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Why PowerPoint Should Be Banned
An anonymous reader writes: An editorial at the Washington Post argues that Microsoft PowerPoint is being relied upon by too many to do too much, and we should start working to get rid of it. "Its slides are oversimplified, and bullet points omit the complexities of nearly any issue. The slides are designed to skip the learning process, which — when it works — involves dialogue, eye-to-eye contact and discussions. Of course PowerPoint has merits — it can help businesses with their sales pitches or let teachers introduce technology into the classroom. But instead of being used as a means for a dynamic engagement, it has become a poor substitute for longer, well-thought-out briefings and technical reports. It has become a crutch."
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... MEETINGS should be banned.
The number of useful powerpoint presentations I have seen can be counted on one hand, but the number of presentations where all the presenter does is read, slowly, the slides to the room is uncountable...
to improve the quality of its briefings while reducing bureaucracy and wasted time is ban powerpoint.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
"Its slides are oversimplified, and bullet points omit the complexities of nearly any issue.
- I see, so the reasons to use PowerPoint are exactly the same reasons as the ones to ban PowerPoint.
You can't handle the truth.
I have none of those issues. PowerPoint is workable and quick and if you need a better slide you can just draw it yourself. Trying to use a slide show as the main way to show something is stupid anyways. They are supposed to be supplementary to a discussion.
Today I was searching for some mathematical papers, and could find nothing but the PDF slides of a conference presentation. It was terribly frustrating to have so many relevant bullet points with no actual content.
It's good luck to be superstitious
PowerPoint is not the crutch. The crutch is pointless meetings and the desire for "material" when what you really need is a discussion with the right key people in the room.
Might as well ban PDFs while we're at it, I've seen lots of pointless PDF files too.
Preposterous. Slightly less preposterous would be renaming "TL;DR" because that's essentially what it's for - taking something complex and reducing it to something simple for a wide audience to be able to grasp the key points of very quickly.
Let's call it what it is: An aid when giving presentations, which are themselves also not documentation. There is no substitute for documentation.
http://www.presentationzen.com...
Also has railed about this at length LONG before this article came out, and some of this article referenced him. http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
Plus, no one can top, "There are no bullet points like Stalin's bullet points!"
Eye contact? Dialogue? Newspapers? These are all archaic ideas! My guess is the author can't adapt to knowledge by powerpoint...
Give everyone in the audience a nerf gun. The moment it takes more than 1 slide to talk about an idea the presenter can be shot. If the slide does not carry information that can not easily be spoken, shoot the presenter. If there is ANY clipart. Shoot the presenter.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It's not the tool, it's the defaults.
I use it with a blank slide or at most a title only format. I then add content like I would on a chalkboard, and animate it the wayI would write it as I speak. It's a handy way to quickly present your thoughts; you just need to use the tool with your structure, not conform your thinking to a narrow framework.
Don't ascribe to deficiencies of a tool that which can readily be explained as incompetencies of the user.
If anything, draft new policies that reflect in an employee's annual review to hold them accountable if they are required to hold effective meetings and produce supporting collateral. If it's not in their job description, then let it go. Some people are too busy being great at their actual job to bother improving their back-office skills - and until they are required to hone those skills as a part of their job, why should/would anyone else care?
Powerpoint is now and always has been a perfect example of what Chuck D called the 'dumbassification' of America.
Don't think. Go buy. Live a thousand lives by picture. --Tuxedomoon
But judging from seminars, using a PowerPoint to go to sleep is a good use of PPT.
Since Slashdot doesn't seem to be able to discern the serious from the ridiculous, I am offering ancillary titles to TFA as a simple illustration:
Title: Why Water should be banned
Rationale: Water is being relied upon by too many to do too much, and we should start working to get rid of it
- - ----
Title: Why Oxygen should be banned
Rationale: Oxygen is being relied upon by too many to do too much, and we should start working to get rid of it
The shuttle disasters Richard Feynman, the late Nobel laureate and CalTech physicist, saw that "bulletized" thinking contributed to the Challenger disaster, where 7 crew members died and a multi-billion dollar craft destroyed due to an O-ring failure. The big problem was that NASA management wasn't really listening to the engineers - and breaking issues up into bullets helped them do that.
The engineers who worked on the Challenger O-rings knew they weren't qualified for cold weather. But management didn't want to hear it and OK'd the launch despite the engineer's opposition.
As sometimes happens, disaster ensued.
In the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, Prof. Tufte dissects the PowerPoint slides that buried important information - such as volume, mass and velocity - about the large piece of foam insulation that penetrated the Columbia's heat shield. Creating useful engineering reports in PowerPoint is difficult if not impossible.
And of course, powerpoint makes you stupid
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Could somebody provide a PowerPoint explaining why we need to ban Powerpoint?
