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PowerPoint of Afghan War Strategy
eldavojohn writes "Disillusioned by PowerPoint at work? Some members of the US Military view it as 'an internal threat.' Marine Corps General James N. Mattis says, 'PowerPoint makes us stupid,' reaching the same conclusion NASA came to back in 2003. But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. The slide causes anyone's eyes to glaze over with confusion so much that General McChrystal jokingly stated when he saw it, 'When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war.' At my job, I know that feeling all too well."
"PowerPoint makes us stupid"
Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
I think in this case, the chicken (being stupid) came first
but it sure would be great if this were the beginning of the end of unnecessary PowerPoint presentations. I can't think of many times when I saw one that was actually helpful.
This ain't rocket surgery.
1. bomb Taliban positions with solar powered laptops running Windows7 with powerpoint installed ...
2. Victory
3.
4. Experience horrible unplanned of blow-back.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
That spaghetti slide has a copyright notice at the bottom, "PA Knowledge Limited 2009"
There must be a joke about oxymorons and military intelligence in here somewhere.
Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.
A long essay on the evils of PowerPoint by the man, Ed Tufte, regarding the shuttle explosions: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Oh, man... the irony
Elen sìla lùmenn' omentielvo
I don't think it is fair to blame this directly on Microsoft. There are, after all, other programs available today that allow you to make terrible presentations. If the talk had been done instead in Apple Keynote, OpenOffice, or any other program, it still would have been possible to make massive, mind-numbing, information-lacking, slides.
For that matter, I'm pretty sure the same was possible before we started doing this with software - it was certainly possible with film slides as well.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
When I was in USAF officer training, all the trainees were required to give several briefings throughout the program. We were told that we could use any visual aids we wanted (to include whiteboard, PowerPoint or... who knows.)
All 144 of us used PowerPoint, simply because it was the easiest way to complement what you were talking about.
...if PowerPoint makes you stupid, but I sure feel dumber having read that article.
How much does it cost us to kill one Taliban fighter?
Spend the money on researching petroleum alternatives. In the Middle East we're simply building castles in the sand.
It looks to me as if the spaghetti diagram would be pretty useful to work from if it were printed in poster format. As a slide, not so much.
"Powerpoint absorbs huge amounts of time that management, marketeers, and other suits might otherwise
spend doing real harm."
Powerpoint isn't the problem, it's large organization management and people who don't want to (or don't have the time) to get into the details..
This is the nature of "summing-up" and presenting to people that do not understand what is being spoon-fed to them.
makes you stupid. Don't blame powerpoint.
Post some news instead of drivel.
You must be new here...
i left the army 10 year ago, but i remember powerpoint even then. officers would spend hours making slides for command and staff and other briefings. they would draw maps and all kinds of pictures from scratch. it was amazing to watch, and i'm glad i never had to do any of it
How about a single slide:
"Kick Bad Guy's Asses"
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
... and it has nothing to do with the complexity of the STRATEGY.... it's meant to give commanders an indication of the insanely-complex interrelations between various factors/actions. It's actually designed to represent the SITUATION in Afghanistan and to illustrate that simple notions of cause and effect aren't quite as simple as you'd like to believe. The slide is nothing more than a model of a very complex situation.... and it's actually a damned good one too.
Check out the larger version of the picture and take a look at some of the headings.
Look at the top right of the dark blue portion, where it says "targeted strikes", if you start following some of the arrows, you see (as you should expect) that targeted strikes will have an effect on "Insurgent Damages and Casualties" and that such an effect will also have an effect on "Fear of ANSF/Coalition Repercussions", which will also have an effect on "Insurgent recruiting/manpower".
There's no description of strategy there, and if you sat down and tried to think about the repercussions of specific actions taken in an area filled with insurgents and a populace that is sometimes sympathetic and sometimes not sympathetic to both the coalition and insurgents, a lot of the interrelations would seem pretty obvious - ie. if you spend too much effort killing insurgents, you run the risk of increasing their ability to recruit, because the population will begin to fear and resent you.
