Whatever your feelings about Powerpoint, and mine personally fall close to the "Powerpoint makes us stupid" line, you can't help but admire that Gettysburg Address slide.
Why PowerPoint should be banned
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Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#12I've seen this type of article come up at least once a year for the last five years now, but banning PowerPoint will not happen in the short-to-medium term in most large (and small, even) companies . Why? Because it's a default app installed on most office machines and because PowerPoint is the language managers speak. If you don't have a PowerPoint or email that managers can physically take to meetings with their managers, it's hard to understand what you're working on. I don't say this cynically; I say it truthfully, because it's human nature.
Tufte suggests banning Powerpoint and giving people handouts to read at meetings; I don't see this getting a lot of traction in most places, simply because people have a lot of other stuff going on.
What I do see as a possible are classes on visual design at both the grade school and college level. Even just one a year can make younger people better at presenting information and will eventually trickle up.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#13I worked in Defense for a year. There were soldiers and staff getting close to a "10,000 hour powerpoint" badge.
I was at a command brief once where one of the officers was presenting a 300+ slide powerpoint show. Fortunately his boss was having none of it, and spared us most of the lecture.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#14The smartass in me would be tempted to get around this hypothetical ban by using LibreOffice Impress.
More seriously, you could make the exact same arguments for banning Photoshop. The more widely adopted software is, the higher the numbers of people who use it improperly. Not much of a solution here beyond deliberately crippling functionality.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#15I've seen this type of article come up at least once a year for the last five years now, but banning PowerPoint will not happen in the short-to-medium term in most large (and small, even) companies . Why? Because it's a default app installed on most office machines and because PowerPoint is the language managers speak. If you don't have a PowerPoint or email that managers can physically take to meetings with their ma…
Anything you do that distracts from the speaking is probably not a good idea. Don't pass around papers, treats, demos, and don't clutter your slides with too much reading. Keep your audience focused on what you are saying.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#16Instead of banning specific tools, try promoting officers and enlisted personnel who do a good job, including public speaking and presenting ideas.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#17One of the slides in the WP story credits Edward Tufte, who has written and published an essay on the subject, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" [1]. This, along with his seminal text "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" [2] are great reads, and I think should be required reading for anyone who has to present anything, technical or otherwise.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#18dont' blame the tool. If a website is ugly, should we ban the internet?
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#19Part of the problem is that Powerpoint guides you to these terrible presentations (and Google Presentations is even worse). At least Keynote tries to stop you from doing awful things to some extent.
But at the end of the day it's really the people using the tool that are doing it wrong. People just need to learn the difference between a Presentation, an Infodeck and an Essay, and when to use each one.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
PowerPoint should be banned because its interface encourages the creator to add distractions. It has almost no tools for making things simpler.
So... PPT really just needs a new design interface?
To an extent. I use iPython with RISE or a deck.js based system. I really like the deck.js method because my interface is vim.