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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."
... 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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
...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.
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"?
Banning things does us no favor, but getting the message out does
http://www.amazon.com/How-Powe...
http://www.computerworld.com/a...
https://www.psychologytoday.co...
http://www.unc.edu/~healdric/P...
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
The summary of all of these articles is that Powerpoint has a limit to how much information it can place on a slide, this is largely a function of screen resolution and visible font size
This limit is resolution results in 'high level' 10,000 display of topics that does not adequately represent the subject matter
The result is that people give presentations at a high level and then send out the powerpoint as the notes for the presentation, when in fact any real detailed information would be either omitted or glossed over at that high level
What we really need is to demand improvements to Powerpoint, like
1. displaying at legible resolution on a 6ft high by 30 ft wide screen (remember those old blackboards from college Calculus class, that is the level of information density that we need)
2. Providing linking and drill down like would would expect to see on an executive dashboard. Sure, start at the summary level, but allow the speaker to drill down to the details at any point in the diagram. Also, make this all print out as the 'notes' with footnotes and references to the linked information
3. Train the presenters to not be satisfied working at the outline level
I guess that we should not simply blame Powerpoint for making us stupid, when we are stupid for relying on it as it is
Wherever You Go, There You Are
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.
Was he describing Power Point, or modern newspapers?
The irony is definitely not lost on the authors...
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"this is largely a function of screen resolution and visible font size"
Wrong. It is limited by how much and how fast the human mind can absorb. Short-term memory varies from about 3 to 7 items. So I never put more than five items on a slide. First think about how the human mind operates, then pick your fonts etc. If you are finding yourself using smaller and smaller fonts you are not using the slides correcty.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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."
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?
What we really need is to demand improvements to the teachers, instructors, and course developers whose reliance on PowerPoint is an abuse of the classroom. FTFY.
Competent educators know damn well that PowerPoint presentations are inadequate in any setting more advanced than teaching college students how to tie their shoelaces. An obvious reliance on PowerPoint for "educational experiences" is an obvious sign of an incompetent educator. Take away that PowerPoint and you still have an incompetent educator. But someone who knows what he is doing in the classroom might use PowerPoint along with a battery of other tools, from rote memory exercises (On old Olympus' towering top a Finn and German view a hop) to advanced computer simulations that demonstrate esoteric features of organic chemistry. The competent educator will choose the most suitable tool from the ones available. Most of the time, that will not be PowerPoint: it is never the sharpest tool in the shed, but sometimes it is the most suitable for the task at hand.
Will
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.
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.
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
Not really, some of the analysis following the Challenger disaster at NASA concluded that the use of Powerpoint limited the ability to put enough relevant information on the screen to allow analysts to make the necessary connections to identify risks.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
In a similar study performed by the Army, the conclusion was that all of the necessary detail that would have been included in a whitepaper was trimmed away for the 5-bulletpoints that they could put on the screen, to quote the article:“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Perfect demonstration of the appropriate use of Powerpoint, to pitch an idea at a high level
Nothing about this provides weight for its use as a tool for in depth analysis or presentation of information for such analysis
Wherever You Go, There You Are
"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.
Simple solution: juse get rid of the text tool. That projector thing is supposed to be for visual aids, not conveying a bunch of language, either over simplified or unreadably complex. The latter is why you're standing up there sweating and unconsciously blinding people in the audience with the laser pointer. Also, if your slides have no words on them, if you send out notes they're actually notes!
I have to disagree with the Challenger commission and the Army on their allocation of blame. If you're the kind of person who sits through a PowerPoint presentation and thinks you've understood something, you really shouldn't be building spaceships or waging war. You should be quietly led off to some marketing department somewhere, or a nice quiet retail job.
General McMaster seems like he has a good grasp of complexity though.
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 !
People look at me like I'm crazy when I tell them not to put words on their slides. Then, after I give a talk they can't believe there were no words on my slides.
No. This is what is wrong with PowerPoint. This is what makes PP dumb.
What should be presented is a cohesive narrative. Drop the stupid rules, tell a story. Make a simple annotated illustration that is information dense and comprehensible. Forget about the slide. It's obsolete.
Now this does not mean put a million things in a view at once just to create the illusion of information density. It means think like Google Maps: information rich, quantitative, and easy to understand.
If you absolutely need a rule, the better answer is 0 or 1. Zero bullet points. One narrative.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/bbo...
Criticism is easy. Constructive criticism is hard.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
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).
“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
Considering the military is often all about filling problems with bullets, I do indeed respect that he knows what he's talking about.
But NASA is such a cool place to park those cronies from college and a good manager can manage anything can't they?
There are plenty of non-technical managers that just think if they can pronounce some "words of power" that is enough, and they do not have to know what the system they have named actually does.
This episode of the BBC tv comedy "Yes Minister" sums up the problem of non-technical decision makers making choices based on how a word sounds instead of the meaning it actually sounds:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greasy_Pole
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.
I fail to see how this is a fault of the tool. I do technical presentations, and when the material is too complex for Powerpoint I tell the audience that fact then don't present it in that forum. 99% of the time Powerpoint does the job.