Don't look at the slide as a whole... just look for an entry on the slide that represents an action, and follow the arrows which show what the effects of that action are.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
The graph at the start of the article may be complex to the point of silly but it does not do a good job of illustrating what is bad about powerpoint. To me it actually does convey something quite effectively - an image of complexity. I don't need to follow the strands of spaghetti to grasp that.
Powerpoint is bad because it puts a presentation into a straight jacket. The presenter comes to identify the presentation with the sequence of slides, when in fact the most important part of should be his connection with the audience and what he is trying to convey. Having the presentation so firmly organized prevents the spontaneity and interaction that makes a presentation interesting and memorable.
Wow, someone needs to learn how to use GraphViz:
http://www.graphviz.org/
*avoid edge crossings and reduce edge length
With the first link, the chain is forged.
During my service we were forced to use power point for every lecture. Our CO stated that training without power point was not training at all!
I would make note of several other crutches that should be great but are created by idiots.
Most site index engines, for an example try to find something useful on Symantec's website using their built in KB search.
Photoshop, you got to love all the "professional photographers" who simply apply the latest filter from their torrented CS.
WYSIWYG, pick any, you know what I am talking about here folks, if you don't...well you probably are part of the problem.
Social Media sites, the abuse never ends...I'm looking at you farmtown girl and political right/leftwing nutjob friends.
Any of these items should work and be great tools but there are just too many idiots in the world who dont want to put effort into anything. These people will exist whether the crutches are there or not, but they sure as heck will waste a lot less time.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
When the web was new and I had to make presentations like this, I would do HTML pages (with bullets) instead of powerpoint slides. The big difference was that I would also provide lots of links to additional information and details on each point. It took longer to write (both because of the additional information, but mostly because we didn't have great tools to assist), but was more engaging with the audience and did provide the additional details that a bullet-list-slide didn't.
Nowadays, I might think about using something like Prezi for some of my briefings. While it does allow a linear path through a presentation, the information is layed out spatially and allows zooms and pans both through the path and independent of the path. This makes it pretty easy to provide additional information and show the relationship between some of the points. It does allow bullet points, but mostly so it can mock their use.
Powerpoint used stupidly spreads the stupidity on to others. It can be a great tool, but more often than not is abused by people who are clueless when it comes to communication. People frequently use the tool as a crutch because it's fairly easy to slap something together.
The solution is to educate people on the appropriate uses of Powerpoint and how to use it well.
Powerpoint is trying to solve a problem - that of communicating a lot of complex information efficiently. Which, let's be honest, is a very common problem.
The issue that comes out of it is that a lot of people are absolutely lousy at effectively communicating complex information. Powerpoint allows them to pretend that they are communicating - when in actual fact they're not. They're just droning.
I think a part of the solution here may be education - but I don't mean "educate people at college or when they're in the workplace". Effective communicating together is such an important part of modern society that I think it should be consciously taught at school. I can't speak for others, but most teaching I had in university didn't even attempt to teach techniques to get ideas across - we were just given a brief and told to "prepare a presentation".
Given the quality of some of the presentations I've seen over the years - from managers, trainers and lecturers alike - I'd say that nobody is really being taught how to get ideas across. Maybe nobody knows how, and so there's nobody to teach anyone else.
"When we understand that slide, we'll have won the war."
Seeing that BOTH sides have already lost, we'll never understand the slide.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
When I worked on a defense contract, all material was expected to be in PowerPoint slides. I even had a customer reject a JPEG image because he "couldn't open it" and had me put it in a PowerPoint container. The effect was to spend time excessively distilling information into a slide format that was meaningless without context. A good presentation requires speaking to go with it and does not stand on its own. Unfortunately, people have forgotten the value of a good report with a nice abstract to start for those who want the distilled version.
My bad - I RTFA and this is the gem in the piece:
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Reminds me of this flowchart that's supposedly about how to fire an inept NYC school teacher.
