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.

Comments

Powerpoint in the military

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently he's not alone in his distaste for powerpoint.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[treeves]

Colonel Tufte certainly agrees.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[garyisabusyguy]

Just google, "Powerpoint makes you stupid"

The first that I had heard about this was from a NASA scientist following the Columbia accident. He said that there were too many variables and choices that had to be left out of slides because there was a limit to how much detail could be displayed given (readable) font size and screen resolution

This leads to multiple slides to cover a single topic, and the loss of fresh visual memory as the presentation moves from slide to slide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/AR2005082901444.html

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[icebike]

Powerpoint also ASSUMES your audience is stupid.

Too stupid to grasp the facts unless presented as bullets.

Powerpoint has the presenter making the notes (on slides) that the audience should have made. Essentially the presentation seems to go directly to notes without bothering to stop in anyone's head along the way.

Cliff notes minus the student.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[couchslug]

He displayed testicular fortitude, and he can afford to get fired. I salute him.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[T-Bone-T]

The presenters you've seen are doing it wrong. The presenter must put important information on the slides but it is still up to the audience to fill in the gaps with notes. I love the 3 slides/page handout because it comes with a handy note-taking area next to each slide.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Deadstick]

...as opposed to repeatedly writing on a blackboard and erasing as you go?

rj

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Mr. Freeman]

"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.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Low Ranked Craig]

As someone who have given numerous presentations, Power Point can be very useful, but it is simply a visual aid and not intended to "be" the presentation. I always put required detail on handouts, or show whatever program on the projector that I needed to. Many of my power point presentations for a 2 hour meeting were only 5 slides long - I only ever put bullet points on the slide and I NEVER simply read the slides. Like most tools Power Point is abused - if your only tool is a hammer everything looks like a nail, and don't even get me started on people who use Word for layout...

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Roger W Moore]

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.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[blair1q]

o T
o L
o D
o R

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[blair1q]

I just cancelled a post on a premonition that I'd read your post saying what i was going to say almost exactly how I'd have said it.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[hedwards]

There's guts and then there's stupidity. I'm guessing that as a Colonel, that perhaps he should've known better than to write such a thin as an Op-ed piece. The military is not a democracy and while expressing respect for rank can get one some leeway, certain things are just not to be discussed other than with requisite discretion.

Being fired like this is almost certain to have zero impact on anything going on. Had he opted to more or less keep his mouth shut he could've at least impressed upon his subordinates that they are not to do it themselves.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Minwee]

Nice set of four bullet points there. All you need is some completely irrelevant clip art and a useless animation and you'll be ready to for the CUA.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[blackraven14250]

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.

I'm fairly sure that after one quick experiment with the new technology, if that, they dismissed it as "newfangled technology" with "no discernible purpose in a physics class". Professors are all too willing to dismiss technologies in this fashion, rather than learn how to use them properly to augment their current skillset.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[AdamHaun]

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.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Gonzo The Gr8]

I love the 3 slides/page handout because it comes with a handy note-taking area next to each slide.

I hate those things. Unless you are a very concise note taker, there is never enough room for decent notes, and IMHO they make the slide itself way too small. Also, (and I know this is as much the presenter's fault as the format) I HATE when the slides are "made available" electronically by distributing .pdf's of them in that format.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[interkin3tic]

Powerpoint also ASSUMES your audience is stupid.

Sometimes they actually ARE stupid. Or rather, don't really care. Judging from the colonel's text, this is one of those times. He says he hasn't done anything for months, and the slides never change, and yet they are all required to be there. Sounds like mandatory mental nap time.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[interkin3tic]

Even if you don't bother learning your own presentation beforehand, powerpoint can be an improvement with the presenter view. You can essentially write exactly what you're going to say on the screen you see, and just put the important points up on the main screen.

Needless to say, lazy presentations using -any- format or technology will be inferior to a well thought out presentation using a chalkboard or even charades, but I suspect a lazy powerpoint presentation could be nominally better than a lazy chalkboard presentation.

It's certainly better for those of us who find ourselves going off on pointless tangents when we're actually in front of people. Get me in front of a crowd talking about my work, and it suddenly becomes stream of consciousness. Even working off a paper outline, I'll catch myself going into unnecessary detail at certain points and skipping ahead before looking down at the paper and then backtracking, losing anyone who may have still been following. It's like "OOH! And I should mention this which when I was preparing the presentation thought was non-essential, BUT IS AWESOME!"

I do realize that this is something which could be corrected by practicing the presentation several more times, but I don't always have that kind of time.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[lahvak]

Yeah, I try to do the same thing, in my case they are math classes. Unfortunately some bright person designing our classrooms decided to place the pull down projection screen in *every single classroom* on the entire campus directly in front of the whiteboard. So I have about 2 feet of whiteboard on each side of the screen available for detailed derivations and examples.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[aevan]

You totally forgot sound effects. No presentation is complete without typewriting noises, lasers blasts or something else equally annoying, everywhere.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[adamdoyle]

I hate when they don't wire the lights closest to the screen on a separate switch. It makes it so you have to have it either pitch black or completely white-washing your screen.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[T-Bone-T]

You hit the nail on the head about PDFs.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Come on man, that's like 4 lines right there!

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[lahvak]

You're SUPPOSED to put your points in bullets because you're there giving the presentation to elaborate upon said bullet points.

No, you are NOT! This is in my opinion the very worst thing about PowerPoint, it sort of forces everything into a list of bullet points. There is some, in my experience rather small percentage of talks that really are mainly about a list of bullet points, with a little bit of explanation for each of the points, and PowerPoint is very useful for these talks. In most talks, the structure of the talk, the "table of contents", is much less important than the contents itself. If in one part of my talk I concentrate on linear systems, people will generally remember that if I announce it clearly, and will not need a giant slide projected onto the screen to remind them. It's *what* I am saying about linear system, their properties, relations to non-linear system, linearization etc. that's important. NOT the fact that I am talking about these things in some particular order, but WHAT I am saying about them. I can include a "talk plan" somewhere in a corner of a screen or whiteboard and every once a while point to it in order to make it easier for listeners to realize where I am and how things relate to each other, but it should not be the main focal point of my presentation.

Unfortunately, PowerPoint makes it extremely easy to create presentations that are either just lists of bullets with no contents whatsoever, or, when people try to include contents, they end up with the opposite extreme, which you yourself described as someone putting three paragraphs of text onto the slide, reading them to the audience during the presentation.

It is perfectly possible to make a good PowerPoint presentation, and I have seen a number of them, but it is not easy. It is not entirely a PowerPoint's fault, making good presentations is hard, no matter which tool you use. The problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it so easy to make a bad presentation. In addition to that, if you look at a random PowerPoint tutorial, somewhere on the web or even in the official documentation, they tell you "this is how you make bullet points, this is how you add irrelevant clipart, this is how you make things fly in and bounce around in an extremely irritating way, and this is how you choose an ugly theme for your presentation." So that's what people do.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[zippthorne]

Have you ever tried to attend a class where powerpoint slides were used instead of blackboard/markerboard and presenter?

