a verbal conversation and presentation.

On the other hand, Asians are amazed that I actually prepare 4-5 page (single-spaced) reports to accompany my presentations (I assume because they thought I would try to pack all that text into my presentation and then read it to them).

Re:Asian approaches to Presentations

[macshit]

I work for a (big) Japanese company, and we periodically have to attend meetings where they describe how many zillions of yen we lost this quarter, and reveal next quarter's inspiring new slogan (`We're Lovin' Information Customer') which will enable us to destroy Sony.

The slides they show are exactly as you describe -- they're amazing, not just in the sheer quantity of text and numbers they contain, but in the ultra-dimensionality of it all. No, 2D is not enough; by dividing everything into sub-sub-sub-tables, intertwined into completely non-rectilinear arrangements, with text running horizontally, vertically, and in spirals around the edges of the vortex, they've got to be pushing some fundamental physical limits somewhere.

These actually often contain a fair amount of interesting information, if you spend some time deciphering them, and it's clear that these guys are pretty smart and know their numbers, and have done a lot of analysis, but really, really, need to stop using powerpoint...

"Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ"

[An Anonymous Hero]

Meanwhile, celebratory gunfire is heard from troff and XML-DocBook users the world over!

Re:This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

Early reports from preliminary interrogation of Saddam Hussein indicate that he spent his time attempting to backdoor the Linux kernel, installing rootkits on Debian servers, and plotting a strategic lawsuit against the BSDs with Darl McBride.

Re:You people are unbelivable!

[Anonymous Coward]

I ask again: who cares about the reasons when the outcome is a win to human rights, democracy and humanity in general.

You're just pissed off because you and the anti-liberation jerks were proven wrong.

We call it...

[JetScootr]

"Electropolitical Engineering". I can put together a ppt for management at work and pursuade them of most any point I want to. I always feel dishonest doing this, but it's the culture (Like the CAIB report describes). The presentations I am most ashamed of are those where I was forced to do this, because some PHB had sold upper PHBs on a completely idiotic scheme. The problem is, as has been pointed out, it's not PowerPoint it's PHBs. I have wondered if the two terms overlap in more than mnemonic ways....

Re: We call it...

[Black Parrot]

> The problem is, as has been pointed out, it's not PowerPoint it's PHBs. I have wondered if the two terms overlap in more than mnemonic ways....

Powerpointy Haired Bosses?

Managers make you dumb

[hey!]

I remember one time around 1995 when my new boss called me in to her office.

She: we're going to run the company Christmas party.

Me: OK.

She: And we're all giving Powerpoint presentations during the party.

Me: What!!??

She: You're going to give a presentation on why we're going to take away everyone's Macs and make them use Windows.

Her presentation was truly horrible; she printed out speaker's notes and handed them out in advance, then read the word for word. You could almost hear the snap-crackle-pop of brain cells commiting apoptosis throughout the room. I actually had a pretty good response. I didn't give my presentation out (so that resistance couldn't be prepared) and I worked hard to keep the audience off balance by taking the flow of topics in unexpected directions and driving my point home with humor (home-made and specifically targetted cartoons, ironic examples). Basically, I had to keep them laughing before they could take out their knives and carve me into fish bait.

The main thing I learned from this is that Powerpoint presentations are not dissertations. They really just props that are used in verbal communication.

You have to plan your talk, use the presentation to keep it on track and provide examples to back your talk up. If you have to resort wacky text animations to try to hold people's attention you're lost. I use simple color schemes, usually just black and white, and only ever use two build styles: build point by point and occasionaly appear all at once to vary the pace. In an effective presentation, you must make your audience focus on you, your ideas, your body language, where you want to take them. Trying to understand an effective presentation by looking at the powerpoint is like trying to infer the plot of a Shakespeare play by looking at the scenery.

If you want to create a complete, self contained package of ideas, a slide show is not what you want. You want to create a white paper.

Powerpoint is very useful as an aid; I try to be prepared to give the talk even if the projector is broken. The biggest problem with PowerPoint presentations I see is that people don't use them this way. They try to shoehorn more information into them than can effectively fit. The point at which people's brain cells begin to die is well before the point where you can put enough information into them to persuade or inform them. Used as the primary focus of a presentation, they do make people functionally stupid, by reducing their engagement in the topic, shoving a simplistic representation of reality down their throats.

Of course, for some managers it's an effective crutch. They really have a simplistic view of the world that pretty much is summed up by what you can fit in a Powerpoint presentation. They dress it up with animations and fancy backgrounds. There's also an element of cowardice. Peopel are afraid of public speaking, so they'd rather have their audience looking at the handout or the projection screen than at them. That's why Powerpoints are so boring. An effective public presentation is like a high-wire act. You don't expect the performer to fall, but the possibility keeps your attention riveted.

Re:Managers make you dumb

[ElGanzoLoco]

She: You're going to give a presentation on why we're going to take away everyone's Macs and make them use Windows.

Ah, the bitch!

Re:Managers make you dumb

[hey!]

You don't know the half of it. She was the biggest fricken' corporate schemer and backstabber I've ever had to work with.

The way she actually put it was "we're going to take away their Macs and make them use PCs". Nobody knew about this scheme in advance, I was going to annonce this for the first time at the Christmas party. Nice Xmas present for that Mac fanatic on your list, eh?

Of course, as a good corporate soldier, I was expected to present this as my idea and pretend I thought it was completely brilliant. She certainly wasn't going to stand up and take the heat for an unpopular decision.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that cowardice, or at least insecurity, is a big part of the mania for PowerPoint and its competitors.

Re:Managers make you dumb

[gnu-generation-one]

"She: You're going to give a presentation on why we're going to take away everyone's Macs and make them use Windows."

Happy Christmas!

Re:Managers make you dumb

[SemperUbi]

You could almost hear the snap-crackle-pop of brain cells commiting apoptosis throughout the room.

Just had to say, this is the funniest thing I've read all day!

Re:Managers make you dumb

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try to find a place to work where the corporate culture wouldn't allow her to make such demands of you.

Seriously, even if she's your boss, you shouldn't have to do things like that.

I could never work in a place where I would have to pretend to like ideas that I don't, or take the blame for things that aren't my fault. Luckily, I live and work in a country where I can't be fired without a reason. Whether this is related to the fact that it seems (fingers crossed) that corporate cultures here are relatively open, I don't know.

The last powerpoint presentation I saw included slides that the presenter made clear he didn't believe in himself.

Re: Managers make you dumb

[Black Parrot]

> Of course, as a good corporate soldier, I was expected to present this as my idea and pretend I thought it was completely brilliant. She certainly wasn't going to stand up and take the heat for an unpopular decision.

Surely you're smart enough to give a presentation that says, between the lines but clearly audible to the audience, "this isn't my idea" and "the reasons given for it are incredibly stupid".

Keynote is better

[schappim]

People with Mac OS X should try keynote: www.apple.com/keynote It also has opengl transitions in all their apple glory... That's what I'm using for my biggest presentation in my life in two days time... video plays so well, and text / photoshop files with alpha transparency work a sinch (even over the video)... ~Marcus

Nice Quote

[patrickoehlinger]

Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.

The final straw. Slashdotters are retarded.

[Craevenwulfe]

Seriously, for a site with a population of folk who think they're smart - an awful lot of bullshit gets spouted.

From all the people who think powerpoint is evil, get a grip. I want to give BRIEFing to people on a topic. Powerpoint does the job admirably since it's easier to use for text than paint-shop.

I can also then send on the Powerpoint slides to people so they have a bite size summary they can double check information on.

Bad workmen blame the tools.

Re:no, /. does

[bj8rn]

Why would you want to read it from Slashdot when you know about it already? If something is not reported here, it does not mean that it hasn't happened at all. It has still happened, except maybe for some lunatic for whom Slashdot is the only contact with the outside world.

Besides, if it's news then it doesn't belong here anyway ;7

Amused at adware ....

[JetScootr]

At the bottom of the article trashing powerpoint (at least when I'm reading it) is an ad for:
"Microsoft 2003 Powerpoint. New Powerpoint 2003 Helps you create and present presentations. www Office Microsoft com"

It depends

[ElGanzoLoco]

... It depends who uses powerpoint. I'm in a school where most of our work has to be presented to the rest of the class, in 10 / 20 minutes usually. Most people still don't use Powerpoint (a Good Thing (tm) I think, forces us to actually listen to our classmates instead of just looking at the pretty pictures).

There is one particular jerk (that I can't stand by the way) who insists on doing ALL his presentations on powerpoint, even the 3-minutes summaries. Shitloads of text, colors, graphs, quotes, transitions, etc... At the end of the show, you are still wondering what was the point. (+ his laptop seems to be misconfigured, and each time he has to fight for 10 minutes to get the damn projector to work. Hilarious)

But one of my teachers used only Powerpoint slides, all year long; he couldn't make himself clearer, and those presentations were excellent.

The USER is to blame, not the software. Still, because powerpoint presentations still have the "new-cool-wow-shiny" factor playing in their favor, some teachers are impressed by mediocre presentations, giving marks way above what they should be. ( Why, yes, that's why I'm getting an iBook + Keynote for next year ;-) )

Re:It depends

[Alomex]

But one of my teachers used only Powerpoint slides, all year long; he couldn't make himself clearer, and those presentations were excellent.

Over my lifetime I've seen academic presentations move from the blackboard to slides to powerpoint/keynote. The average presentation in the field (a) has no bell and whistles (default background, no special transition effects) and (b) is much more comprehensible than the average blackboard/slide presentation of a few years back.

Powerpoint forces the speaker to deconstruct the message to its basic elements, and present them to the audience as a scaffolding upon which the speaker builds the entire presentation. A very good speaker doesn't need this scaffolding, but lets face it, most of us are average speakers.

What really pisses me off....

[Qbertino]

...is not the fact of the meek not knowing anymore the difference between a brandname of a monopolist ("Powerpoint") and the type of a computerprogramm ("Presentation Programm"), since that in a twisted way in the context of this article can get people convinced that a Microsoft Product makes you dumb and that you should consider using plain text or classic HTML once in a while.
What really pisses me of is the fact that obviously the slashdot crowd uses this monopolists brandname as a synonym for Presentation Programm aswell, without even noticing it. Even though people should know that Powerpoint isn't and never was the best presentation programm.

Then again, we ought to remember that in the US comanies can actually lose their exclusive brandname rights when their product has become synonym for the rest of that product class. Wouldn't that be the case with Powerpoint by now? Any details on this law from US citizens?

Re:What really pisses me off....

[JetScootr]

This confusion between the type of product and the brand of the product is exactly what Microsoft wants. That's why their flagship products have names like "Windows" for a windowing GUI and "Access" for a database access tool and "Word" for a word processor and "Flight Simulator" for a flight simulator... . If they wanted their brands of the products to stand alone, they'd use non-descriptive words, or make up their own, like "Ford" for cars, "Apple" for computers, "Jimmy Dean" for sausage, etc.
The reason Powerpoint is taking the heat for dumbing down presentations is because Microsoft is a monopoly. If presentations were produced by 4-20 products that approximately shared the market space, the article would have used the term "Presentation or Slideshow software" instead of "Powerpoint".
One aspect of this that you didn't mention, though, is that because Powerpoint has so little in the way of competitive products, new ways and ideas for presenting data are not being turned into products to compete. This results in the cookie-cutter presentation design - all presentations look alike and have a common weakness because they're all built using the same tool.
It's like houses: They're nearly all built with vertical rectangular walls. This isn't the best way to enclose a living space - it uses more material, it's not as stable in high winds, it is less pleasing to the eye than other shapes. But most building codes are written around this idea, and superior designs like geodesics, curved walls, etc, are actually illegal in many many places in USA.
Sorry, didn't really mean to rant here. You are mostly correct, but consider that /. crowd is basically a slice of the "power user" part of the industry, and is not really that exclusive a crowd.

Re:What really pisses me off....

[Reziac]

But by that logic... what about Xerox Presents and Corel Presentations? (Which, BTW, is far superior to Powerpoint.)

And personally, I hate curved walls in houses, because the result, once populated with real furniture, tends to be very wasteful of floor space.

Re:What really pisses me off....

[Anonymous Coward]

mmmm, I love programmmmming cookies.

Re:What really pisses me off....

