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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.
[...] You should expect to get fired in any industry when you say that to your boss or the media.
Who else here thinks that is exactly what he wanted. He's a Ph.D., stuck in the reserves in a sinecure job in Afghanistan. He just wants to go home.
The problem is that Powerpoint, like Word, defaults to making it very easy for the user to do stupid things or does stupid things by default.
Changing the font size on a slide should be difficult because you should very rarely if ever do it. Fitting more than 4 bullet points on a slide should be hard because you should very rarely if ever do it. There shouldn't be any templates that let you put half a billion graphs and a picture on one slide. Backgrounds shouldn't be complicated and busy by default. There shouldn't be default colour schemes that make Egyptian Hieroglyphs easy to read or reminds people of the good old days of green on black monitors.
Transitions shouldn't be something one picks out of a line up, they should be something you look up how to do because you have a good reason. Unless you are trying to emulate the wipes from Star Wars then you have no good reason to go wiping slides from left to right distracting your entire audience. The default font for body text on a slide should be big enough that it is not only easy to read but also makes it impossible to write an essay on the slide.
Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them? It's a piece of shit that just cant compete with something like Beamer for sensible defaults. It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text, half a billion shitty Excel graphs with crappy hard to understand axes, stupid colour schemes, shitty backgrounds and walls of text and then rush through the presentation like your morning coffee was laced with methamphetamine.
I do not understand this whole thing. The slide touted in your link as the epitome of what is wrong with PowerPoint slides (what does a complicated diagram have to do with presentations?) looks very useful. It illustrates many relationships between the many elements involved, and illustrates how ANSF, for example, has no effect on the economy or infrastructure or vice versa.
Admittedly there is too much information in it, it should be split in 2 for showing institution interactions and concepts, and strength of relation should be shown by line thickness.
I routinely deal with very similar charts for biochemistry and intracellular signaling. They are a godsend for those times when you get lost and forget which element does what, and with complicated systems I get lost every 5 minutes.
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.
Brilliant analogy! As a physics prof I've had colleagues express surprise that I use electronic slides at all (I actually use OpenOffice since its maths with OOoLatex is far superior to PowerPoint). However I use them as you describe interspersed with more detailed derivations/examples on the whiteboard and while it took a little trial and error to get the balance between the two right it seems to work very well for me now and the students love have the slides as a framework to annotate.
... at least once a month, I get an e-mail informing me that there's a commander's call, or some such event.
It never actually says this in the e-mail body, though. The actual date, time, and location, is in a single-slide Powerpoint file, attached to the e-mail.
Powerpoint isn't the problem, people's over-reliance on it is the problem.