One of the big problems with powerpoint is that you usually have to darken the room to use it, which kills personal note-taking, which ruins recall: just writing something down helps you remember, even if you never re-read your notes.

PP presentations also tend to move too quickly for good note-taking. It's great for presenting overviews, but if you need teach detail, it's far from ideal. There's a reason its main competitor is called, "Keynote."

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[TheLink]

I daresay many people here read faster than most people talk and comprehend speech.

Presentations are good for people who have little idea of the subject material. They are also good if entertaining your audience is part of the requirement. People who know about the subject material are fine getting it in formats similar to research "papers, manuals, "errata" or similar.

Perhaps the Generals don't need to know the details. But the details are often important. Why does a bunch of important people have to waste time getting schedules synchronized and sitting down for some powerpoint presentation? If the information is important enough can't they just get in their email so that they can go over it thoroughly, and then call/instant message the relevant people if they have questions?

Whatever it is, I think they are doing things wrong, even their "practice for war" is a sham (more about supporting the military industrial complex than actually winning wars?): http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/sep/06/usa.iraq

Looking at what is happening in Afghanistan[1] I think the US military should have seriously learned from what Lt Gen Riper did (and the bigger picture implications).

[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/asiapcf/02/18/analysis.afghanistan.shadow.governors/index.html

As long as you have the constraint that genocide is unacceptable you get diminishing returns from being able to kill more and more people, or destroy more and more with a single weapon. In fact it is counterproductive when you start having too much "collateral damage".

So figuring out who to kill for maximum effect is what you need to do, and getting your version of what happened out to the rest of the population is important.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[jonadab]

I've actually seen PowerPoint used effectively, in a way that enhanced the presentation rather than actively detracting.

Once.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[icebike]

There is a certain amount of that in the military.

The more the better I guess.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Roger W Moore]

Well, unless you happen to be on the same campus, that's not a unique problem! I used a wheeled in whiteboard in a particularly appalling room and fortunately managed to get my class shifted a second time. My challenge for this term is a brand new, very large lecture theatre which uses document cameras rather than whiteboards....should be interesting!

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[the_other_chewey]

Just google, "Powerpoint makes you stupid"

The first that I had heard about this was from a NASA scientist following the Columbia accident.

"The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an
illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."
-- Columbia Accident Investigation Board report, Vol.1, page 191


There's a scary example on that page too, look it up:

The vaguely quantitative words "significant" and
"significantly" are used 5 times on this slide, with de facto
meanings ranging from "detectable in largely irrelevant
calibration case study" to "an amount of damage so that
everyone dies" to "a difference of 640-fold." None of
these 5 usages appears to refer to the technical meaning
of "statistical significance."

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[hairyfeet]

Sadly this is something many of us have pointed out for years: Tools in the hands of stupid users equal stupid results. Its like VB, for a simple GUI to a non networked database? It is the perfect tool. I still have several clients with an old box sitting in the corner with a simple VB 6 database app that is used for simple jobs like keeping track of inventory or customer lists. It is simple, doesn't need hardly any power, it just does its job.

The problem is when you hand these tools to total morons that try to do everything using ONLY the tool instead of using common sense. How many of us have dealt with a PPT presentation where they have overloaded the thing with bullet points and are basically reading the slides to you? Its no different than those that would take VB 6 and try to make some horribly complex app and ended up with a buggy mess. If you use the tool for its intended purpose, like with Powerpoint (or Impress, whichever) to simply point out highlights which you then elaborate on? Then it is a great way to focus you audience on specific points while you fill in the blanks. But sadly as we have seen with every easy to use tool (entire pages made of Flash, anyone?) if it is easy to use the clueless will try to use it for everything, which of course equals a big mess.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Z00L00K]

The major problem is that it is often used in large meetings and large meetings are usually the least useful meetings. If you are lucky you will target 20% of the audience on average during the presentation. But the target floats in the audience so of course you will provide something to every part in the audience.

The problem is that 80% of the audience is idling during the parts that aren't for them.

Then it doesn't matter if you use a whiteboard, powerpoint or just have a speech from a script about the next five year plan.

This is why I tend to have a meeting allergy.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[kdemetter]

- Powerpoint is not the problem , the people using them are

That about covers it.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[ultranova]

If in one part of my talk I concentrate on linear systems, people will generally remember that if I announce it clearly, and will not need a giant slide projected onto the screen to remind them. It's *what* I am saying about linear system, their properties, relations to non-linear system, linearization etc. that's important. NOT the fact that I am talking about these things in some particular order, but WHAT I am saying about them.

So what are you saying about them? If it can't be effectively summarized in a single slide of bullet points, I assure you that most of it is going to melt into a buzz in your audience's ears. There is a limit to how much information human brain can absorb at once before you have to stop and think about it, which requires tuning out the lecturer.

There's a reason why PowerPoint is so popular, and that reason is that it allows you to memorize the main points of the representation despite not catching most of the details. Of course, this rises the question of whether it really makes any sense to do the representation at all, rather than just emailing the bullet point list, but oh well.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[FuckingNickName]

If you are lucky you will target 20% of the audience on average during the presentation.

Is the proportion of British soldiers in US military presentations usually that large?

*ducks*

(literally)

(-1, Flamebait)

(literally)

*ducks again*

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[JamesP]

Obligatory:

http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/2010/08/a-long-time-ago-before-death-by-powerpoint.html

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[asdf7890]

Every time you use Powerpoint Edward Tufte kills a kitten: http://markandrewgoetz.com/blog/index.php/2009/11/my-new-wallpaper/

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Compaqt]

The thing is, aren't most people so bad at speaking that, rather than listening to a long rambling speech and wondering what exactly the point was, it's just better that Powerpoint forces you to reduce your thoughts to a couple of bullet points per page?

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Compaqt]

Yeah, it basically acts as an onscreen outline for the audience who might be wondering "where's this going?"

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[AP31R0N]

Does that say "Too long, did read"?

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[npsimons]

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.

Yes, yes, yes! How many times are we going to have to go through people too lazy to write up better documentation, who only later realize that they have to explain it, and sometimes re-explain it to multiple people, wasting both their and others' time?

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Mr. Freeman]

"But PowerPoint does make poor communication easier"

So does the telephone.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[Mr. Freeman]

"The problem with PowerPoint is that it makes it so easy to make a bad presentation"

And a nail gun makes it too easy to build a bad house. Seriously man, you're blaming the tools for the quality of the work that people use them to create.