Freedom is drinking a beer in the park when you're supposed to be at work.
I recall once hearing a US Army General say during the Iraqi war that "If the copier had been invented prior to WWII, we'd all be speaking German."
This seems like a good summary of what the Commander-in-Chief needs to understand.
It may look like indecipherable spaghetti but we'll have something like a 3D browser representation with a page for each concept in our minds. Do we look at the internet and say "OMG that's too complicated"? 7+/-2, remember?
So the problem is primarily trying to put too much information on to one page.
It also reminds me of Ender's Game where a certain victory was achieved by denying the player the big picture... so they could focus entirely on the process.
I never understood this about our army. We spend SO MUCH MONEY just to kill one Taliban. We need 200K troops just to deal with 1000 fighters. Why is our miltary so inefficient at doing the job of fighting? I thought one of our fighters was the equivalent of 15 Taliban? We apparently need 20 soldiers, which are supported by 5 each, using expensive gear, to eliminate one poorly armed, poorly trained enemy. God forbid these guys rise up in mass, we won't have enough troops to maintain the 1000:1 ratio it apparently requires for us to win.
Published: April 26, 2010
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
in my office, I gotta say that this story inspired both fear and awe. The shear amount of dynamic connectors and double backing process ovals should cause our enemies to immediately shit their pants.
Is it the problem of PowerPoint or the one creating the presentation? It seems to me a case of blaiming the technology instead of the user. PowerPoint doesn't create a strategic genius by magic. But i am 100% sure Clausewitz could have created a great PowerPoint presentation "about war".
But I got a flowchart that could rock his world.
But nothing speaks to this more than the spaghetti-bowl PowerPoint slide of the US Military's strategy in the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
Projecting a diagram onto a screen does not make the diagram a PowerPoint slide. The complexity of that diagram has nothing to do with PowerPoint.
Though I don't think "Powerpoint" or "open office impress" is the issue, I can see the point. We have become too reliant on a screen full of information. Of course, this is nothing compared to the chalkboards of yesteryear!
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
What's a PowerPoint?
Follow me
I think the point of that slide is to show that the war is complex and judging by the laughing it worked. It's basically like Primer in this XKCD comic, the point is not is understand the picture but to see that its very complex.
The included informational image is provided for the benefit of your personal knowledge.
Of course it's crap. They should be using Microsoft Project instead! Right tool for the right job & all that.
There is a war going on for your mind.
We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint
* Slides that are too complex
* looks like bowl of spaghetti
* Slides that do not convey important information
* It does not show the intricate relationship
between the parties
* Too much time spend on making them
* Ties up "PowerPoint Rangers"
"Sometimes the situation or mission is complicated."
Killing Afghanis for employment and profit, while hiding the true nature of what is being done is very complicated. The slide shows that perfectly.
This is the real underlying issue: If Afghanistan can be made safe, an oil company can become very rich by building an oil pipeline from the interior of Russia to Pakistan. A side issue is that weapons sales and war contracting are easy money. (It is the employees of the war contractors who are killed.)
To those who want to make money, killing poor and relatively defenseless people is just a cost of doing business. Especially since the U.S. taxpayer pays the cost.
"... incapable leadership and poor communication..."
Exactly.
The problem with PowerPoint is not that it makes us stupid...we're good at that already. It just allows people to build bad meeting presentations that look good on the surface. People have a need to feel like they put together a good presentation, so they spend all sorts of time twiddling around making things just perfect. The problem is that you get something that looks totally polished but is useless.
In IT, I've seen that "spaghetti bowl" diagram over and over, except the end nodes are routers, servers, PCs, clouds, extranets, etc. etc. I work for a services/development firm doing niche-market projects, and colleagues of mine will just dump everything from a design doc onto a bunch of PPT slides to show to the higher ups. Especially as you get higher, you have about 10 seconds to get and keep their attention; after that they go back to checking their BlackBerry or reading something else. The message needs to be tailored. A CIO does not care one bit about the internal support processes of an outsourcing deal, they want a pretty diagram with maybe 5 elements and a bunch of connectors showing how things interrelate. An Army general can't be bothered with all the stuff in that diagram; his job is to take input from his commanders and say "make it so".