[JetScootr]

Concerning Xerox and Corel Presentations - "far superior to ppt" - Exactly my point. Better ideas aren't getting a fair trial. I haven't seen these products, and I fully accept your assessment that they are superior. Because MS is a monopoly, I and the PHBs who might benefit have had less opportunity to learn alternatives.

Concerning "I hate curved walls ..." Again, exactly my point. I hate nearly square rooms in my house. Why? Cuz if something doesn't fit in one room, it doesn't fit in any room.

It's all about choice, and the lack of it.

Re:What really pisses me off....

[Reziac]

I have no realworld use for a slideshow app, but... I was first introduced to Powerpoint and Corel (formerly Xerox==>Novell) Presentations back in their last Win3.1 versions. Presentations was quite intuitive (do the obvious, and the expected happens), and has a nifty outlining feature that makes organizing your slides a snap; also, with a little planning, you can dump a WordPerfect document directly to slides, images and all. With Powerpoint, I actually had to RTFM just to get started! Another thing I noticed right away too, was that PPT slides just didn't look as clean to the eye; I think it may have been that the default layouts were "mathematically incorrect", if you get what I mean.

But hey, if someone wants to use Powerpoint instead, who am I to say they can't? :)

My ideal home layout has all the rooms around an atrium (so every room is no more than one room and no hallway from the next), a floorplan one sees even less often than curves and domes! (So what's my house? Sortof modified ranch, my least-liked layout. Ah yes, choice would have been nice, but I needed the location worse than I needed an ideal house. *sigh*)

Actually, my choice would be that everyone should have to watch their own PPT presentation 10 times in a row before inflicting it on the hapless audience. If they fall asleep, they should be horsewhipped, and the PPT should be ditched. :)

I don't understand this article at all.

[Pathetic Coward]

It's just text. Where are the PowerPoint slides?

Re:You people are unbelivable!

[Anonymous Coward]

who cares about the reasons when the outcome is a win to human rights, democracy and humanity in general.

Talk to me when we see human rights and democracy in Iraq. Saddam captured is great news. That doesn't mean that human rights are respected in Iraq by the military occupation forces nor does it mean that democracy is a sure thing.

Engineers are dumb, not powerpoint

[Cthefuture]

Seriously, I've seen some really awful stuff done by engineers. If you've ever worked on your own car then you know what I mean.

I've worked for NASA, I know those guys. Some are very smart but couldn't explain what they know to you (which is quite obvious in this Powerpoint case).

And don't get me started on engineers that try to be programmers. Oh, there are a lot of them and for the most part they all suck beyond comprehension.

Re:Engineers are dumb, not powerpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

My father is an engineer and I can personally vouch for the stupidity, short-sightedness and bull-headedness of engineers.

Re:Engineers are dumb, not powerpoint

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, I also see they are bitter.

alright...

[after]

This applies to the post below as well.

I know that this goes against my original post, but I have to say that I agree with both of you.

I get what you mean. PowerPoint, aside from being a Microsoft product (its not "cool" to use those, remember) does add clutter and gives the user endless possibilities to add even more.

*sigh*

[Maskirovka]

Daryl McBride's parents make people dumb.
Heroine makes people dumb.
Getting hit in the head with a hammer might make people dumb.
The US public school system encourages people to be dumb.

People trying to convey information to others by reading sentence fragments off of a wall doesn't make people dumb. They merely subconsciously promote spacing out, smut surfing, homework for another class, quake3, or watching 0-day m0vi3Z, depending on your position in the back of the class and your laptop's battery life.

Re:*sigh*

[Anonymous Coward]

Heroine makes people dumb.

True. Very true. Especially the good looking ones.

P.S. The name of the drug is spelled Heroin. Heroin*e* is a female Hero.

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck

Chicken, or Egg?

[LazloToth]

Is it that PowerPoint makes us stupid, or that only the stupid use PowerPoint?

The answer, as usual, lies between - - it's that the tool provides an outlet for the stupidity that lies within us all.

Some of us, aware that we live in a Dilbertesque world, shake our heads sadly at the spectacle of a comrade droning through the narration of their cookie-cutter presentation, hunched over their laptop in the back corner of the room while the rest of us try valiantly to stay awake in the dimly lit conference room. After it's over, a still-conscious VP nudges the CEO to let him know that it's time to move to the next agenda item. The CEO nods, says "thank-you for that, uh, insightful look at blah-blah-blah," and the presenter wonders whether she's on step closer to the executive suite.

Re:Chicken, or Egg?

[cesarcardoso]

Is it that PowerPoint makes us stupid, or that only the stupid use PowerPoint?

The answer, as usual, lies between - - it's that the tool provides an outlet for the stupidity that lies within us all.

Things become worse when you have to do a presentation in 5, 10 minutes.

Re:Chicken, or Egg?

[xao gypsie]

The answer, as usual, lies between....
dude, you jsut like totally blew my mind... *cough* man this is good stuff...
xao

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[gnu-generation-one]

"Great day for Iraq. Let's hope they can rebuild and live in peace now."

Yeah, let's hope they can find a new native Iraqi leader who is popular enough and strong enough to meld the various warring factions into one stable, peaceful country.

I seem to remember someone who'd be an ideal candidate... they had his posters on the walls, and all sorts.

Yeah, I have his pamphlet on my desk...

[Photo_Nut]

So all that Tufte really says in his pamphlet is that most people really can't put together a presentation if their life depended on it, but then their boss gives them PowerPoint, and suddenly they think they have a holy grail.

Regardless of how much information you construct in your charts, displaying it on a XGA (1024x768) projector will ruin it. Don't blame the medium for the faults that really should be blamed on the information gatherer / analyzer / organizer.

If you print out those presentations at 300DPI, then you can fit a lot of information on them. Somehow, people always forget that bulleted slides used to come with handouts chock full of the data the slides referred to.

As for the Columbia tradgedy, blaming the death of our nation's explorers on software to produces presentations instead of the incompetance of the people using it to perform their job is irresponsible. If those engineers couldn't communicate, NASA should have spent the money required to train them better.

Tufte has his own reasons for publishing his material. He believes that there is an optimal way to organize data. You can follow his methods without burning PowerPoint... You just have to organize what you are presenting, and determine how to best present it before you even launch PowerPoint.

It never ceases to amaze me how much time it saves to take a few sheets of paper and a pencil and work out what the important message you are trying to deliver is before you write your presentation to deliver it. Just like with writing software, planning is the most time-saving step.

It helps to know where you are going before you get on the highway.

My Presentation

[t_allardyce]

• The problem is that people either use terrible templates
  
• Or they try and design it themselves thinking they are good designers
  
• Then there are bullet points that have no purpose
  
• and really annoying effects
  

• People dont use enough graphics to explain things
  
• just clip-art of people shaking hands
  
• A good model broken up into layers/parts can explain allot more than text
  

• dont even get me started on 3D text!!!
  
• OpenOffice Impress can do much better frame based/morphing animation - ie you can show a graph changing shape in response to a decision
  
• The End
  

Other insights

[UnknowingFool]

When I first saw the headline I immediately thought of this:

Evil will always win over Good because Good uses Powerpoint and Good is dumb.

Maybe we need more descriptive titles especially with anything related to MS, SCO, and RIAA.

You got it! MOD UP!

[jpatokal]

As the submitter of the article in question, all I can say is... MOD PARENT UP! You're the only one who has gotten the point so far (better than the NYT did, at that).

Cheers,
-j.

But why is the essay only for sale!?

[jpatokal]

Just one tangential comment from the submitter of the article:

I almost didn't submit the story, because Tufte's essay is only available in hardcopy for 7 bucks a pop. WTF? The only reason I excuse him is that he's a freelancer now, so his thoughts aren't sponsored by tax money, but in this day and age it's pretty odd not to freely publish your content if you want to have an impact... especially when said content is all of 28 pages long, and you've already written 7 books on the subject!

And now we've got hordes of slashdotters posting uninformed comments, because it's not really even possible to RTFA beyond what the NYT reveals of it. Sigh.

Cheers,
-j.

The right tool for the right job, in this case...

[Presence1]

... stupid presentations.

from the article
"Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it."

"If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation, [...] they wouldn't want it."

While the point has been made that 'it isn't the tool it is the user, the issue here is not that it is POSSIBLE to create a rich, clear, and concise presentation with PowerPoint, but that it encourages exactly the opposite behavior, i.e., gutted data sets, obfuscation, and inaproppriate brevity.

Is this Microsoft's fault? While, IMHO, they have perpetrated many outrages, this is not one of them. They simply sold what the customers wanted.

The much scarier prospect is that schools are starting to teach PowerPoint as a basic skill/tool.

Re:You people are unbelivable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Proven wrong?? What exactly does the capture of Hussein prove wrong? The fact that the claims of WMDs in Iraq, you may remember the accusations of a nuclear programme, of poison gas stockpiles and mobild germ labs, were blatant lies by Bush and his adminitration? Or maybe the fact that they played out the fear of the public after 9/11 to get support for a war that the neocons had been thirsting and lobbying for for almost a decade?

Looks to me like you're all enthusiastic because theres a good news from Iraq for a change. Enjoy it while it lasts.

Don't Replace Bad Solution With No Solution

[Alphanos]

The problem being discussed is that powerpoint cannot adequately convey information on complex issues. Trying to solve this problem by not meeting to discuss the issues at all is not a solution to the problem.

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb ?

[Anonymous Coward]

PowerPoint^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H iDiOtS Makes You Dumb!

Right tool...

[MaGGuN]

What ever happened to the notion about the right tool for the job ? Isn't this more a testamony to the people who choose to use powerpoint/slideshows in a way which would obviously not provide an acceptable level of clearity. Even further, I am very sure I can produce bad results using any tool, but can I really blame the tool ?

If they were forced to use powerpoint in a situation where this would not give a clear picture, the problem is with management, little with powerpoint. I am sure powerpoint has it's uses, presenting complex sets of information obfuscating the relationships certainly does not sound like one of them.

Presenting this essay as a proof that powerpoint makes you dumber, microsoft SuXX0r etc. is just totally taken out of context if you ask me, read; orignal post.

Singer, not the song

[djupedal]

While I tend to view PP presentations with suspicion, I find they have their place. I've made and editied hundreds of these as part of my work.

The end result, like most things, lies in being able to craft a message.

Whether you use cave drawings or sky-writing, if your presentation skills suck, your message will suck.

You describing the problem, not the solution

[Per Abrahamsen]

Your three rules are the problem, they result in presentations that are visually stimulating, but does not carry any information that sticks.

Such presentations are very simular to TV news. If you ask people after watching a TV news broadcast, they in general answer that they feel informed. But if you ask them about what was in the newscast, they remember very little.

PowerPoint presentations have the same effect, they give the subjective impression of being informative, but the audience learn very little from them.

Your advice are fine if you want to be popular. If you'd rather want to be informative, here are some better advice:

1. Blackboards rule, if have the skills. But they require a lot of the teacher in organization talent, multitasking, and handwriting. For most people, transparents are better. Handwritten is best, if you can write so everybody can read it.
2. The basis should be the oral presentation, the slides should support it by providing structure. This mean they should be mostly text, but not much. A good slide has 5 plus/minus 2 bullets (yes, it is cliche, but it works), each containing 1-3 words highliting a point in your presentation. Never complete sentenses, they are an aid to your oral presentation, not a replacement for it. Using handwritting helps avoid overloading the slides.
3. A bit of carfully chosen color is fine. Avoid animations at all cost. Some topics will need diagrams, but remember, you can not actually present raw data in this form, only the conclusions and highlights. Keep the diagrams few, and if you have any drwaing skills, prefer handdrawn diagrams.
4. You will obviously need to know what information you want to get across, and you should attempt the presentation at least once. But do not learn it by rote, unless you are an actor or other professional. For most people, a bit of improvision on the spot makes the presentation feel more alive to the audience.

Of course, if your job depends on a positive evaluation from the audience, or you are doing this as part of an entertainment gig, follow the other guys advice. The audience will feel entertained, and give you high marks (or suggest friend to hire you). My advice only pertain to the, perhaps rare, case when you have some information it is important to you to deliver to your audience.