Yes, most people make shitty power point presentations. Yes, most power point presentations are complete shit. There's a lot of poor construction too, but I don't see anyone blaming the hammer or the nail.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[GMFTatsujin]

Ignite-style presentations tend to get around this by forcing the speaker to advance a slide every fifteen seconds with a twenty slide limit. Result: five minutes of good stuff. The creed is, "Enlighten us, but make it quick," and this structure does a pretty good job.

I volunteer at Ignite New Mexico, and we've had dozens of fascinating PowerPoint presentations -- a weird paradox, I know. Even if you find a presentation less than invigorating, at least it's short. Chances are you'll be surprised by how interesting *any* topic can be, though.

Check out our YouTube channel.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[lahvak]

A good nail gun does not make it easy to build a bad house. At least it does not make it easier to build a bad house than to build a good house. Think about a nail gun that makes it easy to put a nail in every 15 feet or further, but hard to put them any closer. A nail gun that makes it very easy to use 1/4 inch nails, but significantly harder to use any larger nails. A nail gun that makes it significantly easier to put nail into a boring gray plasticky looking materials than anything nice looking. Imagine a nail gun like that, and imagine that 95% of all builders use that type of nailgun. That would certainly explain lot of the construction I see around the last 10 or 15 years.

Re:Powerpoint in the military

[rnj]

The best presentation I've ever seen was from James Martin -- long before powerpoint

He used 3 projectors and two whiteboards and kept what he felt mattered to his current point up there

The white boards were invaluable in allowing him to add detail on the fly in response to questions from the audience

see power point can cost you your job

[BlackSnake112]

I see people using power point way too much. Professors/teachers use it too much. Most students just download the power point so they do not have to attend class.

Can we just say no to power point?

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Romancer]

For headquarters staff, war consists largely of the endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information. Even one tiny flaw in a slide can halt a general's thought processes as abruptly as a computer system's blue screen of death.

Sounds like he agrees.

And DAMN, that's gotta hurt. No wonder he's in trouble, he presented the shit outta that. :)

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[iamhassi]

I remember reading about this rant (or a very similar rant) awhile ago and I was wondering what the repercussions would be.

Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint

Sorry out of the 3 options I'd have to go with powerpoint presentations. I'm not sure what the Colonel would prefer, but I'm pretty sure there would be a quiet riot if someone walked in and just spoke for an hour or put endless pages of text up on a overhead.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Romancer]

I think you're missing the point (pun intended).

He's talking about just relying on powerpoint to give information. To actually have the slideshow mean something without giving it any real information to start with.

Crap in = crap out. (with pretty graphs and moving icons)

He complains that just having a powerpoint presentation every 12 hours is not the same as having an actual breifing and discussion of information. It's not that you couldn't use powerpoint to do it, but that you have to have, as a goal, the need to actually accomplish something besides presenting a slideshow. Presenting the slideshow not a goal in itself as he claims that it is treated. He mentions that the slides don't even change. Now that would be a hell I would try and avoid.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[tool462]

Agreed. The content may have been inane, but that's not PowerPoint's fault.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

I'm in the military. PowerPoint is used A LOT in the military, and that is because it is an excellent tool for a presenter to use.

A lot of people imagine the worst PowerPoint presenter they've ever had when they rant about PowerPoint being bad... but it's an exceedingly useful tool and this is why it persists today.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[dsginter]

Unfortunately sometimes you can't just talk one-on-one to everyone and you will have to present information to a large group. Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint

The delicious irony of explaining the situation with what might as well be a powerpoint slide. Nice bullet points. A+++ would buy again.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[geekoid]

MAybe the need a power point cadence song?

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently got out of the military. Powerpoint is used A LOT in the military because A LOT of the people being briefed are only able to handle highly formatted, repetitive, infovomit.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[professionalfurryele]

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.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Gaffod]

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.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Shadow of Eternity]

It IS possible for something to just be terrible and still widely used for reasons of pure inertia and arbitrary (likely unintelligent) mandates. Not everything that is popular is also necessarily good.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[shog9]

Wait... So my choices are:

1) a poor public speaker
2) a poor public speaker (with subtitles)
3) a poor public speaker (with pictures and sound effects)

Shucks... Those all suck. But...

With #1, you can do your best to focus. Take notes, use a recorder or memorization tricks... You'll probably miss some portions, and misunderstand others, but with a bit of luck you'll manage to come away with the gist of it.

With #2, you can try to get a copy of the presentation and just read it later, so even though your time has been wasted at least you can still get the information. If you can print out a copy before hand, you can take notes in the margins, or just use the time to read it, thus avoiding some of the waste and potentially allowing you to ask questions.

With #3, you're screwed. There's no verbatim print-out, and now you have flashing images and sounds to compete for your attention span.

A good presenter uses the tools available - whether software, whiteboard, or merely his own voice - to complement the material he's trying to communicate. A bad presenter takes the same tools and distracts himself and his audience. The problem isn't powerpoint - it's thinking that sprinkling powerpoint on a dull, dense presentation magically makes communication happen, expecting that the same folk who couldn't manage to streamline their verbal communication will somehow manage to extract the key points when faced with a dizzying array of new tools for amplifying and emphasizing whatever garbage is fed into them...

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

There is no mandate to use Powerpoint. There was a recent Slashdot article that said Generals "demanded PowerPoint", but really... Giving voice-only presentations is a terrible way to get your audience to absorb the information you are trying to impart on them.

Additionally, for a lot of intelligence briefings, you need charts and maps in order to show hotspots and trends. Unless you think it's easier to update a gigantic real-life map using acrylic overlay (the old way of doing it) and then haul it to briefings to show on a giant easel to the command, you're better off using PowerPoint.

Useless, unneeded briefings are a different topic entirely, and I am not covering that in this post. I am only talking about the usefulness of PowerPoint for a presenter and his/her audience.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

I think a lot of people are missing the point of the slide. While I am not the creator, I'm certain the intent was not for the slide to be used. Rather, it's probably a slide meant to be briefly shown to the audience while a presenter says, "Take a look at how complicated the decision-making process is. What seems like a small decision or action has wide-reaching implications that are difficult to predict in advance, to say the least."

I doubt this slide was meant to be useful for longer than the ten seconds it takes to make that point to the audience. There is nobody looking for meaningful connections in the slide, and nobody is using it for actual mission planning.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Gaffod]

Some nodes are too abstract for practical mission planning use, as I have said splitting abstract and practical elements into separate graphs for theorizing and planning would be better.

I do not think its best use is to illustrate the simple point. I would expect that colonels are able to believe their general when he says "the situation is complicated", rather than demanding evidence like wisecracking schoolchildren.

Note how a different kind of arrow is used to show delayed effect. That kind of detail is pointless for a 10-second snapshot.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[kiwimate]

Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them?