Someone used a hammer to drive a nail! We should ban hammers!
I literally had a professor (3 years ago) that put his lecture notes in text documents, and showed them on the projector from his ubuntu laptop using emacs. And he was one of the best CS professors I've ever had.
This was because he used them as outlines for what he intended to teach during the class. We discussed, worked through things, and had eye-to-eye contact and whatever else the summary says.
----Isn't this what powerpoint is for? We don't want to ban powerpoint; people just need to learn to use it properly.
Why don't the detractors show us what's right instead of shouting down what is wrong? It's easy enough to show how many products/concepts are broken but unless you're brining something new to the table then you really have nothing to add to the conversation.
Presentation software has it's uses. Do you need to present something visual that contributes to the discussion? This may be a graph or a diagram. If yes, then you probably need presentation software. Do you want to provide a visual representation of something that backs up your point? This may be an excerpt from a report, an equation, or a block of code? Presentation software may be useful here. (I'm not suggesting that it should be used for instruction. Writing things out is probably better in that case to pace the instruction.) Do you want to show where you are in a presentation? You have to be careful with how you use presentation software in this case, but it can be useful.
There are definitely poor uses of presentation software. "Reading slides" and serving as "notes" are among those poor uses. Yet those are failures of the person giving the presentation. That person would probably give a poor presentation even if the presentation software was removed.
Yeah. There's a reason why verbal learning isn't 1:1 with a powerpoint slide show. It's perhaps abused.. is that the fault of ubiquity?
Look what happened to them.
Step 1) Watch an Apple keynote.
Step 2) Take notice that those people up on the stage are not looking at their slides.
Step 3) Realize that those people up on the stage have rehearsed their presentations so that they do not need to put their entire presentation on their slides.
Step 4) Conclude that software is not the problem, people are just lazy.
Step 5) Next time you have to do a presentation, don't be lazy.
Seriously. 30 years ago, the people that make shitty PowerPoint presentations today would have just made copies of their reports, passed them out, and read them in front of you. Bad presenters have always been bad presenters.
Stop complaining about PowerPoint and complain that very few people take the time to practice their presentations.
Meta!
...or let teachers introduce technology into the classroom. "
Oh hell no. Tech in the classroom is not an end unto itself, and certainly not a justification for Powerpoint. Don't get me wrong, PP can be a useful tool (in some cases), and yes, it don't work without tech in the classroom. But the idea that any random PP show is valuable because "it's introducing students to technology" is ridiculous. Students are on a first-name basis with technology, they don't need to be introduced to it.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
It's fine (and necessary) if used in the right situation. Sure if all you are going to do is read off the slides, then it's kinda pointless. But when used right, it allows people who may not know the topic as much as you do, or people who miss a couple of sentences, or people who aren't as fluent in the presentation language as the presenter to catch up, or have some kind of idea about what is happening. Eye contact, if they don't know what you're on about, it just makes them feel awkward.
They hate actual learning so they force tools down our throats that prevent learning.
Next lets ban email because what we really need is for people to discuss things face to face.
Or lets ban bicycles, because you can't go 100 miles in an hour on one.
Just then there was a concussive shock. Momentarily the Post's reporter was transported into a netherworld of pounding, blinding light as his office exploded in a cloud of acrid smoke and swirling documents. He lost consciousness momentarily. When he awoke, there were several men standing over him with solemn, angry looks on their faces. Their black paramilitary uniforms were outlined in stark contrast against the white-boards and family photographs. "Who... who are you" he struggled to speak.
"We're the Power Point Rangers".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Isn't ALL of the office products abused and misused? Word documents used to provide screenshots, overly complex excel sheets requiring ram upgrades and minutes for re-calc, 100k message count in Send Items and Inbox in Outlook, Access based critical database servers?
Should LaTeX Beamer be banned as well?
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
The same crappy presenters will use whatever other platform to do the exact same crappy job of presenting the info.
Powerpoint is not the actual problem.
Ban all the things!
You should be banned. It would make more sense to ban this article but I'm just applying your logic to the problem and just going with the "ban the author" approach.
Was he describing Power Point, or modern newspapers?
The irony is definitely not lost on the authors...
I can take or leave the usual PP slide driven meetings, the problems there are more with the meetings themselves and less about the tool.
But I receive "design specifications" and "requirements" created in PP. Not a slide from a meeting with someone's prototype drawing, an honest-to-Gord document complete with revision history and all our other documentation details. UI's designed with little boxes and presentation decorators. Everything in a bullet list. Send help.
PowerPoint is incredibly effective if you know how to use it. For example, this video was produced 100% in PowerPoint 2007. No after effects, no flash, no nothing...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqbhFrIcVik
The problem is "bullet points", not PowerPoint.
