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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.
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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.
The owls are not what they seem
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.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
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?
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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!
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.
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.
;). And if you know consulting firms, when they felt we managed to do a very good presentation, I think we did something right...
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
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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."
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
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.
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... 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
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
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.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.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).
The potato it is uninformed.
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.
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
Make cheese not war 8:)
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.
--Forest C. Adcock--
...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.
"she says i'm lousy conversation. as if that's supposed to help."
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.
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.