Yes, quite easily, in much the same way as I can blame "sysadmins" who routinely give people admin access to a server because they don't know how to set up access properly. That may be the easiest way out if you don't know what you're doing; if you take a little time to understand the tool you're using, it's just as quick and easy to do it properly.

It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes blah blah blah TLDR

I can see why you think Powerpoint and Word make it easy to do stupid things by default. Your post is a turgid ramble with no coherent structure. If you can't write a few basic paragraphs that succinctly and clearly describe your position when using a bare bones text entry screen, then having powerful tools will simply allow you to present a more powerfully messed up turgid ramble.

They're tools. If a user rushes head first into any tool and starts pressing buttons or typing commands without understanding how to properly use the tool, then...well...garbage in, garbage out. It's the equivalent of RTFM.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

There are already checklists for mission planning.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Gaffod]

A relation map does not simply duplicate a checklist's functionality. I do not think you have been able to follow the discussion.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[MichaelSmith]

Yeah my workplace is a power point tragic. One time the annual christmas dinner had power point. I noticed recently that power point is now an acceptable format for resumes at many employment agencies.

This is where I get off...

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[MichaelSmith]

infovomit.

Great word.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

I guarantee mission planning steps take into account the relation map you reference through means of checklist, especially higher-level mission planning.

Think about it this way... if you use the relation map, you still have to do things one step at a time, anyway.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[rolfwind]

--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?

Maybe your problem is that you're attending church, not the format. Or the speakers are speaking at you rather than to you.

I have seen many fascinating talks like the "Never Talk to the Police" lecture on the Internet which may had 3 or 4 graphics/slides in half an hour but were never the focus of the talks for more than a few seconds to supplement the speech content. Also, if slides were all that, we wouldn't dread the relative with a slide projector and pics of all his vacations.

No, it comes down to content and delivery and taste of the listener. A poor speaker isn't better with PowerPoint, probably worse as he doesn't speed up but drones on bulletpoint by bulletpoint.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Gaffod]

You "guarantee" it? How, pray tell? Are you a military planning policy maker of some sort?

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kagura]

Many years in the military.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[zippthorne]

Uh..

That slide is absolutely terrible. For one thing, it won't even be legible for anyone not doing the presentation in an IMAX theater, or at least one with individual screens. Certainly not the poorly focused SVGA projectors that seem to go hand-in-hand with it.

Further, there's way too much information on there. People won't be paying attention to the presenter while that things up (at the IMAX presentation room, remember). They won't even be absorbing the information in it. They'll be lazily playing "Euler's Bridges" with the line art.

You don't put an image like that up, except as a joke to help you introduce the glossy, high-resolution B-size handout and packet explaining it, close to the end of your presentation.

The fact that you think it's actually a good idea goes a long way suggesting that powerpoint itself is a big part of the problem.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[lahvak]

Actually, none of your three options is good by itself. In order to transfer substantial amount of information to the crowd, you need to combine all three of them. Besides, all three of the individual options can be done with PowerPoint. I have seen may talks where someone put basic outline of their talk on the screen, and then talked and talked and talked. At the end, most people remembered the outline, if anything at all. I have seen talks where the speaker had gobs and gobs of text on each slide, and read them along. Interestingly enough, I have seen a number of talks where this method worked extremely well, but in these cases the text was extremely complicated and needed very close attention to detail, and the audience was extremely motivated, carefully followed the text with the speaker, and asked questions when they did not understand some part. Finally, I have seen presentation full of multimedia, very entertaining, but with very little actual content.

On the other hand, each of the tree options can be easily done without PowerPoint.

In most cases, you need to strike the right balance between the three options you listed, Whether you use PowerPoint or not is largely irrelevant. PowerPoint and similar tools can make things easier, on the other hand, they seem to often "lead people the wrong way" to easily.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[the_womble]

--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?

I can remember stuff from some sermons I heard years ago: it depends on whether the speaker has anything interesting to say and whether they can speak well. If you have nothing to say and cannot speak well you should STFU.

--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does

If you do that, you might as well drop the talk and just let people read it - that is often the best thing to do anyway.

--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible

Easily digestible if done right, which is difficult to do and takes far more work than simply writing it down and circulating copies.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[the_womble]

Yes and no. Power Point tends to encourage this.

It is rather like saying that you can do any given task in any Turing complete language - its true, but they are not all equally well suited to a particular task (even ignoring speed/efficiency considerations).

Similarly, using Power Point when what you want is:

1) A tool to jot down notes to speak from (a text editor or word processor)
2) A tool to produce a report to be circulated (typically a word processor - although personally I think something like Lyx is more productive)
3) A tool to produce diagrams to embed in the above

or some combination of the three will lead to a bad result.

You should use Power Point for, and only for, slides to accompany a talk you have already drafted.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[khallow]

--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?

I'm not sure what the point of this argument was about. Ultimately, "talking for an hour" is what all lectures are, whether or not they are "multimedia". Someone talks, possibly with pretty pictures and sounds, and if things go right, you retain some knowledge afterward. If things go wrong, which they often do, then you've just wasted a bunch of peoples' time. To be blunt, I don't see multimedia helping that much in communication. A far more useful tool is audience participation. If you can get them asking questions, then they're retain a lot more of what you tell them. Power point doesn't encourage (nor to be honest does it discourage) audience participation.

I've worked in education off and on for twenty years and it's still very hard to beat the chalkboard as a aid in lecture-style communication. You can do the most important parts of power point, that is, distill information into digestible chunks (chalkboard does bullet points!), draw impromptu pictures and text (can't be done in Power Point itself, though you can always bring extra slides to anticipate such needs), and the technology overhead is very low (you need a board, chalk, and a decent outline, either in your head or on some other medium).

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Kilrah_il]

PowerPoint slides are a great tool to help augument a presentation by highlighting key points and adding helpful visuals (as you can see in almost all of the lectures on Ted.com). Done right this can keep the listeners alert by having them shift attention between what the lecturer is saying and what is on the current slide.

The problem is that many people's idea of a PowerPoint slideshow is what you described as option 2 - condensing the entire text of the lecture onto slides and then you get someone who just recites what is shown on the slide. As someone who learned to read many years ago, I don't need this and that just makes me go to sleep (which isn't a bad thing usually, but...).

In the end, making good PowerPoint slideshows is a skill, one of many needed to be a good lecturer. And sadly, nothing can help someone who sucks at lecturing.
Last point, in my studies I had, once in a while, a lecturer come in without a slideshow and just talk. If he's good - he can be interesting with no aids whatsoever. It's harder, but it can be done.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[houghi]

Most people are crap at giving Powerpoint presentations but can you really blame them?

Well, yes.
First there is already the wording. You should not give a Powerpoint presentation, you should give a presentation and Powerpoint might be a tool to help you with that. It might not be.