The name of the product says it all. It is not intended for communication, education, or the thoughtful display of information. It's not supposed to facilitate critical thinking by the audience.
It's intended to give the presenter the power to cloud men's minds... to convince... to project the presenter's views into the minds of the audience as forcefully as possible.
The once-competitive product from a once-competitor was named Aldus Persuasion. Not Aldus Display, not Aldus Presentation, not Aldus Foils--Aldus Persuasion.
Someone once called word processors (in the early days before everyone had them) "automatic weapons for inter-corporation turf wars." Much the same can be said of PowerPoint.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
in number and complexity. I use Keynote, mostly because you have a freer hand in designing, which makes you think about what you want to do. I've seen countless presentations forced/stuffed/mangled into following the default PPT slide format *AND GRAPHICS* because people would sooner live with a bad default format than think for themselves.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Since this article is gibberish
when Powerpoint was new (and I was also new), I used PP to both hit the bullet points and prompt me on what to talk about next. I'd read the bullet point and my brain would go to "ok, why foo sucks and bar rocks". Somehow PP morphed into the end all be all of the presentation; see also: the posting of power point files on the internet with no supporting documentation.
As usual, the problem isn't the technology so much as how it's used. My solution is I never put words in my slides, except occasionally a title. That way people are listening to what I'm saying but getting the multimedia from the screen.
Six slides.
Why is Snark Required?
How will the douchebags convey their vision of why the only way the company could possibly work is if they're grossly overcompensated while everyone else learns to make due with less?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I've never seen powerpoint used for an in depth technical meeting. I have only seen it used to give the 50,000 foot view so that the higher-ups eyes don't glaze over during the meeting.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
- That's the point of PowerPoint
- Don't blame your tools for working
- Limited space means limited explanation
- Therefore:
- - Avoid explanations and detail
- - Introduce and conclude only
- The purpose of bullet-points is action:
- - Put recommendations last
- - Recommendations means "Do this"
I work in the education industry in a large-format print environment. PowerPoint is one of the main pieces of software chosen to make large academic posters (36" x 48" commonly, but I've had larger than 60"x 96" designed in PowerPoint). It is also the main reason there are delays and errors with said posters.
Our department strongly recommends that faculty and students use either Adobe Illustrator or the free open source Inkscape to create their posters. Less than 1% of posters created in these programs have any issues with the format, while PowerPoint currently has issues in roughly 50% of the files we have received in the past, with PowerPoint in an OSX system being by far the worse offender. The problem has been somewhat mitigated with requiring all submissions be in PDF (which works well with our proprietary ripping software), but has only reduced the issues, not eliminated them.
It should be noted that various other office suites and other programs have been used to generate the posters we print, but nothing is quite as bad as those coming from the Microsoft Office suite (don't get me started on Publisher). And to those suggesting a raster export (jpg, tif, png, bmp, etc) the files quickly become to large for an average user to move them easily (less an issue today than 5-10 years ago) and text/finer elements often become fuzzy and plugged in all but the highest resolution files.
So yes, please, let's all kill PowerPoint (and throw Publisher on the pyre while we're at it).
Powerpoint is a tool. Don't blame the tool, blame whoever is making the content. The truth is, doing informational slides require skill, knowledge and a good speaker to present them - it doesn't really matter if you're using acetate sheets or some fancy top-of-the-line video editor. Its like blaming typewriters for making bad literature. And if you 're afraid powerpoint is going to make you stupid, guess what? You already are.
Actually, PowerPoint is so horrendously clunky and limited that even if you want to make a compelling presentation, it works against you. In short, the only thing that you can do easily is to use bullet points.
PowerPoint still cannot do what the long dead Persuasion could do, and do efficiently.
I'd love an decent alternative to PowerPoint, but it really doesn't exist.
I saw that eye contact thing in TFS and wondered what that was about. Could someone explain that to me? If eye contact is so important, howcome people can learn things from books?
I've never had a teacher that was shit at explaining stuff, and then thought "of course! it's because they didn't make any eye contact!". No, it was because the subject itself was difficult.
Eye contact while talking about or listening to some non-trivial thing feels too much like trying to do two things at once.
I have a small 12 slide presentation to prove that you are wrong.
How is this news? Everyone was saying this when PowerPoint first came out.
...that there are so many people out there giving so many presentations that it warrants creating a specific piece of software to actually do this.
Presentations are a complete waste of time, and are only a thing because there are so many useless managers out there that don't actually provide any real function.
Let's spin the dial back to the Pentagon banning animated Powerpoint tanks.
But then we'd notice that about 90% of the managers are useless. And please consider that most of them can't do anything else than create Power Point slides, you can't even retrain them, they ARE already at the bottom of the usefulness ladder. What would they do, especially in this economy?