Re:You describing the problem, not the solution

[Glamdrlng]

You and many other posters are failing to take into account both the different uses for a presentation and the different learning styles of audience members. By your description of how presentations should be done, you're most likely an auditory learner. There's nothing wrong with that, go with whatever works. But the person sitting next to you may very well be a visual learner, and the speaker presenting to you should be using techniques that will reach both of you. Myself, I teach Routing/Switching classes, and I've run into extremes on both ends: I've met visual learners who will zone out while I'm describing a simple network scenario because they have to draw it for themselves before anything I say will make sense, and I've dealt with auditory learners who can't make a connection until they've talked their way through a problem.

Note also that for the preso's I do, a good majority of your rules would be detrimental to anyone trying to understand what I'm putting out. While blackboards/dry erase boards are ok for drawing up simple scenarios, in some cases you simply have to have pre-drawn diagrams if you're going to accomplish anything. Most college students have an attention/retention span of 30 minutes, and I simply can't afford to give up ten minutes of that to drawing out a multi-area OSPF redistributed into BGP scenario. I've found it's far more efficient to have a visio diagram on hand or embedded into a preso, and spend one or two minutes talking through the setup, using the diagram as a reference (thus also keeping the auditory learners involved). Avoiding animations is a mistake, unless of course the animations are thrown in there for fluff. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a well-done animation is worth a million. For an auditory learner, this may not be the case. A 2-minute verbal explanation of a routing loop is fine for those people. For a visual learner however, an animation can save hours of headaches.

In short, your advice works fine if someone is doing a presentation for you and only you. Otherwise, a presenter will need to employ the methods and tools necessary to cover the subject at hand and reach as wide an audience as possible.

Re:Did anyone get it? (mod parent up!)

[SemperUbi]

"Briefly stated, by only allowing a mimimal amount of data with only one obvious conclusion, presentations are skipping the analytical process. [..] PowerPoint makes us dumb because it disallows independent evaluation, thought, logical processes and retention of information or assessment related data."

Yes, exactly.

By limiting the amount of information which can be displayed on a given slide, PowerPoint also requires the presenter to choose which data are most important, and which data to simplify or just leave out. This introduces bias, even when the presenter does all he can to be honest and complete. We just can't SEE the bias.

It's also less satisfying for the audience. The illustrations in Tufte's books are a delight to look at and THINK about, because there's so much information in each one, and it's presented in a way that's easy and even fun to think about. They are elegant.

I've never seen that kind of elegance in a PowerPoint chart. There's less to think about, less for me to sink my teeth into. A lot of the thinking I might have wanted to do has already been done, by the presenter, at the step where he had to leave some things out in order to create the chart. It's about as satisfying as chewing someone else's chewing gum.

The more data-poor charts we all see, the more normal it feels, and the less aware we are of what might be left out.

wrong

[nsebban]

Powerpoint will not make you dumb. It's like saying "hammer will break your finger".

People have to be dumb in the first place, to forget a life-threat, when it's showed using a media, whatever this media is : Newspapers, Radio, TV, or PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is a tool. Period.

English speakers

[Imperator]

English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can. The words are shorter, simpler, and easier to understand. They won't make you sound as sophisticated, but they will make you a better speaker.

Re:English speakers

[Daggie]

I agree. The person who gives the presentation most likely knows what he is saying, but for the audience it is likely the first confrontation with the subject (or a decision, point of view, ... about it).

They have absolutely no need for difficult words. Using normal vocabulary will make it easier for the audience to understand you.

Also the vocabulary has to be adjusted to the audience. Talking to 17 year olds is not the same as talking to scientists :)

Re:English speakers

[elmegil]

'cos you know, I'm going to go cross reference all the words in my presentation to make sure that I know the etymology of every one. Maybe if I was an english major I'd inherently know which ones were Anglo-Saxon, but right this moment the only one I can think of is not contextually appropriate unless you've made me angry, which you haven't.

Re:English speakers

[dilger]

Preference for Anglo-Saxon vs. French/Latin reflects 19th century fascination with Anglo-Saxon because it was "more natural" than French/Latin. (Interestingly, some people believed A/S was harder and therefore better.) This "rule" is probably the tiredest of the tired old saws folks are spouting out here. You'd do much better to have a friend who's willing to spill a little red ink peer-review your presentation than waste time looking up etymologies.

cbd.

Re:English speakers

[Anonymous Coward]

So you need to use short words?

What up with dat?

Re:English speakers

[Imperator]

Anglo-Saxon for the sake of Anglo-Saxon is stupid. Anglo-Saxon for the sake of using the "simpler" part of the English language is worthwhile. Looking up etymologies is a waste of time if you're a fluent English speaker; you have an intuitive sense of which words are simpler, regardless of their origins.

Re:English speakers

[Haeleth]

English speakers should stick to short Anglo-Saxon words. You can't always avoid Latin and French words, but try to use the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary where you can.

That's very good advice.

Er... sorry, I shouldn't have used "advice" (via French from Latin "ad visere")... let's rephrase that to "your words are wise." Whoops, I said "rephrase" (re + phrase, via Latin from Greek "phrasis"), that should be "let's use a different word". Oh, but "different" is from Latin "differre". An alternative... nope, Latin again... aha, I think "another" is okay. "Let's use another word".

Damn, this is difficul-- um, hard, isn't it? Blast, I forgot, "damn" is from Latin too!

By the way, I would like to draw attentio-- sorry, to point out that your use of the word "vocabulary" is not a good choice. The Anglo-Saxon term is "word-hoard", which I think you'll agree[1] is much clearer[2].

[1] Agree: from Old French "agreer"
[2] Clear: from Latin "clarus" via Old French "cler".

Re:English speakers

[Anonymous Coward]

So why did you go on about Anglo Saxon versus Latin words if you just meant "use simple words by preference"? Unless you were being ironic, which I don't think you were... maybe I just missed it.

Management pretense makes you dumb.

[Futurepower(R)]

MOD PARENT UP.

It isn't Powerpoint that makes you dumb. It is management pretending that they actually know how to run a company that makes you dumb.

Bad Presenters Use Powerpoint

[calyphus]

The real problem with PPT is that it's a crutch for people who don't know how to present information. A presenation should have two components, at least: the speech, or text, and the visual data. The visual data should illuminate ideas and expand on data.

Consider a news article that has a few accompanying images or a chart. The visuals are a very small part, perhaps 5%. The text contains the information.

Steve Jobs is an excellent of a presenter who knows that the slide show is just the show behind him. He will put up a slide with a single word on it, and then speak about that for five minutes. The slideshow isn't the important thing, it's a very minor component. Or, consider Jack Ryan's presentation in Hunt for Red October.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" should be understood as 'A picture needs a thousand words.'

Unfortunately, too many presenters have gotten it backwards. They try to put all their ideas on screen, relying on the visuals to speak for them. And then they learn that they have to reduce the information on-screen (word-wise at least), but they don't learn to shift the extracted information to their mouth (or accompanying texts).

Read this slide? How about the whole report?

[ibeleo]

Considering the magnitude of the report ("Hey Bob, here is a report if the Shuttle will explode") I think people would have read the whole report. On page 5,right before the slides Dr.Tufte critiqued, was titled

Damage Results From "Crater " Equations Show Significant Tile Damage

which I imagine should have had the following affect on the two types of audience memebers - 'senior'engineer and 'senior'managers.

Senior Engineer - Screw the presentation give me the data the Shuttle is in trouble

Senior Managers - Big Hole can't be good

I won't disagree with Dr Tufte's conclusion on those particluar slide he outlined - yes they were packed full of words and should have been spread out. But I doubt it was PowerPoint. Especially not from the final summary bulletpoint on the last page of the report {page 13 I'll note} gave the engineer's conclusion

Conclusion
Contingent on multiple tile loss thermal analysis showing no violation of M/OD criteria,safe return indicated even with significant tile damage

Re:You people are unbelivable!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if you hadn't put Saddam there IN THE FIRST PLACE, *AND* _SOLD_ him all those weapons, there would have been "liberation" a whole lot sooner, dontcha think?

"It looks like you're writing a dire warning!"

[scrytch]

'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation

How well would the words Life Threatening Situation in 64 pt Times New Roman convey the situation?

Readability Analysis Tools for Slides

[G4from128k]

It seems most of us can agree that PowerPoint makes it too easy to make bad, form-over-function slide presentations. But why not produce tools that help the author check the readability/confusability of the slides. This scoring system could work on the slide-pack level or on the slide level. I can also see ways in which the scoring system could provide advice on correcting the problem.

I see the scoring system as checking the following 6 dimensions of readability. It should probably score each dimension separately because a bad score on each of the different dimensions yields a different recommendation for correction.

1. Legibility analysis: We've all sees slides that use illegible 10 point (or smaller) lettering. Sometimes small type is justified (e.g., for a necessarily complex data table that will be handed out to the audience) but usually it is bad.

2. Contrast Analysis: Yellow text on a white background is bad! Using purple and maroon to color-code two data lines is bad. A simple analysis of the colors in a slide would give one a contrast score and could even provide recommendations on how to move colors away from each other.

3. Object Density: Some slides are too dense. If we analyze the number of "features" on the slide or the ratio of information to whitespace, then we can give a density score. An appropriate score might vary -- I've noticed that German engineers (and myself) like information-dense slides.

4. Text-to-Graphics ratio: Slides with 100% words are bad and ones with 100% graphics (no words) are bad IMO. Scoring the ratio of words to graphic features might help people see if they are near the sweet-spot (whatever that is). The only problem with this dimension is that it is hard to assess the text-to-graphics ratio in information content terms -- one can add useless grpahics to a wordy slide and think that one has improved the text-to-graphics ratio.

5. Word Reuse: Repetition is good. If every slide uses different words, with no word overlap between slides, then audience comprehension will drop. This dimension can also catch terminology consistency problems -- such as when the presentation agenda slide uses different words than the slide titles for the respective sections.

6. Jargon Use: By scoring the slides against word-frequency data, we can detect the use of too many rare words in the presentation. There might be different word-frequency datasets for basic English, college English, mechanical engineering, medical research, etc. that lets the presentor see if their slides are right for the audience.

I'm sure that others might suggest other dimensions.

Re:Readability Analysis Tools for Slides

[Zork the Almighty]

I thought this was a joke. The point of the whole article is that exactly these sorts of rules dumb down presentations, making it difficult to present complex ideas. I don't know how you expect to address that problem with suggestions like "repetition is good". I like your contrast analysis idea though.

Re:Readability Analysis Tools for Slides

[G4from128k]

The point of the whole article is that exactly these sorts of rules dumb down presentations, making it difficult to present complex ideas.

Good point, I guess I did not explain what I meant by readability analysis. In the field of text document analysis, the entire point of readability analysis is not necessarily to get the highest (or lowest) possible score. For text documents, the readability score is often equated to the required school grade reading level of the audience. Thus, too low a grade level score means the text is dumbed down, whereas too high a number means the text is excessively complicated. Therefore the goal is to match the readability to the audience, not maximize a readability score.

The original articles illustrate this problem nicely. On the one hand and as you pointed out, Tufte complains that Powerpoint generally leads to dumbed-down slides. He finds that Powerpoint users create slides with low information content. On the other hand, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board cited excessive complexity in the Powerpoint slides associated with the accident. Clearly, most Powerpoint users author slides at too low a readability grade level and the Columbia engineers authored slides at too high a readability grade level.

Analysis tools could help slide creators to author at the right level of complexity and avoid common mistakes that obscure the content.

Humanware is to blame

[zanderredux]

PowerPoint is only a freaking tool. It gives the option to bulletize the stuff you'd like to explain, but you do not have to follow those guidelines.

The problem with PowerPoint is that Microsoft tried to "make it easier on the users", creating a lot of tools that depend on a unique, certain way to work. In other words, if you do not bulletize every f***ing phrase, you'll lose some features like outline editing, which we became so dependent upon.

On the other hand, it is almost impossible, given the most common choices available (PowerPoint and OO.org), to convey graphical information by Tufte's standards.

I'm a big fan of Tufte's work and I've tried to create grahpics using some ideas from his books, but I just found it impossible to do with Excel.

Guess we'll have to compromise, huh???

it's a disease

[Tom]

Many comments are trying to ascertain whether it's the dumb users who can't use presentation tools right, or the dumb tools which make users stupid.