When I give a presentation, I use powerpoint to help me put an order in the things I need to bring across. I could easily be writing it down on some memory card and do the presentation from that.

I have given presentations without handouts, except for me, using a whiteboard or a flipover instead of powerpoint, because the beamer would not work. If I can not bring across whatever the message is that I want to bring across without Powerpoint, I am not the right person to bring the message across.

Unfortunatly most Powerpoint Presentations are indeed just that. A Presentation of the Powerpoint slides. The reason often is that the presenter is insecure for whatever reason. Could be that the date he presents is false or he does not know enough about the subject or he is just a timid person who does not want to be there.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Quiet_Desperation]

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.

A hammer is a universally liked and used tool, but it's VERY easy to do stupid things with it. :-)

But at the end of the day it is still the user's fault if he make bad slides. When I have a technical presentation, my slides have one black and white diagram (with light, pastel colors used very occasionally) and little to no text at all (other than what's labeled in the diagram), and I speak to the diagrams. My presentations go over very well. Different data types require different formats.

It practically begs you to do 500 slides filled with wipes, animations, walls of text,

It does no such thing. This whole "the program made me do it" clap trap is psychobabble, and the angry reaction the program evokes in people is bizarre.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[professionalfurryele]

Perhaps there is a better way to phrase my objection. There exists software which while requiring no extra effort on the part of the user, would enable them to give better presentations (for example Beamer and Latex).
In an ideal world users would be taught how to give sensible presentations and it wouldn't matter what program they use, heck WordPad is perfectly adequate for most presentations.
The thing is that PowerPoint isn't trying to be a general purpose piece of software, it is designed for presentations. It is designed for presentations and it gets it's backside handed to it by bloody typesetting software!
Using your analogy, PowerPoint is a bad hammer. We don't ship hammers with sharp spiky grips by default, and being able to replace these grips wouldn't make a hammer that ships this way good.
Is it the users 'fault'? I'm not really concerned with blame. There exists a simple way to make most presentations I have to sit through better and that really is all I care about.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[professionalfurryele]

Well I'm glad you've come up with a realistic solution to the problem of millions of under qualified people having to give presentations. Getting all of them to be experts in communication is certainly a more realistic solution than either changing the defaults in the most widely used piece of software or displacing said software in the market.
Why we can apply this solution to the healthcare market as well! Everyone gets medical complaints, so lets just make everyone learn to be Doctors! And we don't need sensible conventions when it comes to wiring a plug because everyone can just become expert electricians!
As for the rest of your post, TLDR and RTFM in one post? Wow, I'm impressed, you really don't care that people think you are an arrogant jackass do you.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[professionalfurryele]

I've got nothing against some Microsoft software, especially back when the Microsoft mantra was 'cheap and adequate'. The problem is that PowerPoint is too easy to use stupidly and now costs your first born and your right testicle, even when you don't have a right testicle.
General consumption software should be informed by expert knowledge and best practices. PowerPoint is the equivalent of a HTML editor that doesn't make using CSS the default behaviour.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[professionalfurryele]

While I take your point, the reason I said 'giving a PowerPoint presentation' rather than 'giving a presentation' was to distinguish between bad presentations (those given with power point), and good ones (those not). Most presentations given without PowerPoint don't suffer from the problems that those given with PowerPoint do.
I've given presentations without a beamer as well (in my case because I felt that the black board was a more appropriate tool for that particular presentation). I'm all for using the right tool for the job, but at the end of the day there are more people who have to give presentations than there are people we can train to give good presentations (either because of ability, inclination or time).
I really don't see the harm in having software informed by expert opinion and best practices so that even the bad presentations we have to sit through are properly laid out, concise by necessity, etc..

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[NonSequor]

I thought it was a graph theory exercise.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Jim Hall]

There's a 4th option there that you missed: slides that support your talk, but are not a requirement for your talk.

My challenge to presenters is to find a way to reduce the number of slides in your PPT deck to only those that directly supputort what you're talking about. If it's not related to the point, isn't supportive, take out the slide.

Here's what I often encourage: if you're giving an hour-long talk, you'll probably talk for 45 minutes, and 15 minutes QA. You have 5 slides. I'll spot you a free name and title slide, and a free "if you have questions here's my email" slide. So you actually have 7 slides for those 45 minutes.

That's quite a feat. But I've given lots of presentations like this, and the comments I've received have all been very positive. The audience feels more engaged to what I'm actually saying, and not the pretty text and animations on my slides.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[gomoX]

This is assuming you want people to understand the flows and interconnections in such a diagram.

Have you considered the point of the speaker might instead have been "This is how things work. No kidding", o something along that line? In which case I think the slide is brilliant: it clearly emphasizes that the situation is a mess and makes it very easy for the audience to remember that fact, because if provides a very graphical and intuitive representation. I would think 99% of the people in the room see this and go "WTF?".

OTOH, if the speaker then went over the slide over the course of an hour, following arrows, then you might as well just shoot the audience in the face.

Additionally, no higher resolution is going to help you understand that pack of spaghetti. Is just poor visualization.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[npsimons]

Your options for presenting information to a crowd:
--vocal: just talking for an hour, which is popular in many religions, and we all remember what the sermon was about last Sunday, right?
--visual text: just endless paragraphs so they can read along which, as far as I can tell, no one does
--multimedia: pictures, audio and video that attempts to explain in a manner easily digestible, hence Powerpoint

You missed one: email. I mean, seriously, why don't people get that interrupting everyone's day just so you can ramble on while pretty pictures fly from the overhead is a waste of everyone's time? There's a reason I fall asleep during meetings: lack of intellectual stimulation. Just email me the slides and I'll read them at my own convenience in 5 minutes while staying awake and absorbing more information. Not all the information is in the slides? Then write a report and email it to me! How hard is this people?

There are three things I demand from a meeting:

1. An agenda - otherwise you're just wasting time talking about the boss's favorite sports team.
2. Ten participants or less - because more than ten, and not everyone can participate, and if they are not participating, why are they there?
3. Less than an hour - if you can't decide something in an hour, you need to break it down and have submeetings.

Notice how none of these involve dissemination of information which can be done much more quickly and efficiently via email. If you want to have a meeting for all those people that learn much better from lecture style engagements, fine, just leave me off the invite list and email me the slides and/or report.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[Quiet_Desperation]

I would suggest that PP is much more of a Swiss Army Knife than most people give it credit for. I use it for presentations, for technical data packages and I'm even composing an e-book with lots of images in it.

*shrug* It's the only thing MS puts out that I honestly like outside of the XBox.

Re:see power point can cost you your job

[lennier]

OTOH, if the speaker then went over the slide over the course of an hour, following arrows, then you might as well just shoot the audience in the face.

Which, remembering the presenters, could certainly be arranged.

