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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.
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.
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.
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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.