In addition, there are some things that are just too complex to bulletize if you're talking about a technical audience. Some people really are obsessed with the "just give me the short version" mindset and do not have the ability to sit still for 5 minutes and read a carefully-written message or document. Boiling it down to a single bullet causes it to lose all meaning. Imagine a presentation on a technical topic like how LDAP works, or how you implemented disaster recovery for a customer. You need a little more meat than "* Directory service * Lets users authenticate * Stores extended information" if you are below the management level.
I've witnessed your citizens grasp of foreign languages. I think it would be fair to say you would be speaking american loudly and slowly.
Perhaps US military leaders in Afghanistan are at a point where they have to play the game where they try to present their jobs as so complex that no one could do it except for them, so that they would become irreplaceable?
Or perhaps they become so corrupted by their power that nobody can correct them when they do something wrong or stupid.
10 years ago, I heard a high ranking naval officer say that if we wanted to debilitate an enemy, we should give them powerpoint.
PowerPoint is probably not a bad tool for pitching strategy at the level the General needs but the real crux of PowerPoint in the Army (at the operational and tactical level) is that it is dated information by the time you brief. The Army has spent a lot of money trying to solve this problem with Global Command & Control System (GCCS) and the Army Battle Command Systems (ABCS) via Command Post of the Future (CPOF). The real problem is the integration of legacy combat systems into one Common Operating Picture (COP) that gives ground truth at any given moment.
Our supposedly "best army in the world" can only win by sheer manpower. All our skill and tech and toys are useless, because we don't even utilize 1% of the capability. To eliminate one $20 Taliban, we need to send 50 people and $10M. Either they are that good, or we are that bad. Take your pick.
Someone needs to teach PA Consulting Services the real value and potential of a dynamic mind mapping tool, so this manually-edited madness can stop chewing up dollars and obfuscating the ideas these cigar-chewing Generals paid someone dearly to extract.
Making an overly complex digram larger is akin to jacking up the amplification on an unintelligible, and potentially flawed statement.
"Parlay vew frawn sace? "I SAID! PARLAY! VEW! FRAWN! SACE!"
Somewhere in the swirl of undersized fonts and chaotic connectors are a set of concepts that probably hold up the whole presentation, and could represent real gain, if people could grasp your frickin' message..
Very very Old Gimmick. Come up with a new one please. Thank you!
CubsSoxFans.pps
This is a very effective way of communicating the difference between fans of the Chicago Cubs and fans of the Chicago White Sox.
Maybe the general's problem is that he's missing the eye candy.
This is something I created a few years ago for my team of engineers. I had basically stopped coding at the time and thought I'd share my feelings and observations in my organization on technical/non-technical. Powerpoint is a key contributor to the loss of techiness.
You Know You've Lost that Techy Feeling...
10) Strategy and vision are no longer used to describe development patterns or a pattern recognition system.
9) Your biggest source control issue revolves around which project plan to update
8) PowerPoint is now your tool of choice for mechanical drawings
7) Your biggest resource optimization problem is insuring that everyone's Outlook calendar is free
6) Amazon has stopped recommending "Uber Java for the L33t" and replaced it with "Paradigm shifting for Dummies"
5) You've finally forgotten the "q!" command in VI; or was that the "ctrl-q"; where's my mouse
4) The mythical man month now means anything can be done with enough people
3) You write an all employee email to see if someone can help you take a tab delineated file and change it to CSV. Special points if the reason was to get it into a spreadsheet
2) You do not understand why Dilbert gives his boss such a hard time
1) You no longer cringe, but shake your head in agreement, when someone starts discussing "Driving efficiencies by leveraging our core competencies while eliminating non value add activities in new game changing markets"
I love the sound of distortion in the morning -- webcommando
Has no one noticed that this is a systems dynamics diagram, an attempt to understand all of the relevant forces related to the conflict. Of course it is complex. And, yes, if it an adequate model, when we understand the slide (the model) we will have won the war.