Obviously, it's both. Like a disease that spreads to the weakest first. But this particular disease has gone out of control.

The best presentations I've seen were usually those were the speaker was first and foremost a speaker. The slides were just so much background. Their sole purpose was to help you back to the words of the speaker if you got lost, or to hang on to for context.

Nowadays, I do routinely judge talks by their slides. If they have lots of colour, tons of animations, cute little icons or graphics that serve no information purpose whatsoever - then almost certainly the presentations main purpose is not to draw attention to the talk, but to keep attention away from it.

Or, in more mathematical terms: The sum of animations, colours, eyecandy and actual information content is a global constant.

The number of presentations I have seen where animation conveyed information is safely in the single-digit order of magnitude.

Unfortunatly - and that's where the disease spreads - eyecandy fools too many who should know better. In university and in virtually all companies, you get rewarded for impression, not content. So a new generation picks up what the old one should've killed long ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if the death of powerpoint coincided with the next boost in computer science.

they're called "talks" and "speakers" for a reason

[penguin7of9]

Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading.

The purpose of the bullet items is to serve as a rough roadmap for the listener and to help the speaker not lose his thread; it is not to let the listener read what the speaker is saying anyway. And, of course, presentations don't just consist of bullet items, they also contain graphs, diagrams, and photos.

Yes, strange as that may seem, you are supposed to listen during a presentation. In fact, if you listen carefully and the talk is at all reasonable, you should be able to ignore the bullet items altogether. But if you doze off for a moment, then the bullet items will help you orient yourself again.

Frankly, I think this beats the alternative of the traditional presentation, which would have someone stand at a podium with no visual aids and reading from a prepared manuscript.

Stop using transparencies?

[bkrrrrr]

I'll stop using transparencies when I can finally be 100% sure that a) disks won't fail b) projector hardware will be compatible and c) interpreter software will be compatible. Last thing I want to do before a critical presentation is spend 15 minutes trying to figure why my laptop won't talk to their projector or why their PDF viewer isn't displaying the fonts properly.

bkr

Power Point is Over Used like advertising.

[jellomizer]

I myself avoid using Power Point or Keynote in my case as much as possible. Because I feel it prevents interaction within the meeting they just listen to my presentation and thats it. But if I use a white/black board then the group is far more inclined to be more active and ask questions allowing them to get a better handle on the data. But unfortunately power point as more of an Adverting affect on your presentation with giving little data but looking really cool and nice. I tend to use Presentation software only when there is data hard to show on the black board (Like Graphs etc.). (Or a quick product demo before it is programmed) But I like to do my power point presentation with a graph then a black page where I can write on the white board then the next graph again. Just because it looks good it doesn't mean that it useful

Let me be the first to say,

[beyonddeath]

DUH!

Not exactly

[twitter]

yet Open Office Impress copies all these flaws faithfully.

The problems come from Microsoft limitations. No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing. It's Microsoft's rule set for generating the slides that's at fault, not the means of communication itself. There's nothing wrong with software that gives you a slide and notes layout to design a presentation. There is something wrong with Microsoft's rule set.

Impress does copy some of that rule set, but not all and offers other ways to do things and is free to grow. One important difference is the ease or reuse. Things that go into Microsoft's Power Point don't come back out very well. Try cutting and pasting an image out of Power Point to anything but power point and you will find the image qaulity significantly reduced. This degradation of information eliminates information reuse and waste's the user's time. Exporting to html and other recognized information sharing formats is also clunkier with Microsoft. Sun's underlying file system is much better organized and well thought out. Thier cut and paste tools work much better and the overall rule set for constructing slides is a little easier. The user community can recognize the flaws and correct them much quicker than Microsoft's beleagured programmers who strugle with all of Power Point's 10 year old legacy code and poor underlying structure.

Re:Not exactly

[VividU]

It's Microsoft's rule set for generating the slides that's at fault, not the means of communication itself.

Easily takes the cake as one the most nonsensical posts I've read in Slashdot. The "ruleset" makes you dumb? HUH?

But then I saw your sig and it all made sense.

Re:Not exactly

[drinkypoo]

You can say that Powerpoint is a suboptimal piece of equipment for doing this but since it allows you to import images your argument is complete nonsense. There is nothing stopping you from composing your slides in the software package of your choice, exporting to some sort of bitmap format (perhaps though postscript as an interim step, then converting to a bitmap with ghostscript) except laziness. It would still be less work than drawing the slides by hand. However people choose to use the internally-provided tools for slide generation.

Both you and Tufte are Anti-Microsoft FUD spreaders. There are plenty of reasons to be Anti-MS, but this ain't one of them.

For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.''

I mean, look at the text. "PowerPoint also encourages users", "PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements", "an attitude of commercialism". All of these sentences make it clear to me that the problem lies with the users, not the software. The software's design might be flawed but it is in no way responsible for the problem, and for reasons which reach more broadly than the EULA. A pusher encourages people to take drugs, but it's someone's own choice to take them or not. Powerpoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements, but is that Microsoft's fault? It's not like you can't generate charts outside powerpoint. And finally, an attitude of commercialism? I have my own attitude, which I enforce over the will of the software, not the other way around. If it doesn't ordinarily do things the way I want to do things, I will find a way around it.

Perhaps the only valid complaint about powerpoint is the low resolution. I have indeed never seen a high resolution powerpoint slide, so I am willing to believe it doesn't support high resolutions. The solution? DON'T USE IT. If your company forces you to use powerpoint, that is simply not Microsoft's fault; it's the fault of your employer. Otherwise, make up some slides which match the resolution of your output device (which incidentally, even in this day and age, is typically only 800x600 and is almost never better than 1024x768) and run a slideshow. Change slides with the mouse wheel.

The real problem is the people unwilling to think outside the [Powerpoint] box. Yes, I hate the base expression too, but it worked well here, so I decided to use it. Similarly, if Powerpoint doesn't work well, I will choose not to use it. Powerpoint is not a substitute for actually LEARNING how to assemble a presentation, something upon which many books have been written, and about which many classes have been taught. People believe that it is, and they let its little wizards walk them through making a presentation and they think it's going to turn out to be a work of art. Powerpoint's wizards exist to let complete idiots turn out a reasonably workable presentation. That's all they do. Believing they do something else is downright superstitious.

Re:Not exactly

[FCAdcock]

Now I'm just as much of an anti-Microsoft zelot as the next guy, but to quote one of my local LUG members here: "YOU'RE WRONG!" It's not microsoft, it's the slides themselves. I look at slides all the time that are talking about things that I actually know and wonder "what the heck is this talking about?" People just don't learn by using slides. It's a dumb idea. always has been. Why do you think the pentagon banned powerpoint. It's a waste of time.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want some good laughs, go check out his posting history. He comes up with the most nonsensical, idiotic "proofs" on why Microsoft is evil.

He's a 14 year old kid who just discovered linux and thinks he's l33t. Or at least he acts just like one.

Re:Not exactly

[canajin56]

Exactly. If PowerPoint doesn't let you do something you want, it isn't making you dumb. But if you just say "Oh well, I'll just not do that" then you ARE dumb.

Anyways, I've used powerpoint to make presentations. It's nice to be able to SHOW a complex diagram, rather than drawing it on the blackboard. But of COURSE you can't fit all of the text you need in it. But the whole idea behind a presentation is to TALK! Use words to describe the topic. And if you need a graph that is to detail to show up clearly on the projector, then print it out and hand it out. Just like you would do if your old transparency slide was too detailed to read on the overhead projector. If another application can make some diagram, PowerPoint can probably import it. The import menu doesn't have "Visio" but you can just drag a Visio diagram over and it will display (Thanks to OLE embedding) and if you can't get it to work, you can Alt-Tab, (or whever-Tab on a Mac) to some other program, and display it there. That's what we did. Rather than "describing" how our application handels certain situations with bullet points, we switched over to the running application and demonstrated!

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

I would actually agree with the "rule set" assment. When I first started using Impress I realized that presentations were both more difficult to create and ended up communicating more information. I think this is due to that fact that Impress is much more like a diagramming tool that happens to have a slide show engine. Contrast this to PowerPoint. Have you ever attempted to create anything within PowerPoint. The drawing tools have eliminated just enough options so that just about anyone can create a reasonable looking presentation. But looks are not inforamtion.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with your assessment is that companies are starting to use PowerPoint as THE communication tool. Sure you can say that you can create all your content outside of power point and then just import everything into the final draft. But that makes versioning overly laborious. And just like any other software limitation, it affects how and what you do. If the boss is yelling that he wants the updates to his presentation yesturday, you will opt to cut time consuming corner and make trade-offs. If the tool was better at what it did, you wouldn't have to make as many trade off decisions.

As an example, these same arguments often occur arround the topic of programming languages. Sure you can write a Web application in assembly or an operating system in PHP, or device drivers in Visual Basic but why? Each tool has limitations that encourage a certian type of use. It's the whole trade-off thing again.

As an aside, I previously worked with a few managers that do everything in Excel, and I mean everything! One even went as far as attempting to require all communications to him to be in Excel. Sure you can do it. Excel allows you to cut-n-paste. It soon became easier not to communicate with this manager unless absolutely necessary and to limit what you had to write to the absolute minimum. Needless to say, he became marginalized within the orginization. Now I have to deal with a manager who demands everything in PowerPoint, and I mean EVERYTHING. It has become so bad that we had to hire two full time people just to manage all the cut-n-paste assembly of information because it was cheaper than having high paid engineers manage all that needless document assembly.

Re:Not exactly

[rnd()]

Uh, your comment about pasting images and the alleged reduced quality after an image has been in PowerPoint is utterly untrue. As of PowerPoint 2000, all images are stored in their original state, and any crops or resizing operations do not modify the original or degrade it in any way.

On a side note, if you read Tufte's book then you wouldn't let a software tool get in the way of your ability to communicate information.

On a second side note, your comment was really a troll.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, Adobe was found to be guilty of making designers dumb, cause many designers using Photoshop found to be creating ugly graphics. In addition to the last month's conviction of creating Dreamweaver which causes people to create pure ugly web sites, this news didn't suprise many. One slashdotter, with the nick name twitter, said the problem with photoshop is that Adobe's rule set is wrong. Another slashdotter admitted that it is a people problem, but quickly pointed out "Adobe should have designed its software so that the users can not create ugly graphics files".

I think, not only the software from Microsoft, but also the news about its software make people dumber. Look at the page and read the insightful and interesting posts. You don't have to touch its software to be dumb.

Re:Not exactly

[Directrix1]

Did they purposefully put the word 'stupider' in that New York Times article? Or has the author been reading too much powerpoint.

Re:Not exactly

[drinkypoo]

But don't you see, this in no way alters the validity of my argument. If "companies are starting to use PowerPoint as THE communication tool" that still is not Microsoft's fault. It STILL points to a failing of people on the usage end, in this case, those who specify the software. Not only are they trying to use a tool which is not suited to the job, but they are trying to use it for something for which it was not even designed in the first place. Sometimes that's a good idea, a tool can have more than one purpose, but I am sure you will agree that this is not one of those times.

The problem continues to be humans without sufficient technical knowledge making technical decisions. You must primarily question the decision-making process that put them, in turn, into a position to make these decisions.

Re:Not exactly

[JamesOfTheDesert]

But the whole idea behind a presentation is to TALK! Use words to describe the topic. And if you need a graph that is to detail to show up clearly on the projector, then print it out and hand it out.

Thank you. That is dead right.

That a tool makes it easy to do something foolish does equate to that tool making you a fool.

There is a cultural perversion that leads people to think that bullet points and pie charts can substitute for well-formed arguments. One could argue that time spent trying to make a pretty slide show reduces time spent organizing cogent thought, or that the ease with which a slide tool allows one to dress up slim concepts and shallow ideas deludes the less-astute.

But the trouble is with the person, not the tool.

Re:Not exactly

[spreer]

>No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb.

Re:Not exactly

[eean]

I think your missing the point. It's "slideware" (did the NY Times coin that just now? I've always just used the word PowerPoint even in reference to Impress, its like Kleenex) in general that is of fault. Theres only so much you can put on the screen. Theres only so much you would want to put on the screen. That can't be changed with a better designed slideware.

Re:Not exactly

[lucifuge31337]

I think your missing the point. It's "slideware" (did the NY Times coin that just now?

