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PowerPoint Rant Costs Colonel His Job
twoallbeefpatties writes "Wired reports that a 61-year-old reservist in Afghanistan was fired from his job as a staff officer after writing a sardonic op-ed criticizing the daily briefings provided by his taskforce, portraying them as little more than a neverending stream of redundant PowerPoint slideshows. This came after attempts to reform the process by giving his superiors a presentation that, of course, included five PowerPoint slides." Maybe he should have presented it as an art project instead of a complaint.
"Powerpoint also ASSUMES your audience is stupid."
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations. You're SUPPOSED to put your points in bullets because you're there giving the presentation to elaborate upon said bullet points. The audience is not "too stupid" to grasp what you're talking about. However, if you put three paragraphs of text on one slide and talk at the same time then the audience has to decide whether to listen to you or read your slides.
The notes field is there so that you can distribute the presentation to people who weren't there, or to save your audience the time and work of writing down their own notes. This gives you the ability to add information relevant to your presentation that should not be directly discussed. For example, you might simply put an equation and its solution on a slide. You can show your work in the notes for anyone who wants to check this. It also prevents different people from copying down incorrect things. (i.e. your slide says "3.14159" and someone writes down "314159" by mistake.)
If you have found that your audience is "too stupid" to understand your presentations when you read directly off of the slides then the problem is with you, no one else. Not the audience, and most certainly not the tool. Seriously, bitching that power point results in bad presentations is like complaining that a hammer results in injuries when you smack yourself in the head. Power point is absurdly easy to use, the only reason presentations are bad is because people don't take the time to make good ones, and anyone who calls them on this gets the same treatment of the colonel mentioned in the article. Anyone who criticizes bad presentations gets the axe, and people continue to make bad presentations.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
The military is a very large organization, and like any large organization, it has lots of people who are involved in running the organization rather than actually doing whatever the organization actually does. Based on my own service, I'd wholeheartedly agree that we need a lot fewer staff officers and a lot more boots on the ground, but pretending that the military -- or even that portion of the military deployed to the theater of operations -- is ever going to consist solely of people who are actively engaged in killing the enemy is just silly. An army without a command structure isn't an army at all, it's an armed mob.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Indeed, Powerpoint and similar when used correctly are helpful. The problem is that people don't generally know how to use presentation software. Good uses are diagrams relevant to the talk, and a hint as to what the take away is from a section. The problem is that rather than using it as a supplement to the talk, people are essentially putting the entire talk into the Powerpoint and then reading it to the people there. Which is bunk. Personally, I don't use it at all because it's quite a bit easier for me to keep people paying attention if I'm tracking what they're looking like and changing things up as needed.
No, god damnit, it doesn't. Power point is a tool designed to be used in presentations. It is NOT AND HAS NEVER BEEN a substitute for presentations.
Unfortunately, what PowerPoint slides (and presentations) are being used for is a substitute for every other form of communication. Instead of specs, essays, helpful diagrams, and properly organized data, we have slides, slides, slides, and slides. Usually the slides are explained once in one meeting or conference call and then passed around, giving the illusion that information is written down in a usable form. In reality, if you really want to know what's going on you have to call the author (if they even bother to write their name), wasting your time and theirs.
You're right that PowerPoint doesn't force people to communicate poorly, and poor communication has many causes. But PowerPoint does make poor communication easier, and 80-90% of people are using it wrong. The argument of Tufte et al boils down to this: regardless of whether it's a good tool or a bad tool, PowerPoint is not the *right* tool.
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