Did they fire him...

[bl4nk]

... via PowerPoint?

Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Sepodati]

He should have kept his rant to PowerPoint instead of basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization. You should expect to get fired in any industry when you say that to your boss or the media.

-John

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Walter White]

[...] 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.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[kevinNCSU]

Not only that, he specifically called out his own position as having too many and himself as unproductive. I think any of us would get fired if we went to our boss and said: "We have WAY too many software engineers, I can't swing a dead cat around here without hitting one! And I should know, I've got nothing but time to swing dead cats around the office because I haven't been productive in TWO full months! And let me tell you, their no fucking good once you hit a software engineer with one cause the tail breaks right off. You see? I mean look at this fucking thing, what am I supposed to do with a dead cat without it's fucking TAIL?! HOW am I supposed to SWING this thing now, HUH?! Tell me that BOSS man!?!?!"

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[geekoid]

".... basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization."

Strawman.

he said no such thing. He said they were using power point incorrectly.

It's not saying you part of a worthless organization if you correct they way someone is using their weapon, or correct them when they don't file document correctly. This is no different.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[geekoid]

Why do you think he will go home?

haha, I just though of Colonial Clink and general hofstedder(?).

General: "Clink If you disturb me one more time, I will send you to the front!"

Clink: "Yes General hofstedder"

Hogan: "I'll go bang your hot secretary now."

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[WallaceAndGromit]

The legs.

There, I've increased your productivity by a factor of 5!

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[hedwards]

There's right ways to do that and wrong ways to do that. The military is not a democracy if your CO doesn't agree or isn't interested in listening you don't have much say in what happens. The military isn't really known for tolerating insubordination. In fact they have entire facilities and commands filled with people that thought they were smarter than the folks higher up the chain. Generally they are places which are quite unpleasant and in parts of the world which are even less desirable than combat zones. The last thing you want to do is go public with something like this, whatever the outcome you can be pretty sure that you're not going to be occupying the same position for too much longer after that.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[sconeu]

Please, be specific.

Hofstaeder always threatened to send Klink to the Russian front.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Anonymous Coward]

are you stupid or just a retard ? go read the fucking article.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[im_thatoneguy]

he said no such thing. He said they were using power point incorrectly.

Ummmm No I have to go with the parent on this one. He practically says the words "part of a worthless organization".

More likely it was founded to provide some general a three-star command. Starting with a small group of dedicated and intelligent officers, IJC has successfully grown into a stove-piped and bloated organization, top-heavy in rank.

Next month IJC will attempt a giant leap for mankind. In a first-of-its-kind effort, IJC will embed a new stovepipe into an already existing stovepipe. The rationale for this bold move resides in the fact that an officer, who is currently without one, needs a staff of 35 people to create a big splash before his promotion board.

So in other words the whole operation is just to pad resumes but serve no purpose. That is my definition of a "worthless organization".

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[commodoresloat]

Exactly. Just like General McChrystal talking smack to Rolling Stone. These people are not idiots, folks.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Weedhopper]

No, he gives a shit, and took a stab at making the system better, and by stab I mean a career destroying rant, and not just his. Kudos.

No, he most certainly did not.

You said it yourself. He ranted. Do you see a single constructive suggestion for improving the system in his article?

No. Just whining, bitching, complaining and moaning. That's not making the system better.

He deserved to be fired.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Weedhopper]

Gen McChrystal's mistake was allowing his subordinates to blatantly disrespect and disparage HIS superiors/civilian authority in his presence.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[Provocateur]

Brilliant! But I can't decide whether to read it in a Joe Pesci making a presentation or Christopher Walken making a bullet point kind of voice, so I decided to default to Will Ferrell instead.

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[evilviper]

".... basically saying he was a part of a worthless organization."

Strawman.

he said no such thing. He said they were using power point incorrectly.

Wow, you're incredibly dense... In fact, he doesn't have ANY complaints about Powerpoint at all. His complaints are ALL, DIRECTLY about how useless his current assignment is, saying "it was founded to provide some general a three-star command": "a stove-piped and bloated organization, top-heavy in rank". "little of substance is really done here".

He doesn't complain about Powerpoint, but instead about typical bureaucracy. Useless meetings, providing useless information to "cognitively challenged generals" who "listen to the CUA in a semi-comatose state." Provided information being of inconsistent quality at best... "Fortunately, none of the information provided makes an indelible impact". Where the manner in which the information is presented is important, and the quality and usefulness of the information is ignored: "Harried movement together with furrowed brows and appropriate expressions of concern a la Clint Eastwood will please the generals. Progress in the war is optional."

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[sconeu]

Oops! You're right! "I know nozzing!"

Re:Should have kept his rant to PowerPoint

[commodoresloat]

You're assuming Gen. McChrystal did this by mistake.

Power Corrupts...

[Anonymous Coward]

...Power point corrupts absolutely

Re:Power Corrupts...

[couchslug]

A General agrees:

http://www.mca-marines.org/gazette/photo/gen-james-mattis-power-point-makes-us-stupid

Re:Power Corrupts...

[blair1q]

Had to click through a few things to actually see it:

http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2010/04/us_marine_corps_general_powerpoint_makes_us_stupid.html

and the original NYT piece:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=1

both include some brilliant shit, and absolutely nail some of the things I've noticed about what PPT does to your information organization

Re:Power Corrupts...

[zippthorne]

It corrupts, pointedly. Jeez, way to ruin a good comedic phrase translation, captain mad-libs.

Jolly bad show, Colonel

[Rogerborg]

You're either with the gargantuan effort to move the drinks cabinet six inches closer to Kandahar, or you're with the terrorists.

Powerpoint in the military

[rnturn]

Wasn't there an article on Slashdot some years ago about how the Pentagon was trying to reduce the use of PowerPoint in briefings because of the lack of information content and how they were fostering poor communications? For some reason the phrase "PowerPoint Rangers" sticks in my mind from the article. Apparently, the higher ups in the Pentagon were unsuccessful in their attempts to stave off the use of the software. This guy must have had to sit through one too many PowerPoint presentation with unnecessary animated bullet points -- with the ever-popular Yellow text on a DarkBlue background, of course.

Excellent rant

[confused one]

That was good. Not surprised he was fired; but, it was definitely good.

Good idea..Rant about being unproductive

[kevinNCSU]

I'm not sure claiming you've done absolutely nothing productive for two months is a good idea if you don't want to get fired. Nor is insulting powerpoint. If you think insulting your Commander in Chief in front of the press while in uniform is a bad idea because of HIS sway over the military you surely don't want to even CONSIDER %$#@$ing with powerpoint. Have fun watching 500 slide Army technical presentations with 40 pages of text per slide for the rest of your tour in Leavenworth.

Re:His commanding officer...

