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I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around. What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool: • something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates • .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had…
PowerPoint wasn't the first though, was it? I remember Harvard Graphics and something from Lotus also?
Yes, Lotus Freelance. Also IBM Storyboard. Not sure which of those had vector graphics in the same style as modern PowerPoint (Storyboard was bitmapped), and whether old PowerPoint already had vector graphics.
powerpoint is one of those things that most people don’t think about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.
I don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).
I’m in my early thirties and we sometimes used transparent sheets on overhead projector too when I was in school. Although in our case we made the sheets with the computer (Microsoft Word, Paint, etc) and they gave us transparent sheets that we put in the printer. I remember that the ink on the transparent sheets would smudge if we touched it, which sometimes accidentally happened when we handled our transparent sheets.
Even in high school I sometimes saw teachers use overhead projection with transparent sheets.
One of my math teachers in high school brought a special device with him one day. This one https://www.calculatorsource.com/ti-89titanium-vs.html (or some other model by TI). It’s an external screen that you connect to a TI graphing calculator and then put it on top of the glass plate of an overhead projector so that you can project what the calculator is showing for everyone to see :)
PowerPoint wasn't the first though, was it? I remember Harvard Graphics and something from Lotus also?
Aldus Persuasion was far superior to Powerpoint. Sadly it got bought and killed.
One of the things I like about Google Workplace is it ended up stripping out a lot of the sort of cruft that Microsoft added over the years and ended up with components that are more streamlined for my generally fairly simple needs.
I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and PPTs flying around. What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in this culture, they are a signaling tool: • something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates • .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals you've thought about it, and probably had…
A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot digest even simple information if it’s not on PowerPoint slides. Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides are a big no no. Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468895/u-s--army-disc... You aren’t the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd...