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.
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.
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"?
.rtf / .pdf (and this story goes right along), but would anyone state that "vi / tex / Acrobat makes you dumb"?
We have seen so much bullshit in plain text / html /
Please, no more...
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
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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...
This is hardly an exhaustive list, but I've found them useful guidelines...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
> 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?
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
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
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!
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.
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?
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.
Usually, science advances best when information can be exchanged freely. Tufte seems to have forgotten this.
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).
davejenkins.com |
"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.
...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?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.
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
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.. html
o m.html
http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/guides/bloom
http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/blo
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
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.
"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.
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.
:) 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.
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
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...
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.
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.
Speaking as a person who attends conferences and has also had to help students with presentations.
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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.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
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.
Avantslash: low-bandwidth mobile slashdot.
Scott McNealy's Take on Power Point (it is a PDF document)
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
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.
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>