[peragrin]

nope the commanding officers rarely attended the meetings forcing instead mid level managers (colonel's) to do nothing but actually attend endless meetings.

In another article I read there are some 1800 LT colonels, and 700 actual troop commanding jobs for them in the british army. that is just asking for trouble.

Re:His commanding officer...

[gnasher719]

In another article I read there are some 1800 LT colonels, and 700 actual troop commanding jobs for them in the british army. that is just asking for trouble.

You got your numbers wrong. One of these lieutenant colonels is supposed to command 700 troops. The number was that there are about 100 times that many in the British army, so 100 LT colonels would be needed. Out of 1800. Not 700, but 100.

Re:PowerPoint sucks

[tompaulco]

Seriously, PowerPoint just plain sucks.
I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent. Microsoft seems utterly devoted to form over function. If it were not for Microsoft products, 90% of people in the computer industry today would be exposed for the incompetent boobs that they are.

Re:He should be happy

[Daniel Dvorkin]

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.

Re:He should be happy

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Replying to myself to clarify: I'm not arguing with Colonel Sellin's point at all; he's absolutely right, and the service could use a lot more officers like him. I was replying only to Simonetta's comment that "If he isn't ... actively engaged in killing people ... then he has no business being there," which shows complete ignorance of how the military functions.

Re:He should be happy

[Dolphinzilla]

he's prepping for his $250K dollar a year contractor job in Afghanistan when he retires, of course - now he can start sooner !

Re:let's put it in perspective

[DirePickle]

What?

Re:He should be happy

[blair1q]

If he's 61, he's lived through a few world-class military-political fuckups and knows better than you do about what happens when you let the terrorists run around unabated, and that the only way to prevent that is to put someone in harm's way, and if the pussies behind the keyboards won't do it, then you have to do it yourself.

You can thank him when he gets home. I hope he decks you.

Re:let's put it in perspective

[blair1q]

Thank you for reminding us all that no matter how much real information exists, some people will still totally miss the point.

Re:He should be happy

[geekoid]

Unlike you, some people take their responsibilities seriously. There was a problem, he tried to get it fixed. Kept trying until he went off on a rant.

Also, There are a lot of support roles that need to be filled. I'm not sure how you think logistics and strategy is done.

A Lamborghini Dump Truck

[MarkvW]

Our military is being wasted as an occupying army.

In a war (a real war) the dumbass powerpointers would have their sorry asses shuttled out of the way. In Afghanistan, they're running the show. That's a sign just how messed up it is over there.

Re:A Lamborghini Dump Truck

[blair1q]

They run the show in every war. The thing about Afghanistan is that it's not a war so much as an attempt to start an economy and a cultural revolution while policing random thugs.

Which means the people at the rear don't have anything of substance to work on, and are engaged in continually statusing each other on the things they put in place years ago hoping to accomplish the mission they knew was a marathon of cyclic behaviors, not a race to beat the Rooskies to Berlin.

It sounds like they could combine the information flows and reduce the HQ by a significant number. But unless the person on top of them does that for them, they're going to continue the status quo, making only incremental improvements, because those show up as just as many bullets on their promotion packets.

Hopefully either Petraeus or POTUS will jump into the circle and make some changes.

Re:A Lamborghini Dump Truck

[CheshireCatCO]

Had PPT existed in WWII, they would have used it, too. The same problems existed then. Read Catch-22, Heller satirizes a lot of the same sorts of issues with bureaucracy in the military from 50 years ago.

Re:let's put it in perspective

[blair1q]

The Taliban are inveigled into civilian populations throughout Afghanistan and half if not all of Pakistan.

If we were simply to nuke those areas we'd get about a 0.01% ratio of bad guys to collateral damage. Then the rest of the world would rightfully come after us.

So no. When that idea was presented (probably milliseconds after 9/11, probably by GW Bush), it was rejected as more expensive than just nuking ourselves.

It's at this point you should expect someone to tell you to grow the fuck up. And if you didn't expect that, then you're even farther behind than I thought.

I'm A PowerPoint Heretic

[hedgemage]

I'm a blue-collar guy who is currently enrolled in a part-time MBA program that is designed for working adults, and the rest of them are white collar. Whenever the courses require PowerPoint, the slides flow freely and in dizzying density and volume.
I, on the other hand, gave the best presentation of my life without a single slide, and even when I need to use them, I limit myself to 3-5 slides. Working on team projects, I often need to talk down my colleagues who think that more slides = better presentation. One guy had 13 slides for a four minute presentation, other times people are trying to cram spreadsheets into slides and expecting the audience to be able to pick out some kind of useful information.
If it were up to me, I'd always do it without the slides. Once I master public speaking that way, I'll maybe consider using PowerPoint.

Re:I'm A PowerPoint Heretic

[Lifyre]

Amen, I'm military, a grad student, and I've taken public speaking classes. Power Point is a great presentation tool, however it is so easy to abuse that most people don't know how to use it. The rule of thumb we were given in my speaking class was you should have no more than 1 slide per minute of presentation. It should be used as a summary of your talking points and for posting facts so accurate notes can be taken.

I actually use it quite extensively for click by click how-to's teaching said officers how to open outlook and reply to emails...

Re:I'm A PowerPoint Heretic

[zippthorne]

I'm really not convinced that it should be used as a summary of your talking points, either.

I think it should be used for showing graphics. Whether those are photographic images or charts or maps, though not necessarily static graphics. Animation is ok for certain uses, if it means that less detail needs to be on the screen at any given moment.

In short, It should be used for showing things that everyone in the room needs to see in order to discuss the topic at hand. More than that is a distraction.

Re:I'm A PowerPoint Heretic

[drinkypoo]

I'm really not convinced that it should be used as a summary of your talking points, either.

there should be nothing on a slide not worth writing down, aside from those visual items which simply cannot be efficiently described or which are too complex for the average audience member to visualize from your description. if your talking points are worth writing down, put them on the slide. Then give the audience the location from which they can download the presentation (hopefully at the beginning) so that they don't have to write anything down.

Re:I'm A PowerPoint Heretic

[Lifyre]

As a bit of correlary if your point isn't worth writing down should you even be talking about it?

Got the quote wrong

[Frequency Domain]

If Powerpoint is your hammer, everything looks like a thumb.

Re:He should be happy

[UnknownSoldier]

> If he's 61 then what the hell is he doing in Afghanistan? If he isn't a terrorist in training, scoring heroin, or actively engaged in killing people because they wear rags on their heads and cut the noses off little girls, then he has no business being there.

Right, because anyone over this "magic age" of 61 doesn't deserve the right to serve their country over seas...

> So, yeah, dude, come home and get a life.

And all those years of experience you have of being older than him justifies that your opinion of how he should live his life over his own personal preference is what again?

