Our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint

The other problem with Powerpoint is that it enables the some of the worst professional behavior in us individually and in groups. Some people don't like to write. Some people don't like to read. Or read mail-outs before a meeting. And some people like to hide in endless meetings to appear as if they are busy (working), while they are just busy in endless meetings not working.

Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate a case for present and future audiences.

But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some? many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in my mind - but I could be wrong)

EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?

Agreed. Some of the old SIGGRAPH course material like Baraff's PBM stuff[0] was simple/clear and stood on its own legs.

He didn't use the Notes section of PPT to print leave behinds (like my lazy own self does) - but took the time to interleave his talking points with his slides for the "leave-behind".

Karl Sims ... Same thing.

I still use some of the old SIGGRAPH material to teach/tutor my now university age kids how to create interesting projects (like the old x-springies) around numerical methods and creating little toy beginner physics engines.

[0] https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-00-winter/paper... (slides - including Witkin's are after the whitepaper-ish looking stuff at the front of the file)

what is your job?

I hate "PowerPoint", but what I really hate is bad meetings with the veneer of professionalism from having a presentation. I've wasted plenty of my life in such meetings (sometimes giving the presentation).

Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides.

IMHO, things would go better if: * meetings had a clear objective, so you could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or discuss to achieve it. * people focused on the story, not the document. I've found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual aids. * we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting, and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's hard to do either one well.

I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry, humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more complex information.

The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2 page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story itself.

Ideally, it's best practice to create two things: the powerpoint presentation that allows you to exhibit diagrams and charts that illustrate what you are saying, but then secondly a handout that puts in text what you've said, and includes the same diagrams. You speak your piece, using PPT to show diagrams only, not slide-after-slide of words (the words are coming from your mouth). That means the PPT as a handout is useless, and you have to create a separate 3 page (or so) text document that also includes the graphics.

That however is extra work - and a lot of extra time, and hardly anyone does it. The real culprit here is the "time saving shortcut" of simply printing out your PPT as a handout. In order to make it useful, you need the words on the slides. Now you've got slide-after-slide of bullet point lists and text, and that urges you to commit the second sin, which is turning your back to the audience and reading the slides from the stage.

To automatically to revert to good form, the trick is to realize there are three things: the words you speak, the images you project on the screen, and a handout that combines both. That allows PPT to revert to what it is truly good at, which is showing pictures on the screen.

But ... it's more work!