Won't someone PLEASE think of the useless?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I've seen plenty of college courses where the professor makes a powerpoint and teaches to the powerpoint, to the point where the person in front of the room could be any person off the street with zero knowledge in the subject they're teaching. The worst example of this I've seen was a physics class in which the professor was not only teaching to the powerpoint, he was teaching to a powerpoint made by the publisher of the textbook. That particular class got so bad that a bunch of the students dropped it because they realized they could just download the powerpoint themselves and get the same "education" for free.
People do. Honestly, people aren't even willing to read a freakin' paragraph anymore. Lots of work is still highly complex and it requires real understanding and analysis. Not:
-Make Money
-Obtain Power
-Attract Females.
A lot of the problems with PP is that it was designed and written so long ago. It should be possible for a team (or a few teams) of people to figure out what would work better.
A new product could also be written with some thought to extendability. I develop Office add-ins, and PowerPoint is awful. There are missing events, incomplete methods, and methods that are missing altogether. The worst thing is that the program managers and designers use Word in the proof of concept, not realizing that Excel, PowerPoint, and other programs don't do everything the same way and may not have the same capabilities.
Someone used a hammer to drive a screw. We should consider using more useful tools for the problem at hand.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So whatever split-second decision an overpaid high-level executive takes by not allowing anything the requisite minimum thought, s/he can later blame on (and get someone else fired for) having been given incomplete information as requested by demanding earlier on that every complex matter be reduced to a polished assortment of insufficient buzzwords in incomplete grammar. In short, PPTs institutionalize PHBs' hierarchical infallibility at the expense of underlings who have to use it.
Plus, oversimplification can be used to justify all kinds of short-sighted behavior, with all the plausible deniability you describe.
I remember learning my company's brand of six sigma, and they stressed not having more than a few CTQs for any process. It made for really nice-looking powerpoint slides (which seemed to be the main output of my company's six sigma efforts). It also made for some really broken processes in some cases, because the stuff the company was making was really hard to make. There were cases where somebody would optimize out some $10 part and end up destroying a million dollars worth of product from time to time due to a failure to deliver an acceptable level of quality. But, when you only focus on 3-5 key quality attributes, it is hard to justify every little $10 part in the multi-million-dollar manufacturing process.
I'm fairly convinced that far more was lost in market share due to an inability to meet demand than was ever gained from optimizing out the odd $10 part.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."
--H. L. Mencken
You can read Edward Tufte's book on PowerPoint as well for some insight on this event.
One guy actually wrote a freaking report in PowerPoint, then brought it down to be repaired. Had to be totally reset in a real layout program.
One person used the every crayon in the box approach, using every damn transition in the program. The room was just about to go into full freak mode.
But perhaps the worst thing about PowerPoint is the appearance of veracity, where unamalgamated bullshit can be presented in a slick official looking form that acts like propaganda that himmler would be proud of. Hope I didn't just Godwin myself - I think the comparison is accurate.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Powerpoint is supposed to shorten information and condense it down. You might as well rail against taking notes by hand, because that loses original information as well.
Now, idiotic uses of Powerpoint in which the presenter just drones on and on and omits vital information - THAT is a crime, I hate people who do that. There simply is no fathoming the depths of my loathing for them. But that's people misusing the tool - we don't ban hammers because some moron tries to push the nail in with the wooden end. Powerpoint can actually be a pretty decent tool when employed correctly.
And Access is amazing, very underrated product. You can do some crazily incredible things with this thing.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
First, I've never used PowerPoint, because I've never used Windows any more than absolutely necessary, but I've used similar tools.
Second, when preparing for a presentation, I make sure that someone could get the gist of my talk from the materials, even if they were not there to hear it. That means I write very succinct statements on each slide, not vague one-word "bullets".
Third, I never read from my slides. I assume that you can read them, yourself. Instead, I paraphrase a point, and then add value by offering insights, providing examples and analogies, and exploring implications of the ideas presented.
All of that is "wrong", according to some self-proclaimed experts. Fine. My presentations are not boring and I became a DMTS with my approach.
I've also heard "word processors process words like food processors process food."
They use bulletpoints to sell something. But in the case of politics, they use it because if people knew the details they would never support it.
It is not powerpoint to be blamed, it is the person using it.
1 - Perfect
2 - Paid For
3 - I forget
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Keynote and omnigraf come to mind and even worse offenders...
In other news, people have been seen using screwdrivers to drive nails, to pry up the corners of things and stab people. Although few would argue that screwdrivers are excellent for their intended purpose (driving screws) too often they are used for other purposes and we should start to wean ourselves from screwdriver addiction.
