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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...
"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.
Let's call it what it is: An aid when giving presentations, which are themselves also not documentation. There is no substitute for documentation.
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!"
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.
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.
...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"?
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.
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.
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
The first time that I was pressed into being a project manager was at a subsidiary of a new telecom company.
We inherited some basic rules
1. Whoever called the meeting had to prepare the info for the meeting and send it out to the participants at least a day early
2. The meeting could be no longer than thirty minutes
3. Whoever called the meeting would prepare a summary and send it out to all participants with a list of action items before the end of the day
The unwritten rule was that if you started wasting people's time they would stop coming to your meetings
This put the power into the hands of the people doing the work and made the PM a servant to getting work done
That is how is should be, 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
Wherever You Go, There You Are
“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.