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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.
I'm watching the PowerPoint presentation now.
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?".
Have a lot in common :
If in doubt Blame Microsoft !
(or SCO but that was no option in this case)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
I worked in a print shop a few years ago, and people would bring in large .ppt documents to print
.ppt slide to be printed as a poster.
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
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.
Part of Whole
Proper Use
Wrapup
I think I've made myself clear.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
What if Abe had use Powerpoint to "present" the Gettysburg Address?
Toddlers are the stormtroopers of the Lord of Entropy.
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"
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
It's just text. Where are the PowerPoint slides?
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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.
'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.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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!
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
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".
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!"
"..."
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.