Powerpoint isn't bad, people just don't know how to use it. Let's go back to 2007, when one of the most well-known Powerpoint* presentations was given: https://www.youtube.com/watch?.... Take a look at Steve as he's presenting. He's glancing back at the screen, from time to time, usually after his slides have advanced. The changing of the slides doesn't affect the flow of what he's saying; it underscores it at just the right time. It's mostly pictures; there are fewer than ten words on the screen at any given point, and not a bullet point in sight. The graphics are large, clear, and immediately relevant. There's no crowding on the screen, the text has a high contrast with the background, and there's nothing to distract the viewer from the presenter. Steve practiced what he was going to say, how it was going to be paced, the sequence in which points were going to be given, and designed his slides accordingly.
This was an excellent presentation for a reason - it's abundantly clear that countless hours went into every second of its exposition. This was no night-before job, with copy/pastes from Wikipedia, and low-res pictures from Google Images, being given by a presenter who was on a red eye flight three hours before he gave it, who is giving the talk having only practiced the first half just once, without an audience, much less a critical one. No, Steve knew that he had a presentation to give, so he was preparing it for quite some time.
The fact of the matter is that Powerpoint* wasn't relevant in this speech - it was the fact that it was a highly polished presentation, from a talented orator and presenter, with lots of practice, and a set of slides that were clearly designed by someone with a graphic design background. Every once in a while, you'll come across someone who is giving a presentation with a similar focus on design and implementation, who has taken their task seriously and practiced accordingly. Most of the time, they get all the time, focus, and attention to detail as a final paper in Freshman Comp, due the day after Memorial Day and read aloud half hungover - because that's how much priority the presentation itself is given by the presenter.
*Yes, it was probably Keynote.
"You're using it wrong! Stop using it wrong!"
The rambling of an idiot.
There's no "true" proper way of using Power Point... Stop being offended at something so minor.
Today I learned that Powerpoint makes bad presentations.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Now that I have your attention again...
I know TFA was getting at electronic presentations in general, but Microsoft Powerpoint is pretty much dead in some academic circles.
It is very unusual, for example, for powerpoint presentations to be used by mathematicians, pure or applied. PDF is the norm there, usually generated from Beamer or Prosper.
Considering PowerPoint didn't exist in 1986 (little more Windows in any usable GUI form), methinks that your first example is false. Secondly, why would you use PowerPoint to create an Engineering Report? Incorrect use of tools... who is the blame, the tool or the user?
2) Anyone afraid "powerpoint might make them stupid" might actually try to raise their game.
3) People with no fear will continue presenting poorly with no thought and no preparation.
And if you're afraid powerpoint is going to make you stupid, guess what? You already are.
Awful presentations were around long before powerpoint.
Awful presentations will be around long after powerpoint is a bitter memory.
Maybe the worst thing about powerpoint is that it amplifies people's ability to generate crap as well as awesomeness, so that overall the total number of lame presentations has increased.
I will just leave this here for anybody that might be interested in trying to raise their game: Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter). I found it to be a good read.
Doing anything engineering-wise with Microsoft Office software is difficult. It isn't as bad as it used to be, but years ago I remember an engineer who spent hour upon hour fighting with Excel because he insisted on embedding greek characters into the text in his Excel spreadsheets. He'd done it before using horrid TSRs and text-mode DOS spreadsheets, and he was gonna do it with Excel now. The tool had taken over and become his main focus.
Excel is a beancounter thing, and it can be twisted into being a scientific/engineering tool. but it can also flex itself and turn back into a beancounter tool on you and in the process distort your data.
You can't really do math with a spreadsheet, but everybody here probably knows that.
Wow.
I know Microsoft gets hammered around here, but blaming the Challenger disaster (1986) on PowerPoint (1990) is really stretching the facts to match the story.
Bullet points and slide presentations did not start with PowerPoint. If anything, the "bullet point thinking" of the Challenger tragedy shows that we were already experts at presenting information poorly before we had software tools to make us more efficient at it.
People who break issues into bullets tend not to listen reasonable arguments anymore.
Word Processors do that. I have been thinking for years of how to make a good indelible writing software tool. It would permanently record whatever you typed into it on the record in a saved document. Any changes you made would be markup and it would be impossible to obliterate the first things you had typed. Kinda like a sheet of paper in a good old IBM Selectric, or even an old Royal manual typewriter. Word processors don't produce durable thoughts, they allow writers to diddle around and produce nothing at all at worst.
Slashdot should stop posting opinion pieces written by someone who is not a renowned name in the field.
Of course we did.
For how many decades was the transparency projector used in academia and other things?
And some of us also remember things with slide projectors where the audio went "bing" for some schmuck to advance the slide.