PowerPoint exposes how stupid we already are.
Basically, it isn't "PowerPoint makes us stupid", it is "Stupid people make us use PowerPoint". But that's true in some ways about the entire suite of MS Office products:
* You haven't worked in an enterprise environment until you've been forced to use MS Excel worksheets as database tables, by managers of the kind who use a $2 calculator to work out the solution before typing that solution into the cell. As these "tables" become unwieldy they are augmented by elabourate macros crafted by the boss' secretary (secretaries wield Excel like witches yield black magic).
* All documentation must be authored in MS Word, even 1000 page technical tomes where Word is ill-suited for the task. All doumentation must be passed around via email, until it clogs the server and someone comes up with the idea of an intranet portal (perhaps even Sharepoint! ooooh! aaaah!). Corporate intranet turns into 90%+ .doc content.
* The more forward-thinking bosses realise that MS Excel is not a database (perhaps because their pet .xls file hit the 65k row limits before Excel 2007 was released). Stupid non-normalised tables imported straight from Excel into Access. Secretary learns how to build even more amazingly byzantine forms and macros, and eventually a whole department relies on a creaky Access .mdb on a network drive with no security where a dozen people run giant queries on un-indexed columns where a proper database server would be more appropriate.
And of course, the whole thing must be supported by an IT person who had no role in crafting this mess.
Powerpoint wasn't designed to make people stupid. Just like the rest of MS Office, it has been comandeered by idiots and forced to their mind-numbing bidding. MSFT products may be low in efficiency and reliability, high on resource consumption and vendor lock-in but they are quite easy to pick up even if they lack the "taste" on famous Steve seems to crave. ON one hand it has helped bring computing to the masses. The other edge of that sword is that it has enabled the semi-literate to misapply all of those applications with minimal effort.
A classic: The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
I work as a Systems Admin and Landscape Manager, very often being responsible for 1000+ server landscapes and millions if not billions of dollars invested in the same.
In my specific field of Client/Server CRM and Enterprise Entity Software, there are no "fall back options".
If my systems go down, the entire company goes "bye bye", often affecting hundreds of thousands of people.
For all the reasons mentioned in this article;
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1
I simply flat out refuse to put certain topics in Power Point format. Even at the risk of angering the very, very higher ups.
I found that in this day and age the attention span of most in top management equals that of a 5 year old.
But topics like "Backup and disaster recovery", or "System Safety and Potential Points of Attack" and even things like "Expected performance changes over the lifetime of the System" can not be squeezed into 3-5 line page "tweets".
Entire books have been written on these topics, designed to be read by EXPERTS in the field, and I am to explain the same to someone who doesn't even understand the difference between a Database and a Flat File Store in under 6 lines?
I read a lot of proud pro PP statements from "professional power pointers" in here.
But have you ever stopped to ask yourself if that glazed over look in the eyes of your audience is not caused by the reflection from the projection screen, but their "tilt" light going into overdrive?!
Free will is the illusion that our wits could compensate for our brain's faulty circuitry.
The one slide may not be as compelling as a well-crafted 5-page essay. But next time you want to get a point across at a meeting try handing out your essay ahead of time, see who reads the fucker. Then go crawling back to powerpoint.
It pisses me off that when anyone presents any information that requires some preparation or thought or analysis on behalf of the recipient, that the messenger is automatically to blame.
The diagram in TFA looked like it might be reasonable to me. I might have preferred to have clear large printed copies of just that diagram to hand out so that I could free up the projector to present supporting slides that explained it, but so far as I can tell, as an all-encompassing overview it may well be a very erudite, accurate and useful visualization.