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.
"The problem is "bullet points", not PowerPoint." Amen!
Building and presenting a good talk is not easy, whatever tools you use.
Chalk, transparencies, slides, Powerpoint et. al. - done 'em all over the years.
The problem is learning to make a good presentation, not Powerpoint.
Unfortunately Powerpoint makes it very easy to dress up a simple talk
wirh all sorts of ridiculous fonts, bullets, swooping text, music clips and whatnot
that are completely unnecessary and distracting.
It doesn't have to be dull (in fact it shouldn't be) but informative and (a little) entertaining.
Powerpoint (or LibreOffice Presentation or Keynote) are very powerful tools for
conveying information. Unfortunately they are usually very badly used.
The Cutter
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."
The army said something wasn't bullet-izable? ;-)
Sometimes you need heavier ordinance. When bullets won't do you use mortars, bazookas, missiles, bombs, etc. Or to attack your target with boredom PowerPoint is often your best weapon.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
We must distribute PowerPoint licenses and 4th-grade PowerPoint tutorials to ISIS, so that they bore themselves into irrelevance.
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.
(On old Olympus' towering top a Finn and German view a hop)
Cranial Nerves? Never saw that one before... The one I used was a lot less PC...
--WooooHoooo--
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.
Yes, Cranial nerves. I think most retired physicians in USA and Britain would remember this (and probably remember most of the nerves as well).
Will
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.
That sounds like a much more plausible reason for spaceships crashing than "PowerPoint did it."
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.
Which is a misuse of Powerpoint.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
Thanks. I had never heard of it but it makes sense. I think in the areas I have worked 10 slides are too few but more than about 20 are too many. Other than that it is very close to how I like to operate.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It was a sales pitch for velcro shoes
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Nice link. But I still think 5+ bullet point starts to get confusing.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
It depends on what you are presenting. As a geologist I am most often forced to put detailed maps on PowerPoint slides. The days when I could plot my map out on a 42 inch by 60 inch sheet and lay it down in front of management, describe the details and show the context from that one sheet of paper, ended when someone discovered I could cram that big map onto a PowerPoint slide.
The PowerPoint slides get distributed and often become the technical documentation of the decisions made. Yet they do not contain the technical details and often do not even include enough text to explain the ideas they are presenting. Five years later, I review a PowerPoint that explains why someone spent $50 million dollars on a drilling program and I still have no clue, because it was documented with PowerPoint. If you only put 5 items on each slide, then you either have 200 slides or you do a huge disservice to anyone who is forced to view your presentation later when you are not there to explain it.
Because of resolution problems I cannot even place a line or an arrow with enough precision to actually be in the right place over a slightly detailed image. For years, I resisted by using Adobe Acrobat presentations, which allowed me to do much more precise graphic representation, but the cheap readily available PowerPoint made it impossible to keep using the much more expensive Acrobat and the extra Adobe applications (Illustrator now, but I once used MacroMedia Freehand for all my work) are hard to get corporate IT departments to provide. At present I am not even allowed a full copy of Adobe Acrobat- only the reader version. I've worked at some companies where I provided my own software in order to avoid using PowerPoint. It is a losing battle. But believe me, RESOLUTION is the BIGGEST flaw in PowerPoint that makes it a poor solution for a technical presentation.
they're more intuitive.
"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.
I'm not sure if I can accept that.
Could you put a Power Point presentation together that would explain it?
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
The Challenger commission (after being derailed from it's initial scheme of a whitewash after Feynman was contacted by some engineers instead of the carefully prepared evidence), had the task of finding systems or procedures at fault instead of being able to identify a person that had made a poor decision. Perhaps it had the side effect of making those who ignored advice and made poor decisions act a bit more professionally for a while. Due to NASA management going from aerospace professionals to a nice sinecure for the powerful to park those they wish to reward the political connections were too strong for it to be acceptable for a commision to find anyone at that management level to be at fault.
Not really, some of the analysis following the Challenger disaster at NASA concluded that the use of Powerpoint limited the ability to put enough relevant information on the screen to allow analysts to make the necessary connections to identify risks.
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tuf...
In a similar study performed by the Army, the conclusion was that all of the necessary detail that would have been included in a whitepaper was trimmed away for the 5-bulletpoints that they could put on the screen, to quote the article:“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04...
Horsecrap. I can present a single word on a single slide which sums up everything the engineers came up with: "NO". Powerpoint had nothing to do with the challenger disaster and is nothing more than a blame sharing exercise. What caused the disaster was that the information exchange between engineers and managers was poorly facilitated. If the engineers at any point recommended not to launch (which they did) then the fault lies squarely on the other side of the table for not seeking all the relevant information. If the powerpoint had nothing but pictures of rainbow unicorns on it you can still extract all relevant information you need as the information was available in the room at the time. If the decision was to be made after it should have been made from minutes not from presentation slides.
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.
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.
Ban all the things!
Banning things only provides windfall profits to Criminal gangs!
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...