Power Point is bells and whistles on some pretty basic technology we've had for a very long time.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Bring back hypercard
No sir I dont like it.
one that is a totally time waster is due to several factors -
1. The skill of the one holding (chairing) the meeting
2. The way the information being conveyed
Let's face it --- The purpose of having meeting is to convey messages and to encourage exchange of views of the participants - either top-down, bottom-up, horizontal, or all of the above
The skill of the one who chair the meeting is crucial - but unfortunately I have been to too many meetings whereby those who supposed to be leading the meeting don't even know why they are there to begin with
I have been in all kinds of meeting - from the ridiculous to the marvelous
Back in China where I was from, back when the cultural revolution was still raging, 'meeting' was a mean used by the 'elite' to spread their propaganda, and to 'enhance' the effect of those meeting, the elite will incorporate episodes of 'showing example' whereby they would parade those who have been accused of 'counter-revolutionary' and publicly punish them (sometimes ended with summary execution) in front of everyone
While that was taking place, the participants, no matter if they were horrified with what happened in front of them, were all enthusiastically applauding the 'elites' with their 'righteous acts'
.....
But I have been in excellent meetings as well, meetings that have been led by people who know what they are doing, and do it very well
People's attention span is short. A meeting can only be successfuly if it doesn't end up cramming the brains of the participants with all kinds of garbage
Information must be pre-sieved before any meeting has taken place so that the info that were being disseminated during the meeting can easily be digested and understood and absorbed
Powerpoint is only a tool - it is far from perfect
But for people who knows what they are doing, even an imperfect tool such as Powerpoint (and all the open-sourced variants) can aid in information dissemination
That is why a call for banning meeting and/or Powerpoint altogether is mindless to the very fucking core
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The perfect presentation slide is blank. Because I am giving the presentation, and I expect people to listen to what I have to say.
...laura
Perhaps word processors should be banned since they reduce that amount of thought and care required to create a hand-written document.
"Man, I hate having to look at slides. We should ban Powerpoint! Who's with me?"
No matter what page, it's still got a big fat 63 in the corner. Avoiding pagination problems is why the Bible is cited by book, chapter, and verse, novels are cited by chapter and paragraph, and plays are cited by act, scene, and line.
I cannot tell you how many times I have wanted to apply the 'unwritten rule' and walk out on some PM that was just sucking all of the intelligence out of the room and keeping people from working
In the companies that I run I encourage my key people to learn public speaking skills. In fact, several of them have internal Toastmaster chapters, in which they get to hone the skill of giving speeches as well as learning ways to make whatever they want to convey comprehensible to the audiences - sweet and short
That is not to say that I haven't been into meetings that were time wasters - and every time I've encountered such meeting I just walk. straight. out. of. the. room.
That is all I need to do - as I do not like people wasting my time, I also do not like others' time being wasted, especially in meetings that have no apparent aim and are not going anywhere, fast
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Heck, I remember continuous film slide projectors in school where the projector even auto-advanced the slides when it heard the bing. :)
PPT is a _presentation_ tool, not something to run meetings.Its great to summarize stuff and it is obviously not made to show complexity (as presentations are about making the subject easy enough to understand for people not strongly involved in the topic).
If you can't tell your story simply, you're telling it wrong. And if you need PowerPoint to tell it, you're telling it wrong.
PowerPoint slides are what I call bathroom material. It's for a board member or director or whatever to tuck under his arm and read on the can while taking a long post-coffee dump.
I use ppt all the time. It's a tool to be (mid)used like any other.
First of all: it's not Powerpoint itself, it's peoples inability to bring good speeches. Powerpoint might lack certain tools that one may point out, but then it's often easy to find some alternative techn{ique,ology} for complements. That being said: no presentation helping tool will *ever* help a bad presenter. Give him/her PowerPoint and a clicker or a chalkboard: it doesn't matter – they will screw it up anyway! Thus: f the speaker is educated into holding a good presentation – Powerpoint may come to a huge benefit for anyone involved. It's well known that Powerpoint introduced certain levels of sloppiness since it arrived, but that's all on the presenters, not the application. Thus: educate yourself, people – in this case in how to prepare a good presentation (there are LOADS of free courses and guidelines out there)! Use technology as the improvement tools they were intended for, not as excuses for your own laziness.
There are 2 types of people in the world - those who understand decimal and those who don't.
... oversimplified and omits the complexities of the issue.
The problem is not powerpoint. The problem is most people not being able to condense and simplify information, or structure it in a way which tells a coherent story in small chunks, using the presentation as a minimalistic tool. They have no clue how a meeting should be run or the role of a presentation in a meeting, plus they are afraid of forgetting any information or talking without a script, so you end up with these massive overloaded slide packs with presenters basically reading most of the slides. Which goes on for a while until someone more senior in the meeting gets fed up, takes control and hijacks the meeting.