It seems to me that what these people are bitching about most is that the war is complex and they don't like to be reminded of that by some upstart with a laser pointer.
A far greater sin, to my mind, would be putting up dozens of near-content-free slides and then reading the bullets to the audience for slide after slide after slide.
Nullius in verba
Need to win the war? There should be an app for that.
Consider that stolen. I will be using it the next time someone tries to subject me to a PowerPoint presentation against my will.
I agree with the US Military. I will even take it a step further and state that Powerpoint is the electronic set of crutches for people whom either have no training in public speaking, difficulty in doing so, or both.
That looks like a reasonably deep and detailed strategic map? Do people perhaps think that directing an entire national army to affect another nation is a simple matter? I would probably make that hierarchical, so not everything is quite so cluttered, but the breadth of information is what I would expect from something this important. Basically, they need to work on the presentation. Once that is out of the way, the rest is pretty reasonable.
for a company presentation. Substituting Gov -> Executive Commitee, Coalition --> Teams, Population --> Employees, Insurgents --> Unions.
Seems to be working out rather well.
This is just an example of a government project having a by product which is beneficial to all of us.
No need to go to the Mars, when you can spend billions going to Afghanistan..
I also find it boggling that the US military can't figure out how to use both presentation and word processing tools at the same time. Is there a reason a five page report can't be written to accompany the presentation?
Yes. Too many important resources are consumed in developing powerpoint presentations.
There aren't enough resources left to do the excellent detailed analysis. And to type it into a concise 5-page paper. And to read and understand the paper.
I once asked a fellow for some engineering advice. The military had paid for his engineering degrees. He seemed baffled by the simplest engineering questions. When I asked what good was that degree the military had paid for, he said he had never spent a single minute doing any engineering in the military. I said, "What do you do?" He replied, "Powerpoint, mostly." And he wasn't joking.
Captains, majors, and up can pull in six figures and spend most of their time in PowerPoint. In many ways, it is the most valuable skill in the military. After all, flying a stealth fighter, or steering a nuclear submarine can only take your career so far. If you want to make Colonel, you'd better polish your PowerPoint skills.
Put up-to *3* *keyterms* in a *sentence*.
( if you want it to be understanding & remembering )
Same rule applies to charts...
Re the book, though...
Solve & Clarify the STORY, before bothering to try "present"-ifying it.
http://www.amazon.com/Presenting-Win-Telling-Updated-Expanded/dp/0137144172/
NOT affiliated with either amazon.com or with Jerry Weissman.
*Any* operation of mine, this is required study/knowing. Period.
Read the reviews. ( or those of the older editions )
Rule of 3, in the Marines, is:
Never give anyone more than 3 Points of Responsibility.
If there are 4 PoRs,
you need more than 1 person in the operation,
or you've sabotaged their ability to work in instinct-mode.
Lion-tamers use the same Rule of 3 by using a 4 legged chair to hold back lions
( their minds can manage 3 things threatening 'em, not 4 ).
Salamanders published, in Nature mag, awhile ago, that they have the same limit.
Human babies have the same limit, and have known this for a long time ( 3 things, or 3 kinds-of-thing ).
If your chart/graph has 50 kinds of item having its own line,
divide 'em into groups,
and colour-code 'em,
so you get as few valid groups as possible, etc...
Anyways, dig that book, and enjoy the results!
Cheers,
-Me.
Lion-tamers use the same Rule of 3 by using a 4 legged chair to hold back lions
( their minds can manage 3 things threatening 'em, not 4 ).
It's not fair to judge your post and the book you're talking about entirely by this one remark, but experience is telling me: fuck fairness, this guy's an idiot.
... I was a naval exercise controller. As the junior guy, I had the night shift, which not so coincidentally, was when most of the action occurred. First thing in the morning, my boss had to brief the admiral on what training objectives had been accomplished, some other stuff, and... how the engagements during the night had gone down. So one of my big roles was to prepare slides that showed this. People can rant about Powerpoint all they want, but it would have been essentially impossible to make anyone understand how an engagement had progressed without being able to flash a diagram of it up on the screen. Back in the day, people hand-drew these for things like history books, but hand-drawn diagrams would have taken way too long to be useful for our purposes.