Quite being a dick. At least he had the balls to say how to make things better.

Re:PowerPoint sucks

[hedwards]

So, that's your backwards way of agreeing? Perhaps if people are incompetent boobs, it might be nice to know for sure so that we can get them the hell out of here.

Re:PowerPoint sucks

[Hatta]

What's wrong with transparencies? Or for that matter a damn blackboard?

Obligatory...

[humphrm]

... Damian Conway Presentation Akido plug... if you've never caught one of his talks, you must. There isn't much info on the web, because he never releases the presentation slides (the slides should back up the speaker, not replace him/her) and only a few people have written reviews of his talk (here's one.

The one thing about Damian, he practices what he preaches. In his other talks about Perl, he follows his own rules. The slides are a tool, not the focal point. You really want to listen to what he says, and the presentation screen adds some spice, but doesn't distract the listener from *him*.

Power Point takes the fall again for meetings

[bzipitidoo]

Didn't ring true to me when I first heard it, and still doesn't now. Presentation software is only a tool, and a symptom of the real problem whatever that is. Why not bash overhead projectors, or similar displays? Or the custom of presenting slide slows? How about picking on chalk or dry erase boards? The real problem is doing a bad job of giving a lecture or holding a meeting. Meetings are frequently fingered, justifiably, as badly done and a waste of time.

I'm in the USAF...

[Jeian]

... 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.

Re:I'm in the USAF...

[oneiros27]

Only once a month?

In the agency I work for, we used to get noticed of meetings / workshops / retirements, etc. at least once a week that way. (Look, I can insert clip art!) Luckily, it's gone down in the last year.

Unfortunately, my mom's a recently retired staff officer from a DoD organization, so I still get notices of newborns, holiday parties, etc, as those one-slide power point files.

Re:let's put it in perspective

[misexistentialist]

probably milliseconds after 9/11, probably by GW Bush

Nah, he was reading a book about a goat. On 9/12/01 the rest of the world would have sighed in relief if Afghanistan disappeared. By 9/13/01 with the decision-makers erecting a shield around Al Saud and developing their plans for Iraq, the US government revealed itself as no longer existent, and Al Qaida was victorious, Allah be praised.

2 Types of military man

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The Warrior. He's here to fight, kill, and die. Generals Patton, MacArthur, Mattis, Chesty Puller, etc.
2) The Beancounter. He's here to make sure the Warriors get what they need to do the job.

Unfortunately, the current DoD setup emphasizes the Beancounter. When a beancounter rises to power, if he has no warrior spirit, it is almost always a bad thing. The beancoutners do not know how to fight, they only know how to work a budget. Unfortunately where the Warrior would say "we cannot by without XX, we must have it to achieve the mission" the Beancounter says "ok, we cant have XX but I got you a YY and two ZZ's, use those instead, even if they're useless".

Im being harsh. But I'm making a point.
There's been too much emphasis of politics and asskissers within the military complex. They need to get rid of all the political animals and replace the ass kissers with ass kickers.
When you give a job to do, fine, we'll do it. Just shut the hell up and get the f out of our way and let us do it. The problem is along with all this politcal bullshit theres too much micro managing, telling the military how to wage war. Last I checked, waging war was the military's area of expertise, not the politicians'

But this kind of environment is a breeding ground for the beancounter / political state of mind. And it needs to stop.

Re:He should be happy

[unitron]

He's a reservist. It probably wasn't a case of asking to go as much as being told to go.

Not just the military

[Anonymous Coward]

"Like most military organizations, structure always trumps function."

Like most any organization, structure always trumps function.

Re:Powerpoint: The NASA guys are wrong

[David_Hart]

No, Powerpoint doesn't make you stupid nor does it assume that your audience is stupid...

The problem is when people try to cram too much information into a single session. When you have too much information to fit on the slides, it's time to break out your presentation into multiple sessions that builds on each other. Something like rocket science requires the dissemination of a ton of data. There are two ways to provide this data to the audience. The first, as I mentioned, is to break it up. The second would be to provide specific data as an attachement to the presentation and provide this information to the attendees for further study. You then need to hold a follow-up Q&A session to answer any questions.

The problem is the lack of presentation skills, not the tools....

David

Re:Ehh?

[herojig]

No your not! The article was clearly about the ineffectiveness of the management stream in the military, which anyone who's been there already knows. I thought his article was clear and well written - bravo Colonel! Too bad he lost his job, or pension, or whatever happened. A good satirist will use a prop (PowerPoint, in this case) to make their points. But where is the accompanying PP file?

Powerpoint is a vast scapegoat

[Quiet_Desperation]

Powerpoint is just a tool, a digital blank canvas, like any other application of its kind. If your slides suck, it's *your* lack of communication skills. There were bad presentations back in the days of film slide projectors and overhead transparencies. I had a number of sucky lecturers back in college. Do I blame the blackboard?

There's an example online somewhere where a guy takes the Gettysburg address, reduces it to a ridiculous summary, puts it into Powerpoint slides, and then blames Powerpoint. WTF?? The reduction to a minimalist state happened before he even touched a computer and, yes, there are some things that should not be put into slides. I wouldn't use Photoshop to write a novel, either.

mandatory diagram

[bickerdyke]

BTW: Is it mandatory to put the diagram with the three intersecting circles into each and every powerpoint presentation?

Re:PowerPoint sucks

[jimicus]

I disagree. I think Powerpoint, like all of Microsoft's products, does an excellent job of making someone who is not very good at a task, look at least competent.

Only to people who don't know what competency looks like.

Fortunately, there is no shortage of such people in the world.

Picture this

[GerryHattrick]

I use mostly pictures (including pictures of documents, diagrams) so that people have something relevant to look at if they're bored with looking at me. Simplified graphs, if they help make a point (please see Tufte). NO bullet-points, ever. So when organisers, or interpreters, say 'may we have slide-copies' before/after, the answer is 'No' (but I'll give interpreters a vocab-list). If they want stuff for the record, a 2-page handout is best, AFTER you can integrate the Q&As, and misunderstandings detected over coffee. Actually, OHP foils were always better than Powerpoint, because you could edit and switch if some earlier speaker had stolen your time.

Learn your presentation ahead of time?

[multipartmixed]

Why in God's name would anybody want to do that?

The odd time I have to go into the city to make nice with suits, I make up my slides on my way in on the train (2 hours) while I think about what I want to say. The slides cover the major topic titles.

Then I get in, fire up the projector, and wing it. The slides are great because they keep me on track, and give them impression that I'm doing a well-prepared presentation.

Re:Handy Note Area

[TaoPhoenix]

Sure there is plenty of room - it's called the other side of the page!

This is sort of a joke

[Antisyzygy]

How is the Military supposed to be accountable for its actions if they fire everyone that speaks out about something that isn't efficient or right?