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Anti-PowerPoint Party Formed In Switzerland
angry tapir writes "Many people dislike sitting through a meeting being driven with presentation software. Microsoft's PowerPoint is perhaps the best known and most hated of the slide presentation programs out there, but few would take a political stand over it. However, that's exactly what Switzerland's Anti-PowerPoint Party (APPP) seeks to do. From the article: 'According to the APPP, the use of presentation software costs the Swiss economy 2.1 billion Swiss francs (US$2.5 billion) annually, while across the whole of Europe, presentation software causes an economic loss of €110 billion (US$160 billion). APPP bases its calculations on unverified assumptions about the number of employees attending presentations each week, and supposes that 85 percent of those employees see no purpose in the presentations.'"
It's not the software. Just about any presentation software can be used to create valuable, compelling presentations. The problem is most untrained/inexperienced presenters are satisfied with showing people a bunch of stats and clip art, without addressing any concrete topic, and concluding without actionable items.
The real problem is human behavior. Good luck opposing that with a political party.
Correct. I remember sitting through horrible presentations with a speaker droning on before PowerPoint existed. I have also recently attended horrible presentations that did not use PowerPoint.
If someone cannot give a reasonable presentation, PowerPoint will not help them, and it will not actually make the presentation much worse.
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If someone cannot give a reasonable presentation, PowerPoint will not help them, and it will not actually make the presentation much worse.
It has the potential of just doing that: make bad presentations worse.
There is of course the bad use of power point: "Things I am talking about, things I will be talking about,... and here we are at point 4.1.1.1 subpoint b. If you still remember the rest of the structure which was on a previous slide, it could almost make sense. Ooops, that was too fast? don't worry I'll come back to it later, but you might not be able to see it back there anyway. No it is 12 point, It just looks like 6 point to you. Sorry, the labels are also kind of off."
But then there are also power-point specific issues. And not just Tufte is criticizing those: You're forced to shorten things into statements that fit on individual slides. Information appears and disappears without warning, the overall structure is hidden. In bad cases you can't concentrate on the speaker because summaries flash in and out of existence in the other corner of the room.
Colleges love power point. The theory is that multi channel presentation of redundant information increases retention. But some studies show, that retention might actually be lower. At the very least, power point can prevent the audience from thinking-along. Quite often, I think a handout would be the better solution: you don't have to cut quotes, everyone gets the same point size, people can go back and forth on their own and have an overview of the whole structure. Ooh, and even mark interesting points or write down questions.