Hardly....but it has been used "incorrectly" by NYT. Slideware usually refers to vaporware when it's in it whiz-bang marketing stage (existing as a presentation of slides targeted at potential investors). I first heard it in the early 90s.

Re:Not exactly

[Sir0x0]

The flaw is human, but PP does not attempt to make it any easier to make high resolution slides. The default layout for slides does promote the use of bullet points, which are most often only useful for outlines of presentations. The main flaw of PP is that it does not include any easy way to make flow charts or cause effect chart. You have to write and position a text box and arrows/lines to do this. This process is very tedious in Powerpoint. If there was an "intelligent" algorithm for constructing an argument, beyond the two level title/text offered by Powerpoint, it would become orders of magnitude more friendly to presenting complex ideas in presentation.

Re:Not exactly

[eean]

Well, doing some "research" on my own using this new-fangled "Google", the first hit had the correct definition:

n. A much-hyped software product that currently exists only as a series of slides in a sales or marketing presentation.

What I find amazing is that the author Edward Tufle (followed blindly by NYT's Clive Thompson) used the word knowing full well that it was new, so they put it in quotes. But obviously they hadn't bothered to actually look it, or decided that if Oxford didn't have the word (which it doesn't) they could ascribe whatever meaning they wanted to. Perhaps the author read the word in another article didn't understand what the author meant, or they did at the time but decided it was a generic for PowerPoint later.

Given that now at least two published sources say that slideware is just another way of saying presentation software (and one of them is the NYT), you could almost consider it another acceptable defintion. And the English language chugs on.

Re:Not exactly

[JohnQPublic]

No one ever said that hand drawn transparencies made you dumb. In fact, such stuff once was the mark of profesionalism in presentations and this is why we have software to do the same thing.

Yes they did - that's exactly Tufte's point. It's not the software, it's the style. Yes, MS-PowerPoint wizards et al. make it easier to create bad presentations, but this style of communication is as old as the hills. Tufte himself says that the PowerPoint style is derived from IBM "foils" and military briefings.

Re:Not exactly

[JohnQPublic]

But the whole idea behind a presentation is to TALK! Use words to describe the topic. And if you need a graph that is to detail to show up clearly on the projector, then print it out and hand it out.

Thank you. That is dead right.

Nope, that's dead wrong. Tufte is an academic researcher and author. As such he comes from a school of thought that values formal papers and verbatim recitations of them, with active Q&A. In other words, pre-planned well-written presentations - the antithesis of PowerPoint. If you believe in that perspective, then bullet-point agenda-style visuals with off-the-cuff or even pre-planned spoken commentary are "bad".

Re:Not exactly

[robertjw]

Interesting. Seems like my high school teachers used overhead projectors to teach us with 'slides'. Thought I learned something...

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

As always, teh twit overdoes himself with a bogus argument about how "M$" is "teh evil".

A true open sores icon.

Re:Not exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

You swine. You vulgar little maggot. Don't you know that you are pathetic? You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel. You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you.

You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you. You are a bloody nardless newbie twit protohominid chromosomally aberrant caricature of a coprophagic cloacal parasitic pond scum and I wish you would go away.

You're a putrescence mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.

You are a bleating fool, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world. An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.

I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you. You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell?

If you aren't an idiot, you made a world-class effort at simulating one. Try to edit your writing of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.

You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood. May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs.

You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you. Even sheep won't have sex with you. You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot.

And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?

You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease, you puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper.

On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool. You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go.

I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid so stupid that it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid. Your writing has to be a troll. Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment

Re:Not exactly

[JamesOfTheDesert]

In other words, pre-planned well-written presentations - the antithesis of PowerPoint.

One does not preclude the other. Using PowerPoint does not stop you from also using Word (or whatever) and writing a proper speech.

If you believe in that perspective, then bullet-point agenda-style visuals with off-the-cuff or even pre-planned spoken commentary are "bad".

But I don't believe in that; I believe that written articles and spoken presentations are different, and work in different ways, and offer different things. And different people will respond, well, differently. Some will get more from the slides than from the talk, and vice versa. Talk and slides need to play off each other.

What's the point of simply reading off a piece of paper that you could just as well give to people to read at their leisure? It's similar to the mentality that treats the Web as being "just like" magazines or TV, ignoring the qualities unique to a particular medium.

PostScript and maybe a PDF viewer is all ya need..

[bkrrrrr]

Who needs "Presentation Software"? If you know how to program in PostScript you can do all of this in a much more simple and portable way... bkr

powerpoint is just a tool

[Anonymous Coward]

that seems so obvious, why do we need 200 comments on slashdot ? as to all these rules "no graphs vs graphs" "memorize your text vs extemporaenous" "read vs dont read the points" people do talks for lots of diff reasons, for lots of different audiences, with widely varying levels of sophistication and experience in hanlding oral presentations
So the best rule: know your audience, know what it is you want themn to go home with and keep them interested, whatever it takes. If it is scientists, maybe a complex multivariate graph makes the point; if it is marketing people, a simple bar graph of sales vs time...the point of a talk is to communicate. If u r a techie, u probably, like me, loathe ppts with every slide with company logo wall paper, in dark colors, making it hard to see the info. But mmmaybe if u r a marketer, simply repeating the company name is actually the point....again, people have lots of reasons for talks
PS: since most people are incompetant, most talks will be bad; that s life
PPS: who appointed this guy tufte the design guru ? where does he get off giving his opinions as rules and facts ? where is his empirical data ?IMHO, he is 80% BS

Great Troll.

[twitter]

To defend Power Point, you pretend to be an expert and then exhort us to:

stop using transparencies,

A perfect Steve Barkto! Blame the user, denigrate the competition and pump up the Microsoft way. The only problem in this instance is that you inadvertenly and completely defeat yourself.

Transparacy presentations prove that Power Point sucks. Why is it that these problems were not problems with hand made transpariancies? Because there's no mindless rule set restricting the hand of an artist hand painting a transparency. For years, hand made transparencies were a mark of profesionalism. This is why slide making programs were invented. Microsoft's constricting rules, combined with the ease of type setting an image, create bad presentations that look good, the worste possible case. The amazing thing is that Power Point's building process, like most Microsoft junk, has remained exaclty as it was hastily flung together ten years ago. All Microsoft has done is add "features" for onramenting the poorly done job. It is true that effective presentations can be made though Microsoft's tool, it just requires too much effort and that's why it makes you dumb. Microsoft has concentrated on the wrong things and won't be able to make a reasonable tool to compete against free alternatives from Sun, KDE and Gnome, which also can use a fancy and expensive projector.

Re:Great Troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

twitter you seem to be a real idiot.

" Why is it that these problems were not problems with hand made transpariancies?" First of all the person attacking PowerPoint is attacking PowerPoint cause it is made by Microsoft. If you ever read his book or the article itself, you would see that everything he claims about PowerPoint applies to the hand made transpariancies. The only idiot, pure idiot should I say, who claims that it doesn't apply to anything expect PowerPoint is you and some idiots who mod you up.

Why is it so difficult for you to think a little.

Re:Great Troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Steve Barkto

Twit, you seem fixated with this. You should seek help. It happened 7 years ago. You were probably nine back then. Get over it.

it just requires too much effort and that's why it makes you dumb

Kinda like... Linux? Mwahahaha. WTF? Effort makes you dumb?

What a fucking pathetic loser.

A craftsman never blames his tools, yes ....

[fw3]

The corollary is that a craftsman will also ensure that he has the right tool for the job at hand. I happen to agree with the article / Tufte, Powerpoint is not the right tool for any job except 'sales'. (Big surprise that Microsoft's got a better knack for packaging a sales pitch than useful technology?). You may not agree with the article but that was its thrust.

My Good Presentation & Shifting the Blame

[entropy123]

If I gave that presentation:
(0) graphic: shuttle on launch bay
(1) graphic: foam/rock hitting wing at takeoff
(2) graphic: (possible) hole in wing
(3) graphic: aluminum bar at 100C
(4) graphic: aluminum bar at 10,000C
(5) graphic: remind them that this is how the twin towers went down.
(6) graphic: remind them of Challenger.
(7) text: indicate how likely it is that #2 occurred

-Field Questions
-Insert pertinent technical anlysis, boring but Pro/Con backing of my team's analysis
-Reiterate points 1-7

This whole process ought to take ~45 minutes, with questions comprising ~15min.

I almost forgot: get fired by management because they feel insulted by the simplicity of my presentation style

Powerpoint is very effective, but then I know how to use it. NASA wouldn't hire me, my GPA was only a 3.5 from a state school. I didn't make first cut, but I know how to integrate esoteric information into a cause/effect presentation. But management doesn't care, they want the Bohemian who applies the power rule to complex networks...yeah...that'll keep the shuttle crew safe...

The guy whining about PPT is just another jackoff who is more interested in protecting his management buddies than solutions which might really be effective.

Everyone with a BS in engineering ought to just go out and start their own business. Hire these business losers to do the scut work, but don't let them gain real power for just being a golf buddy.

Death By PowerPoint...

[kelsey.grammer]

is how we refer to many of the meetings I'm forced to attend.

It's not powerpoint, it's projectors

[Unregistered]

This is from a student's prospective, but i'm sure it applies to buisness as well

The problem with powerpoint is not powerpoint itself, it's projectors. Projectors tend to be small and in a 4:3 ratio. This means that very little can appear on a slide. If we had nice widescreen projectors that displayed slides in blackboard sizes and could therefore fit much more data on there a once, viewers would understand it better becasue the report could be presented in a sort of outline form that could keep all the important stuff on the screen at once and lead to a more organized report. When my school went from destinations, which ca hold only 2 or 3 bullet points legible, to real projectors, which can hold 6, the presentation quality imporved somewhat, bt ot to the level of the whiteboard, which can hold an entire chapter or two. Also, powerpoint wastes a lot of space with unnecessary formatting, titles, and horizontal lines which often make text hard to read if a line or something falls under it.

but it's not jsut ppt, smartboards have the same problems.

Re:It's not powerpoint, it's projectors

[Da VinMan]

I see your point, but I don't think it's really relevant to the problem. The real problem, in my mind, is that students who are used to copying notes from a whiteboard, PowerPoint slides, or even a chalkboard are not used to needing to structure the information for themselves. When information is presented in a pre-structured format for you, it's takes much less effort to capture the information. However, I think assimilation of the information (i.e. learning) is enhanced by the act of structuring. Just recording information doesn't make me think about it. If I have to structure it AND record it, well that's a whole lot harder, but much more effective too.

This is from someone who is essentially ADD but somehow made it through undergraduate and master degrees.

Stupididty

[danoaks15]

I am still in high school and I have seen some of the worst use of powerpoint possible. Many people just ype a report onto PowerPoint and then read it. Pretty much everbody uses unreadable fonts. I'ts unbelievable.

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Anonymous Coward]

and they should use Powerpoint to achieve a stable, peaceful country?????

It's only the first step...

[IDigUNIX]

...in the de-evolution of intelligent life in the corporate world.

1. Make someone use PowerPoint. Well suited candidates can progress rapidly to step 2.
2. As technical skills diminish, the use of MS Access becomes a "logical" choice.
3. At this point, the candidate will be unable to process information without the use of Excel spreadsheets and charts. Adequate time must be allowed at this stage for memories of past "clues" and competance to fade.

   When the candidate begins publishing Word documents on internal websites they're ready for the final step.

4. For subjects who are marginally competent at using MS Office, Managerial positions are the logical choice. Schedule the subject's lobotomy and prepare an office for them.

   ...or...

5. For subjects who are incapable of using the full MS Office Suite, but excell in verbal communications and have a nice unctuous personal image...schedule the "soul-ectomy", give them a fancy Palm Pilot, and introduce them to their new coworkers in the Sales department.

More like

[Anonymous Coward]

Powerpoint most effectively reveals the inherent dumbness of the presenter.

Confirmed!!

[Anonymous Coward]

According to the NYT article, "... Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction."

Academic Uses of PowerPoint

[abbamouse]

I'll go ahead and stick up for PowerPoint. As a university instructor, I use plenty of interactive stuff like simulation exercises and group discussions. Nevertheless, sometimes a lecture is the way to go, particularly when dealing with a complex and unfamiliar body of material.

