Slashdot Mirror
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.
For a concise summary see also here ;-)
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.
The potato it is uninformed.
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!
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
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
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
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.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.