Let's get it straight, folks: Powerpoint doesn't make us dumber, people make us dumber (with bad slides).
Hmm, I never realized that the military needs a collaboration tool so much. Of course an AI system would be even better, but that's a pipe dream for now. On the other hand, if a war is so hard to manage in modern time, maybe that'd be a reason for alternative peaceful means.
When I zoom in on the powerpoint, this is what I see.
Their they're doing there hair.
.. I must admit to a grudging respect for Powerpoint in one aspect: I worked once in a setup where they had mapped all the military procurement processes and projects on ONE slide.
I was impressed with Powerpoint for handling that slide because:
- it was size A0 (we printed this on a plotter)
- the font was Arial 10 - that's how much detail we had
I kid you not, this was in the days where scroll wheel mice were just introduced. Never was a feature more welcome, but hats off - Powerpoint coped.
As for content otherwise, well, yes. I agree with the original premise. The only useful thing of Powerpoint is the outliner..
Insert
http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/teaching_slide_design.html http://www.writing.engr.psu.edu/slides.html btw, today i had to give a ppt to a fortune 500 company interested in us (small company smellign $$$$) i had one killer handdrawn figure, you could see the lightbulbs go on when people saw it
A business flight from one one country to another crashes into the sea. Only three survivors; an English businessman, a Japanese businessman and an American businessman. They wash up on the beach of an island inhabited by cannibals. They are immediately captured and told of their fates. However, each will be granted one last wish before they are killed and eaten.
"Well," said the English businessman, "I'd just like a last cuppa."
So they dig into the flotsam that regularly washes up on the beaches of their island and find a case of English tea and a Sterling silver teaset. They start the water boiling.
"I'm not sure you can grant my last request," said the Japanese businessman. "I have been working many hours on a PowerPoint presentation and I was flying to a business meeting to present it when our plane went down. It would be a great disapointment if I couldn't make that presentation fater all the hours I put into it." Well, oddly enough, a portable generator had also washed up on the beach complete with a supply of gasoline. Combined with the Japanese businessman's laptop it would be possible for him to make his last presentation!
"Shit!" said the American businessman. "Kill me first! Don't make me sit through another PowerPoint slideshow!"
I really don't see how this has anything to do with PowerPoint*. Yes, it's a complicated graph. But that really has nothing to do with PowerPoint. You might as well bitch about the evils of the overhead projector while you're at it.
___
*I'm certainly not a fan of somebody reading a bunch of bullet points to me as if that's an effective way to communicate information, so don't take this as a defense of PowerPoint.
"Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point."
or cover up that briefers are, in fact, incapable of polishing their writing to convey an analytical, persuasive point!
A blog on Huffpo picked this story up in an interesting way. The whole Power Point thing is a bit of a red herring when you really consider what that chart is about:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meghan-ohara/diagram-of-a-war-strategy_b_555389.html
And sorry to all for posting as an anonymous coward - new to the site but will sign up soon.
the debate about PowerPoint is fun... everyone's had to sit through or put together one of these MINDNUMBING presentations. Why that's a standard bearer of how to talk to people is beyond me and probably has something to do with the eventual collapse of Western society.
HOWEVER... i feel like there's a far more important message from this debate about PowerPoint. the picture in the NYT article is complex, but it's outlining all the elements of a frigging war! it would be terrifying if such a picture WASN'T complex.
which is all the more reason that it's INSANE that the folks at the Pentagon are all b**ching about PowerPoint when the problem right in front of their faces isn't the program but that THEY don't understand what the program is trying to show them... the strategy of the war they're implementing!
i've read a bunch of articles about this today, this one at huffington did a pretty good job getting at the real problem: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/meghan-ohara/diagram-of-a-war-strategy_b_555389.html