What is the alternative to PowerPoint (or other slide-show programs) in academia? Hmmm... I remember chalkboard lectures that were hard to read (and I know my handwriting is awful) and often a confusing mess of arrows, half-erased comments, and lists without bullet points to mazke it clear when each item begins. Then there was the time involved in writing the material on the chalkboard/whiteboard and the annoying frequency with with the lecturer (myself included) would talk while writing, thus addressing his/her comments to the board instead of the class.

Then there were overheads. These lost the spontaneity of chalkboard comments, but dramatically improved legibility. Unfortunately, they were also (usually) monochrome -- even when I printed color overheads, I had to be careful since I was paying for my own color ink. Moreover, they lost the ability to change a diagram easily, adding and removing elements to illustrate one's point. Finally, they made it difficult to integrate video or animation, since the overhead projector was likely to be in the way of the film projector or TV.

Enter PowerPoint. Now I have the ability to include video, so when I talk about patterns of voting, I can play campaign commercials that sought to appeal to particular blocs of voters. Saying the economy matters is one thing. Putting up a graph comparing economic performance to vote share in elections is better (but can be confusing without color). Doing both and then watching Reagan's Morning in America ads is best. Powerpoint makes it simpler (though not exactly easy, given its hostility to non-Microsoft video formats) to do this sort of thing.

I disagree with many suggestions made by other comments. My advice:

1. Use color, but try to use style as well and don't rely on red/green differences. Remember, 10% of males in your audience are color-blind.

2. Use text, but not more than six or seven words per subpoint. This is enough to communicate just about any conclusion, and then further subpoints can walk through each element of your argument if needed.

3. Never use anything less than 14 points, preferably at least 18. People in the back of the room and people with less-than-perfect vision need to be able to see.

4. DO NOT MEMORIZE YOUR TALK! I coached speech and debate for years, and while the formal memorized speech has its place, that place is almost never in the type of presentation where you'll be using PowerPoint. Practice your speech until you have an extemporaneous but fairly efficient style.

5. Writing your points is the easy part. Decorating then with visual geegaws is only moderately more taxing. The really hard part is coming up with a real-world example of what your talking about. Once you have the example, use PowerPoint to communicate it with some amount of pizazz. After all, you don't need your audience to remember the particulars of the example (so little text is neeeded); rather, you want them to understand the meaning of whatever point they just wrote down. This is the place for audiovisual dazzle, not your main points...

6. Don't let the flash distract from your points. The key is to follow rule # 5 for examples, but to keep the points themselves distinct and consistent. Don't mix the visual style with which you present text. Don't use distracting animation for anything you want the audience to copy down.

7. Get to the room early and TEST YOUR PRESENTATION on the available equipment. Perhaps the fonts and software on the presentation machine are different from your own. Perhaps the equipment isn't working (see # 8). Perhaps the resolution of the scre

Re:Academic Uses of PowerPoint

[hankwang]

>Never use anything less than 14 points, preferably at least 18. People in the back of the room and people with less-than-perfect vision need to be able to see.

I've never understood what the idea is of point sizes on something that is going to be projected on a 3 meter-wide screen. Is it going to be 14 points if you print it landscape on standard A4/letter paper, or if it will be portrait (covering half the paper)?

I have found that from the last row in a typical lecture hall, the projected image is typically as big as a QUARTER A4 (=A6) or Letter sheet at normal reading distance (30 cm/1 ft). So if you want to judge the legibility, then print it on reduced size, or turn down the contrast of your 17 inch monitor and look at it from 60 cm (2 ft) at a 30 degree angle.

Re:Academic Uses of PowerPoint

[foobsr]

... a hint to ViSta might fit in here.

QUOTE
Dynamic, High-Interaction, Multi-View Graphics: ViSta constructs very-high-interaction, dynamic graphics that show you multiple views of your data simultaneously. The graphics are designed to augment your visual intuition so that you can better understand your data.
UNQUOTE

Never had the time to evaluate for myself yet, but this is a recommendation by a friend / former colleague.

CC.

RTFA -- it is too a software problem!

[js7a]

2) avoid text on your slides at all costs

WTF?

I smell a troll.

Here's the full story:

[Futurepower(R)]

All the comments I've seen missed the full story. Look at a GIF image of the original Boeing PowerPoint slide and analysis (GIF, 130 kB) to see why NASA did not understand the danger of high-velocity damage to the heat tiles. If the slide is Slashdotted, the text of the slide is shown at the bottom of this comment, imperfectly formatted.

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board said, "... it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."

The analysis of the Boeing slide was taken from Edward Tufte's pamphlet The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint which was excerpted on page 191 of the CAIB report (PDF, 10 MB) (or page 15 of Chapter 7 (PDF, 0.5 MB)).

Tufte suggested that a more appropriate title would be "Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models."

Check out this humorous HTML page of a PowerPoint presentation of Tufte's book: PowerPoint Remix.


Text of Boeing PowerPoint Slide

The existing SOFI on tile test data used to create Crater was reviewed along with STS-107 Southwest Research data

• Crater over-predicted penetration of tile coating significantly
  • Initial penetration to described by normal velocity
    -- Varies with volume/mass of projectile(e.g., 200ft/sec for3cu. In)
  • Significant energy is required for the softer SOFI particle to penetrate the relatively hard tile coating
    -- Test results do show that it is possible at sufficient mass and velocity
  • Conversely, once tile is penetrated SOFI can cause significant damage
    -- Minor variations in total energy (above penetration level) can cause significant tile damage

Flight condition is significantly outside of test database
-- Volume of ramp is 1920cu in vs 3 cu in for test

please mod parent up

[js7a]

n/t

I've noticed that trend....

[js7a]

Lately several presentations I've seen at Stanford and other Silicon Valley public venues have been getting text-dense with the presenter just reading the slides. Yuck.

Using Flash as a presentation medium

[arn0n]

I used to work at a place where my manager used Flash as a presentation medium, together with (and sometimes instead of) powerpoint.
This allowed him to present complex non-linear issues in an easy way to follow, and also have have a cool audio/visual candy once in a while, to spice things up.
This approach managed to achieve both goals of (a) not having to dumb down the content presented (b) clear and intuitive presentation that the audience actually enjoys.
The problem with this approach is that it requires more work than your usual powerpoint presentation (and a steeper learning curve), but then again, achieving the same goals with powerpoint takes longer to perform.

It comes down to whether you know how to lay out your message.

Quote of the day:

[mcrbids]

... 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider?

This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous...

Perfect slashdot grammar! At the NYT! We are WINNING! Grammer Nazis, CHARGE!!!

Power Point facilitates stupidity

[adenium_obesum]

I don't think technology can make a person any dumber or smarter than they already are. People conveyed complex concepts through slideshows, overheads, and chalk n' talk for a long time before Power Point came along. It's up to the presenter to make the message understandable. As a professor of mine once said on presentations, "Tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell it to them. Then tell them what you just told them." I try to follow that "model" in any presentations I give.

Convey the Crux

[jacobjyu]

Really, people, it's not PP, it's the people. I really think, in a technical talk, that there are really two main points or cruxes that underly the premise of the talk. If not anything else, convey these two points to your audience!! Whether it be just these two points on a PP, or (god forbid) memorizing them (while you're at it, why don't you memorize the whole presentation without the slides!)

Everything else is details, implementation, and analysis. Yes, of course these items are important too, but probably won't be as important to everyone in the room. Print out a copy of that well written report that you typed up before the presentation so that people who are interested can pick up a copy.

And please, don't bore your audience.

Let me reiterate, get those two points to your audience!! Whether it be life threatening or not, the crux of your paper should be conveyed, or else why even do a presentation?

dumb and dumber

[mrm677]

Believing that a software application is to fault for your lousy presentation is even dumber

Fact

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact: PowerPoint is dying

It is common knowledge that PowerPoint is dying. Everyone knows that ever hapless PowerPoint is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which PowerPoint is the worst off of an admittedly suffering PowerPoint community. The numbers continue to decline for Windows but PowerPoint may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for PowerPoint continues in a head spinning downward spiral.

All major marketing surveys show that PowerPoint has steadily declined in market share. PowerPoint is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If PowerPoint is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes PowerPoint is already dead. It is a dead man walking.

Fact: PowerPoint is dying

Not that simple

[fm6]

Style rules of thumb are all very well, but that's not the root of the problem. The fact is that communicating technical concepts is an art onto itself, and it's one that few engineers have mastered. (They're too busy engineering.) Of course, anybody can improve their communication skills with a little practice, but for best results who makes a profession of reducing a big mass of technical information to some clear, fundamental concepts.

Speaking of which:

use plenty of full colour figures...

[Anonymous Coward]

use plenty of full colour figures and simple animation but don't overdo it

Great advice.

Re:PostScript and maybe a PDF viewer is all ya nee

[Anonymous Coward]

umm.. the rest of the world? Yes, my secretary is going to do her next presentation in Postscript. Of course, this is the way the world works in every retarded Slashdotters mind. I'm going to tell my HR dept to tell a Cowboyneil joke at interviews; if the interviewee laughs, we won't hire him.

Bullshit

[Bored Huge Krill]

PowerPoint doesn't make you dumber.

Many people make bullshit presentations that twist the facts and obfuscate the most important points. Most people these days use PowerPoint (or something like it) to make presentations. From this we conclude that it's PowerPoint's fault.

Please

Krill

The Format Wouldn't Have Mattered...

[answerer]

First of all, the NYTimes article is pretty pointless. The writer did a better job of mangling written word than he could have if using PowerPoint slide. Main Point If you don't put "THIS IS A LIFE-THREATENING SITUATION" as your first PowerPoint slide (or a skull and crossbones picture), your report probably would mention the same life-threatening situation in one sentence on page 54 of 130. You did the research, you're the expert, YOU should be able to tell us what's important. If you simply toss up a bunch of information, it forces the audience to draw their own conclusions; not quite what you want in life-or-death situations.

Slashdot needs tro make moderators' jobs easier

[Little Brother]

It would be pretty simple, mod any post that ends with the line *"is dying" or *"is dead" as -1 troll. This would save the moderators a lot of trouble and if the code change isn't announced, you won't have people doin inane things like:

X is dead
lkdfjlkad;s;sakhgl;dks;sjfa;ldsfjl;dsfja

Just a thought.

I can imagine

[ShadowRage]

The NASA powerpoint presentations having midi music playing while being presented, with little sound effects playing as they activate text or something like that..

this is where the shuttle lost control and blew up in re-entry, *WAAA WAAAAA*

"excuse me, what was that?"

"oh, we added in that little effect, neat, huh?"

"and why is there really bad stairway to heaven music on?"

"ooh, we added that in for the drama!"

"..."

Re:Operation Red Dawn

[Anonymous Coward]

"and they should use Powerpoint to achieve a stable, peaceful country?????"

Well, any country needs a lot of powerpoints... You can't run your lights from batteries all the time.

You can't automate that

[gidds]

While those are all generally good points, you can't easily automate them, just as you can't machine-generate a good presentation in the first place. There are always exceptions; while well-intentioned I suspect that if actually implemented, rules like those would just lead to blander, lower-content presentations. "Well, the content checker liked it, so it must be good!"

A decent presentation needs to be checked by an intelligent human being. It helps if that's not the one who wrote it, though if the writer is intelligent, that gets you most of the way there...

The bottom line, though, is the content. That's the important thing. Bad presentation can obscure the content, but if you don't have any content then even the best presentation can't magic it up from nowhere. If you know what you're trying to say, and concentrate on communicating that to your audience, then most of the details will look after themselves.

The problem is information dissemination...

[jinx90277]

...not PowerPoint itself.

I have taken several presentation classes, and agree wholeheartedly with much of the advice given by the other posters: structure your information logically, use graphics whenever possible, limit the number of words per page, and avoid distracting graphical gimmicks. When you follow those guidelines and spend the time practicing your verbal style, you get good results giving your talk to the audience. However, the real problem lies with how PowerPoint is actually used in business -- namely, as a form of documentation, not merely as a visual aid.