Another place where people fail is being too attached to their presentation, in the sense of "I made this thing so I must go through it from start to finish". If the meeting takes another direction, e.g. because the person you are meeting suddenly changed their priorities, (much of) the material may no longer be relevant. Or starting to run out of time, and still trying to go through everything instead of skipping to the key slides.
Powerpoint is a decent tool. If anything should be banned, it is probably the monopoly it has been allowed to achieve. Having the whole business world essentially running their meetings on one piece of software from one single vendor, is not good. Powerpoint as a tool could be improved, and businesses should be able to run without paying the MS tax because business partners keep insisting on sending or receiving .ppt(x) formats.
So let me get this right you want to ban a tool because the users aren't using it "properly"? It is the tool or the method of use that is the problem? Okay so you ban a useful tool in order to cure the method of use. Good thing Kartin Park is only a journalist and not someone with a proper job who has to solve real problems.
While the example slides in the article are very bad; the key point here is that a presentation is not the slides and the slides are not the presentation. Slides are supposed to be a presentation aid and help reinforce what was being said and the story being told. Taking slides in isolation to the context of what was being said and how they were used in the presentation is just as bad as giving the bad presentation in the first place.
The worst things about PowerPoint are the emphasis on bulleted lists: almost everyone using ToDo lists or outliners has moved on to GTD style approaches rather than simple bullet points - why haven't the developers of PP learnt this ? at least get rid of the default layout being title and bullets; the abundance of "clip art" which should have been phased out when DTP went out of fashion; the default of scaling without preserving aspect and allowing massive zooms on bitmap graphics; and finally the crappy animations and transitions that there are far too many of.
As they say, power corrupts and PowerPoints corrupt absolutely.
I can't count the amount of times I've looked forward to a talk online, expecting a video (Vimeo, Youtube, whatever) of the talk, only to be presented with a series of bullet points on slides that mean absolutely squat to me, and leave out the meat and potatoes of the actual content. Pardon my French, but Fuck PowerPoint.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. ~~ Hunter S. Thompson
I don't see the link between his rant and Microsoft Powerpoint. Maybe he just meant "slides"?
In any case claiming that slides should be banned is ridiculous.
If they get this drastic about Power Point then what about Excel? I have yet to see something that is NOT being managed, tracked and manipulated in an Excel file somewhere, no matter which industry or for what purpose... somebody is going to find ways to use or abuse an Excel sheet to do it! From simple table-making-layout to elaborate project plans to complicated user forms! It spreads like a plague.
"Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." - Mark Twain
So get rid of the tool instead of shitty users of the tool? That makes zero sense.
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
but there should be fines for people without taste or knowledge about composition, type, storytelling, etc. that produce ugly presentations with it. also, microsoft should be punished for consistently promoting bad taste and usability.
The not open file format, hardly compatible with any other version of the same software is the only reason to ban PowerPoint.
Export a pdf, use it for the slides. Less time wasted on stupid eye-candy.
Hell, just use latex, it has the best templates in terms of functionality for your slides.
Sure it did - The first version was called "Presenter" and later changed to Powerpoint in 1987 because of trademark problems. Then Microsoft bought them. And no, it wasn't a Windows program - it was for the Mac, which certainly had a GUI at the time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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Powerpoint (originally called Presenter) certainly did exist at the time - it was written for the Mac. Microsoft bought them in 1987, after the name change.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The very fact the I even clicked the link to this thread or whatever its called deducts at a bare minimum of 13,IQ points. Wtf this is /. ......the English Chinese an Arabic languages do not have sufficient ability to even pretend to ....why? Just ...awful
PowerPoint doesn't kill people, people kill people.
Sanity is the trademark of a weak mind. -- Mark Harrold
Do you want to see a PDF or Microsoft Word presentation? Because that's what will happen rather than the dynamic discussion based meetings you hope for.
Tradesmen blaming their tools...
It's not in the tool the fault lies, but in the person using it.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
I guess someone at the Washington Post read his paper.
Use Libreoffice Impress instead.
Hey yeah, I can use Wikipedia too. This may come as a shock, but you probably shouldn't blindly trust everything you read there.
"Presenter" was the internal development name for the early versions of what became "PowerPoint". It still didn't exist as a commercially available Mac tool until 1987 (after Challenger). Even then, it was for a computer system not in use at NASA, and had nothing to do with creating technical reports until after the 1990 launch of the Windows product.
In large engineering corporations every "doer" has 3~7 layers of technical management above them, excluding non-technical executives. These "spectators" want to be involved in innovation, but don't have time to keep up to speed with every project. Thus it's commonly understood by "doers" that they are expected to dumb down complex issues when talking with managers, often using what is called Start Trek logic (i.e. "the issue is like a balloon: after growing to a certain size it pops."). This has the additional benefit of allowing mid and higher level managers the appearance of grasping complex issues quickly, so they are not threatened or confused by their subordinates. To make a long story short: power point is an ideal tool for dumbing down messages, which is what mid and upper level managers have grown to expect.