As a case in point, I recently had to give a technical brief at the end of a program to the customer and my management. The problem was that although several members of senior management considered the briefing important enough to ask to be invited...none of them actually showed up! Of course, they wanted a copy of the presentation so they could read it at a later point. If I had constructed the presentation according to the guidelines mentioned above -- minimal text, etc. -- they would have gotten almost no information from it at all. So, anticipating this outcome, I did my best to use as many graphics as I could, but also included enough short statements so that someone could follow the outline of the talk I actually gave that day.

Personally, I think this situation is endemic in engineering. I have seen presentations circulated for years because they contained information which was never documented anywhere else. Although it would be far preferable to construct proper notes or white papers to go along with every presentation, I don't know of any managers who are willing to spend the extra money on putting together those artifacts -- or, for that matter, any engineers who have the spare time to craft them on their own. The best solution would be to record and archive the actual talk itself and pass those files around instead of the slides...but I think we have a long way to go before the verbal content is seen as the truly important element in a presentation, as it ought to be.

The solution: "The Bill Joy Font"

[neilmjoh]

Scott McNealy's Take on Power Point (it is a PDF document)

McNealy famously decalred to the San Jose Mercury, 3 August 1997, "We had 12.9 Gigbytes of PowerPoint slides on our network. And I thought 'What a huge waste of corporate productivity'. So we banned it". ...

McNealy's much cheaper, and more productive solution, was to remove PowerPoint and to "give everybody plastic Mylar sheets and all the pens they need to scribble on them", and to use what he describes as "the Bill Joy font. You can see where he licked his thumb and erases. It's so much faster," and leaves you time to get on with the job.

Re:The solution: "The Bill Joy Font"

[Anonymous Coward]

In related news, Bill Joy sadly died today, apparently from overhead projector marker ink poisoning. He was best known as a co-founder of Sun. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him, even if you didn't like vi and csh. Truly an American icon.

$200,000

[jefu]

If you look through Tufte's website you can find the page on his sculpture where evidently you can buy an instance of one of his pieces online for only $200K. Yup, you can "add it to shopping cart" and then type in your credit card number and buy the thing. I somehow doubt my credit card company would appreciate my attempting it though.

Tufte's full article

[20goto10]

Tufte's site only has the first couple of paragraphs. Wired has the full article.

"Access" as an example

[antizeus]

The first time I heard of Microsoft Access, I assumed it was some sort of firewall tool or something. Nothing in the name suggests "database" to me.

. . . at my old job

[jafac]

they used to call it "Death by Power Point".

I'm a whiteboard-man myself.

I have not seen something as buggy as pwpt

[Nikademus]

Try to type "-->" in pwpoint XP, it just crashes your comp..

The most important presentation rule: Tell a story

[Jerf]

The most important presentation rule of all is that you must tell a story.

Your story does not have to be like a novel or anything, but you do want to co-opt the standard story order: Problem, elaboration, solution, resolution (effects of solution). This time-tested structure drives your presentation forward and makes people more likely to want to listen.

The two other presentation orders I see result in flawed presentations, regardless of the other qualities of the presentation. "Random facts in random order", by far the most common, results in an incoherent presentation that leaves the listener to try to pick out the most important facts themselves; perhaps valid in some ways but for the most part that indicates failure on your part.

"Solution first" may seem more appealing then my formulation, but popping the climax right off the bat leaves the rest of the presentation an anti-climax. It's important to explain the problem, so as to motivate the listener to listen.

By the time you get to the solution, significant chunks of your audience should want to hear the solution.

Of course, this only really applies to presentations more then ten minutes or so; shorter then that and it doesn't much matter. That's also why this message is "solution first"... of course, it's also not a presentation, it's online writing, so newspaper rules are in effect, but it's also because you shouldn't need ten minutes to read this post.

Powerpoint at schools

[Polyhazard]

I'm a student at Colorado State University, and one thing I have noticed is that so many of the Freshman level courses use Powerpoint for notes that once people get into upper-division classes they have no idea how to take notes for themselves.

Most of the time, people spend thier entire class period copying down everything on the screen, and don't pay any attention to what the instructor is saying. They have a bunch of disconnected facts to read later, but no context.

In classes where the instructor chooses not to use Powerpoints, fellow students are constantly complaining that they don't know what to write. Their ability to learn by listening is shot.

Parent up

[EvanED]

Again, this isn't PPT's fault. PPT is a good presentation tool when used properly (which is admittedly too infrequently). It does what it tries to do, IMO better than transparencies, slides, or just about anything else. If you're giving a presentation, PPT will do the trick for most things if you use it right.

When all you've got is a hammer...

[Big Sean O]

It's not that PowerPoint makes you dumb, it's using the wrong tool for the job.

If you're interested in briefing someone, sometime the proper way is with PowerPoint, sometimes it's a memo, sometimes it's a technical report.

The problem is most people feel they have to use PowerPoint, or they won't be taken seriously. There's a technical word for people like this. They're called "Asshat".

When I use PowerPoint, I try to follow some very simple rules:

1. Seven words on a line.
   
2. Seven lines on a slide.
   

If you do this, your presentation will at least be legible.

If your message is having a hard time fitting in this format, chances are it shouldn't be a PowerPoint presentation.

Re:Iraqis dance like Palistinians did on 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

Those picture were stock footage.

No they weren't.

Also, in my (completely subjective) opinion, George W. Bush deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing down the Taliban and Saddam's regime.

I disagree, but still hate Powerpoint.

[supabeast!]

Powerpoint does not make people, or presentations, stupid. It just makes it too easy for stupid people to put a bad presentation together. In my last job, we put together excellent presentations by doing them the old-fashioned way-a big team, lots of writing and editing, and numerous preparatory presentations. I've seen other people pull this off pretty well, and even know someone whose job mostly involves doing excellent Powerpoint presentations instead of letting someone do bad ones.

Laziness is the real problem with Powerpoint. Any idiot can toss a presentation together in five minutes, add in a nice theme, and then spend another ten minutes on effects.

Worst of all is that some colleges are now implementing department-wide Powerpoint slides to go with lectures instead of letting professors just handle it themselves. I was in a programming class that started off really well, because the projector was broken and the professor used the blackboard. A month in the projector got fixed and the slides went up, within two weeks half the class dropped.

Best antidote

[tomem]

The best antidote to Edward Tufte is David Byrne's Book: Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. To some degree, Byrne is spoofing Tufte here, and he shows pretty convincingly that PowerPoint is what you make of it.

I didn't see many folks here recommending Keynote in place of PowerPoint, but Byrne might well adopt it. That's because it is even more concerned with style over substance than PowerPoint. Which is not to dismiss Keynote. All slideware has the ultimate goal of allowing one to collect whatever bits of graphics and text one would like on a series of frames, and I for one think that is a very useful set of requirements for a software tool. PowerPoint, at least, works quite well for large format posters, as well. But a slide program isn't a page layout program for printed media, and it shouldn't be used that way.

Perhaps the most useful capability of PowerPoint is "save as a web page", which actually makes a set of web pages and links between them that create a web presentation in a jiffy.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but good software is good software, no matter who develops it. PowerPoint is now over 15 years old and it has just continued to get better and better. It's well out ahead of whatever is second best, even if it is not "foolproof".

Dilber on Powerpoint

[d0n quix0te]

Enjoy these fine cartoons on Powerpoint. I usually include them in my presentations...

http://www.bioch.ox.ac.uk/graphics/misc/dilbert. gi f
http://www.idblog.org/images/dilbert8-9.gif

Saddam Hussein is Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

CNN just confirmed that he asphixiated himself using the cellophane from a fritolay snack pack bag that was included with his lunch!

Wrong direction

[MrWa]

Powerpoint, as a presentation software, is not horrible. The problem - which Tufte points out - is that people use the templates to help them put what little information they have into a presentation. Even worse, they may try to fit the good information they have into the minimal amount of space that the slides allow.

The bullet list is a good way to summarize and highlight data. The problem is that people have become used to putting ALL of the data into bullet lists. This leads to arbitrarily cutting statements short, or leaving them out entirely, to fit into the format and space that Powerpoint provides.

This is why Powerpoint makes you dumb.

It also seems to make the people looking at them dumb. I know that I sometimes come out of meetings feeling dumber for the experience.

Tufte is focused very much on data density. I was at the presentation last week and noticed that many people there are webdesigners. The point that Tufte is really trying to make is often lost: that higher density media - like paper! - is better at presenting data than a computer screen or Powerpoint slide.

No I don't know what's goin on...And in conclusion

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...does anyone have a Powerpoint of what he just said?

good point

[GCP]

There are really two issues: form and content, but they're related.

I think it's true that PowerPoint makes some forms (e.g., bulleted lists) easier than others (e.g., detailed blueprints), and that has an effect on the substance. You're more likely to come up with substance that fits easily into the form you imagine presenting in, and you're likely to imagine presenting in the form that's easiest to produce in your "presentation" software.

This is how the design of PowerPoint really does impact the actual substance of the message.

That being said, though, I think it's silly to put most of the blame on PowerPoint. I've made a lot of presentations to top execs in many industries in many countries over many years.

Since long before PowerPoint existed, I've noticed that top execs *demand* presentations in the form made easiest by PP. Their days are a non-stop parade of presentations designed to sell them on one idea after another. They want the minimum information necessary for them to be able to make what they (and NOT the presenters) consider a sufficiently well-informed decision to either take a next step or kill the project immediately. Once they feel they they have the info to make that decision, they'll stop your presentation in mid-slide, and you're done, so you'd better get your best ideas into the first two or three slides.

This is NOT the way scientists should make their presentations or decisions, and Tufte's work primarily focuses on presenting scientific information.

The blame then should not be on PP so much as on those who PP as the medium for all types of presentations. Unfortunately, the mechanics of putting information in front of a live audience are demanding, so the conveniences of PowerPoint make it seductive.

Of course, it's seductive to blame various bogeymen, such as MS, for all of the world's problems, too. That's another form of "dumbing down" an analysis.

Re:good point

[ahdeoz]

The real point everyone here is missing is that styrofoam dropped 50 feet didn't do any harm at all to the space shuttle, and whatever went wrong, nobody knows now, at least not from a ultra-low resultion photo, and certainly could not have known before hand in order to prevent the tragedy. No, the foam did not hit the shuttle at mach 6, it was accelerating as fast as the rest of the shuttle until it fell off.

And people still think moderation isn't broken?

[drinkypoo]

Now, I've "defended" Microsoft in the past and not taken such a huge hit through moderation, so I never really believed the cries of the slashdotters who claimed that expressing pro-MS sentiment got yhou modded down like crazy, but apparently I've struck a nerve. Modding someone down just because you don't understand powerpoint is clearly an abuse of the moderation system.

I was absolutely not trolling. I believed every word I wrote in my parent comment. A troll is not simply something you disagree with. It is a comment which is deliberately designed to invoke angry or confused responses through arguments given for no other reason. Those who do not understand this should not moderate.

journal

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* no one ever reads my journal.

And we're not going to if you advertise it like that.

Re:Iraqis dance like Palistinians did on 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, in my (completely subjective) opinion, George W. Bush deserves the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing down the Taliban and Saddam's regime.

George W. Bush deserves prison for the wreckless violation of the US Constitution.

At the risk of being modded down...

[Bugmaster]

...I beg to differ. It seems that the main problem NASA had was that

When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle.

If you don't know how to create a clear, meaningful visual aid, then no amount of software will help you. I have seen people who drew their slides by hand, with ink and paper, and they had so many bullet points and arrows that the paper was literally falling apart in places. I got a headache just by looking at it through my peripheral vision.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the problem is not with PowerPoint -- it's with the people who use it. It would be tempting to say, "See, M$ makes you dumb, use OpenOffice", but in this case, the Evil Empire (tm) is not to blame.

Re:At the risk of being modded down...

[MarahFellicce]

the challenger "slides" are in one of the tufte books. these are hand written slides that have all of the right information, displayed in a way that does not impart the point - that there is in the engineer's minds, a possible saftey issue. i'm sure that they thought they were making a point, otherwise they would not have went through the trouble of making slides. the problem was, they were unable to communicate what they thought and why... and their slides were not made in powerpoint. i agree, the evil empire is not entirely to blame.

Re: At the risk of being modded down...

[Black Parrot]

> If you don't know how to create a clear, meaningful visual aid, then no amount of software will help you.

Kind of like BASIC enabling people who don't understand what they're trying to do to write programs, WebTV allowing cluebies to use the innerweb, and microwave ovens allowing non-chefs to cook.

Re: At the risk of being modded down...

[Bugmaster]

I am not sure if you're being sarcastic or not... But I think all these inventions are still good. BASIC is an ok "intro to programming" language; kind of like what a tricycle is to an 18-wheeler (the 18-wheeler being C++). Microwaves are great for popcorn, defrosting chickens, and when you need something semi-edible in a hurry. WebTV... um... hm, there's actually no redeeming feature there, but I digress. My point is, all these things can still be useful, either as a training tool or as a weak solution to a weak problem. The disaster happens when you try to write an application server in BASIC, or to cook a six-course meal in the microwave, or to use PowerPoint (and solely that) to discuss structural weaknesses in shuttle design. I mean, toothpicks are great too, but you won't normally use them to build a house.

Re:Iraqis dance like Palistinians did on 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, yes, but so does every Representative, Senator, and President since 18-something-or-other. The federal government ceased obeying the Constitution a very long time ago. Remember the 10th Amendment? Congress and the President sure don't.

Re:Iraqis dance like Palistinians did on 9/11

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the prez, congress, all those assholes deserve to be gangraped by the Goatse giver. Bush swore to uphold the Constitution, a pledge to the nation and his God. He deserves to burn.

You've simply interrupted the fanboy groupthink

[Anonymous Coward]

The slashcrew are too busy masturbating to Sailor Moon to give a damn about fair moderation.

Problem with verbal

[bluGill]

So close to right on, yet still completely wrong. Verbal is what a presentation is all about. Unfortunatly verbal is a bad way to present information.

The first problem is I'm a poor listener, after a few mintues I start to doze off or my mind wonders, I start staring at the cute girl in class, or I get called away on an emergency (doesn't matter if I'm the only one who knows CPR, or the network is down, I've gotta leave no matter how important your presentation is). Psycologist have stuided this - I'm just like everyone else, the details change, but it is unlikly that anyone will pay attention to every word in your speach even if they truely want to learn.

The next problem is I have a poor memory. I can take notes, but while I write one point, you are onto the next. Even if you distribute your slides, I still need to write notes on the slides or they end up meaningless a year latter when I need the information.

Skip several other important points because I don't want to write all night...

Last, I'm busy. Something written down can be read when I have time, I can skip the parts I don't care about, and I can even read a little at a time. If my mind wonders I can trun back to the point where I was last paying attention and start over. (I might be weird this way, but I've more than once found myself having read several pages of a book while day dreaming about something completely different, just like some people tune out the TV while watching I can tune out a book while reading.)

I've been to good presentations. I wouldn't want to learn SCSI by reading the standards, but once I took a class that went over each command in detail and showed me how to interpurt everything and I now understand the standards. It worked because the guy who presented knew his stuff (in this case was on the committe) and slowed us down to the point where we could understand very dry material.

Most people don't need that level of detail very often, but want to know something. What those senior managers are saying is your information is important, but they don't really need it in depth, so prepare something that will sumerize it quick. (Unfortunatly you don't often get the budget to do that)

OperaShow

[ChristTrekker]

I couldn't agree more. Add "paged" media type with a few simple rules (e.g. h1,h2 { page-break: before }) to your CSS, and hit F11 in Opera. If someone asks for a copy of your presentation notes, give them the URL. In "normal" mode, you can have the full text of your presentation.

Who uses powerpoint anymore?...

[LnxAddct]

For any presentations that need to be done, Flash is a much better alternative.I haven't used powerpoint for about 5 years or so, but have seen presentations done by it. The flexibility and power offered by flash far surpasses any slideshow application. I'd love to go on about the greatness of Flash, but I haven't the time right now. BTW, it runs great under wine. There is no need to for someone who knows what he is doing to use Powerpoint or Impress.Pn the other side, does anyone know of any good SVG apps similar to Flash, I'd rather be using a truly OSS solution. Regards, Steve

No, you certainly don't...

[Anonymous Coward]

You complain (I think) that groupwork is killing you because you apparently can't play well with others. This is, no doubt, partially because your skills with the English language are atrocious. BTW, where does "controversial thinking" come from if there's nobody to have a controversy with?

Here's the scoop - you can't be a code-monkey for the next 40 years, okay? Get over it. You *will* have to interact with people, so start learning how to do so.

As for planning sessions making you a "worse programmer", HUH? You're probably one of those lame-ass dipsticks who code the wrong thing because they didn't pay any attention during the design sessions when we said we'd re-use the code libraries from some other project. Then the project is 3 months behind schedule because your deliverables aren't delivered, but somehow this is the team lead's fault, isn't it?

Either learn to play with the human race, or get off the planet. You're wasting oxygen otherwise.

Re:No, you certainly don't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, he certainly has a controversy with you.

I think they got it backwards-Healing touch.

[Anonymous Coward]

"It is not my conclusion that powerpoint makes people dumb; it is my conclusion that people are dumb, and giving them powerpoint is like giving a g t; blind man paintbrushes</a> or a digital camera.[Emphasis mine]

So in other words powerpont can perform miracles, like make the lame walk, and blind see.

Yet our colleges force the use of Powerpoint...

[lifebouy]

almost religiously. In America, 'education' is almost an oxymoron.

information theorist

[mpeac]

Tufte may be interested in the theory of presentation of information, but that does not make him an 'information theorist'. That title is reserved for those that, eg., publish in the rarified world of IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

Information theory is the mathematical foundation of compression and transmission of information, started by the venerable Claude Shannon in the late 40's with his paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623-656, July, October, 1948.

Is it not also fair to say...

[davidylin]

that dumb people use powerpoint as well?

At least, I chalk up dumb powerpoint presentations to dumb people.

Boring!

[BSDKaffee]

Here's the bottom line: slide shows are boring. We've known this all along--a slide show is a slide show--but we still continue to employ them. Turn the lights off and, "Hello nap time!" Nobody is learning because everybody is sleeping.

I disagree almost completely

[scruffyMark]

Interesting you should say that, my experience contradicts your almost totally. I have seen slides/projections used in more talks and presentations than I can count, and in perhaps 80% of them, the projections were an impediment to communication, not an aid.

However, if we break it down between powerpoint/everything else, then powerpoint has been an aid to communication in precisely one talk I ever saw; an impediment in the other 100% - 1. In the everything else category, it's an aid in about 75%. I think perhaps the thing is, people use powerpoint as a reflex these days, whether they need any projections or not. If they use anything else, it's because they're thought about it.

Transparencies can be good - they're versatile.

• You can point to parts of a diagram easily. Laser pointers are terrible - everyone's hands shake a little, and little red dots jumping all over the place make the audience hate you. You can point to multiple parts at once, by leaving a couple of pencils on the transparency, or circling things as you mention them.
• Biggest point - if someone doesn't understand what you're explaining, you can do the calculations over in a different way, or add a more detailed explanation of something complete with diagrams, just grab an extra blank transparency. Any system of ready-made slides doesn't let you do that (of course there's always chalk, but some people are just no good with it).

As for pictures, the best case for that was some art history courses I took. Powerpoint would have been terrible for this - projectors were pretty much all 800x600 at the time (are they 1024x768 these days? How much does that cost?) and the color is lame. The only way to go was a real slide projector, with the clickety-click cart and the acetate slides where one always ends up being upside down.

One of the best uses of projection though was a course where the notes were on a website, simple html, no powerpoint. So, he put that up on the projector, and we knew exactly what notes we had to take and what we didn't need to write, since we all know the URL for what's on screen now. Because it's a web page, he could have a useful amount of text, i.e. that doesn't fit on one screen, diagrams that you need to scroll about to see in full.

I agree with you about reading slides though. It's a slide show, not the 3x5 cards with your notes. But, in presentations where people did that, the slides were usually completely unnecessary. A better slide show would have been better, but the no slide show at all would have been best.

PowerPoint in lieu of school term papers

[peter303]

A few months ago the educational supplement of the New York Times had a article saying some high school teachers were accepting PowerPoint presentations instead of term papers.
I think competence in both are necessary for a successful high school graduate.

Sorry, but that's crap.

[HaloZero]

• "The Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA agrees, noting that the slides produced by engineers to report on the wing damage were so confusing that 'a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.'

How is it that hard? Did they leave out the life-threatening parts, because PowerPoint couldn't do some whizzbang animation to make it look flashy enough?

### Slide One ###
- This is a life-threatening situation.
- We need to inspect panels J-6822 through K-9147.

### Slide Two ###
- Photography of the launch reveals a strike from an object.
- Later images during the mission show a black object floating away from the spacecraft in the vicinity of the initial strike.

### Slide Three ###
- Break out the three-billion dollar Polaroid.
- Use it.

### Slide Four ###
- Engineer2Administrator interface fails (err: unknown)
- We lost the shuttle
- ...?
- BLAME MICROSOFT!

The information could have been there, one way or another. PowerPoint is not so crippled that you can not just make a text box and typety type some crap into it, and boom, informative slide.

What's really the problem

[HeX86]

Is it powerpoint or the people making powerpoint presentations?

Both are common

[scruffyMark]

In most cases of powerpoint presentations I've seen, the powerpoint stuff was put in reflexively, because "powerpoint is how you do presentations", not because the material lent itself to powerpoint.

Actually, the best alternative is often a mostly oral presentation (no slides), with the occasional point being drawn out on the blackboard (by hand in chalk or marker!) at the same pace as the explanation of the subject. It's much better to hear "and then we have generic widgets in here. In practice we use about two dozen types of widgets" as the presenter is drawing the "generic widget" part of the diagram, than to see him wave a laser pointer all over 2/3 of a complicated diagram, while his audience thinks of where they'd like to stuff the laser pointer.

But you can't just blame the person using the gun

[ngrier]

While your post is dead on, you are failing to miss the point of many who cry foul of powerpoint: too many people who use it don't know better. For the same reason the folks in the trenches like to snipe at management as "pointy-haired" it's really easy for those who know how to make a good presentation to say "oh, they're just incompetent; it's not the fault of Powerpoint".

While I agree that there is some validity to the argument blaming the person and not the gun, to draw the line there is also short-sighted. Too many people either haven't ever been tought how to make a good presentation or just don't care and are happy to use Powerpoint to effortlessly produce crap.

Either way, Powerpoint clearly enables such poor presentations by making people focus on only one way to present information (a large-fonted bulleted list) and gives way too many options for transitions that only distract from the substance.

(Of course this doesn't remove the blame from corporate execs/govt officials who are not willing to listen to more than 30s of a presentation, nor those who willingly oblige them. And of course a higher education system which actively promotes the blind use of Powerpoint rather than spending time making people learn how to make a good presentation is also to blame! [Hint: the slides are purely a visual aid; they are not supposed to be your presentation, merely assist you in getting your point across -- nor are they a substitute for a good technical memo!]) </rant>

PP doesn't kill presentations, poor presenters do.

[kevmit]

"Powerpoint makes you dumb"?!
C'mon, get serious. If a piece of software, ANY piece of software, can 'make you dumb", odds are you were already there or well on your way.
The fact is ANY visual aid, used ineffectively, can and will detract from your presentation and the accomplishment of your learning objectives.
OTOH, slides can be extremely effective when they're USED effectively i.e.

Not AS the presentation, but to SUPPORT the presentation.

Not AS the content, but as an INDEX to the main points of the content.

Not as a REPLACEMENT for a good presenter, but as a focusing tool and contextual backdrop for a good presenter.
The following is excerpted from a Novell publication entitled "Teaching Effectively for Novell"

"Learning and retention increase dramatically when learning aids appeal to more than one sense. Students absorb more than 75 percent of information through sight. The combination of hearing and seeing is six and one-half times more effective than just hearing. Therefore, when you talk and show a visual aid, the chances of your students understanding and remembering the material are substantially increased."

Re:Did anyone get it? (mod parent up!)

[daraknor]

I did another reply in this thread about a data system that wouldn't leave out data, although i was very brief. We need to be able to look at where data came from, and have it weighted as we come across it. I think the ultimate version of this would be where each individual can have their own alorithms and weights for relating the data.

In such a system, some information could only be referenced for a fee... for example the original test data by researchers. There are tons of needed features, but I think a system like this would be useful in most fields of information, especially scientific.