Senior management *fucking loves* powerpoint, and the simpler the better. It's funny to read about a desire for more nuanced technical discussions of the issues, because this is exactly what management pushes back against whenever possible. The difference between a good company and a shitty one really comes down to whether senior management will accept a reasonable level of detail that accurately portrays the issue at hand, or whether they can only handle slides which a 3 year old could understand.
To be clear, I'm not saying that we need to give senior management engineering level detail. That makes as little sense as giving them no information at all. The paltry amount of information some executives can handle is really disturbing at some companies, though. I'm glad to be at a company right now where appropriate levels of information are escalated.
Another trend seems to be for engineers or almost senior management to develop slides which give a reasonable level of detail, get shot down and told to condense everything into one or two slides, and then the whole exercise is repeated when corporate leadership starts asking very obvious and appropriate questions. You get asked, in panic mode, to redo the whole exercise when really all that needs to happen is to put all the detail you originally had in the presentation back in.
I remember having meetings prior to Powerpoint being such a big deal, honestly they weren't any better it just took longer to make the props.
was "taught" through Power Point on a projector. That's what I get for not being able to afford a good education.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
C'mon folks, this is just a tool like any other presentation software. The problem isn't that powerpoint exists - the problem is that people don't know how to communicate any other way, having been trained to use powerpoint. This is strictly an education issue...
taken a nose-dive here.
Use Google Slides.
Twit.
Do you have a power point for this?
heh
We have all suffered from "Death by PowerPoint" far too long!
they're more intuitive.
Too bad the author failed to cite her primary source, Edward Tufte. His title was better, too: Powerpoint is Evil. http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
"First-name basis" implies that one is fairly well acquainted with the person in question, so an introduction would be unnecessary.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
If you are a developer and want to go beyond Powerpoint, Tao3D (http://tao3d.sourceforge.net) is a valid open-source option. It takes time to master, but it's a much more effective way to tell a complicated story.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
So the complaint is that it simplifies technical reports and briefings. Should we also "work to get rid of" telephones because they simplify communication? Sure, the telephone has merits, when it has become a poor substitute for longer, face-to-face conversations. Sounds more like the writer at the Washington Post is just a bad presenter and doesn't know how to use simple tools for simple work (incompetent) because it didn't help them be lazy enough.
Doesn't banning the tool that stupid people use only guarantee stupid people will be forced to be stupid with another tool?
or a technology that transfers knowledge directly, different types of people will need to learn subjects at different depths differently. PowerPoint is a tool used by a certain sector of publishers to communicate with another specific sector, at a high level with low detail. When I joined a client, the Project Manager showed me a PP to give me a high-level understanding of the business requirements. That was the only the first step. Then I read a detailed Technical Requirements doc, and produced a Technical Specifications doc to translate the requirements into solutions. Some people open bottles with their teeth, but we have better tools for that job.
HAVING WORKED 20 YEAS IN THE TELCO BUSINESS most in a " VERY VERY WELL KNOWN GLOBAL EUROPEAN WIRELESS " I can vouch that the use of the OVERSIMPLIFIED, NON DEBATE READY "DROOL TOOL"....- actually designed to NOT ALLOW DEBATE until the ppt is over - IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MOST OF CATASTROPHIC, WRONG And DECEPTION FILLED DECISIONS I have seen...
When people are FORCED NOT TO THINK , ARGUE AND DEBATE AN IDEA BUT TO SIT AND JUST "WATCH" then TELEVISIONLIKE STUPIDIFICATION OCCURS... and the major culprits are the huge US "CONSULTANCY" firms filled with BS MBA BMBA MMT MM1 and XBMC and all those CRAP young arrogant people who NEVER get to have any ground up training and have no idea what is complexity...but yet they tell you - from the grandstand of their MBA and the vigor of their 30 old age - THEY TELL MUCH MORE EXPERIENCED ENGINEERS WHAT THEY SHOULD DO, AND MOST OF TIMES THIS IS CATASTROPHIC DECISIONS FOR COMPANIES....
UNTIL STOCKHOLDERS CLAIM THAT ONLY PEOPLE WHO HAVE CUT MARKS OF EXPERIENCE AND NO BULLSHIT INTERCORPORATE "PPT" MARKETING GET TO MAKE DECISIONS WE WILL CONTINUE TO SEE COMPANIES GOING BAD....
See subject "Forrest" & this -> http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...
The real problem is presuming that giving someone PowerPoint makes enables them to present. Few of us are natural orators. People need training on how to present, regardless of their degree of subject matter expertise.
-- I dream of a better world, where chickens can cross the road without having their motives questioned...