Ha, as someone who has worked in the public sector the army (hell most of the defense community) essentially RUNS on PowerPoint. They should certainly move away from it but there are so many workflows that have been established for so many years moving is going to be painful and likely require custom solutions for each type of report.
Why PowerPoint should be banned
31–40 of 215 posts
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#32PowerPoint isn't the problem. The problem is asking people who aren't proficient speakers or presenters to present on something. We are literally asking them to present on a topic they know about and communicate it in a way that is effective and informative. PowerPoint isn't the issue. The issue is one of training. PowerPoint (and other presentation software) is easy enough to use, it gives you all the tools you need to prepare an excellent presentation. But just because I have a kitchen filled with chef-quality tools and the best food available doesn't mean I'm immediately a professional cook, let alone a chef. I might be able to hobble together a meal suitable for the family dinner table, but I'm not quitting my day job.
But no one is suggesting we ban burners and bowls from the kitchen.
The call to ban PowerPoint is harmful. It ignores the real problem while pretending to solve things it cannot really solve. The result will be that the real underlying problem goes unfixed longer, while those that don't use PowerPoint will effectively be given a pass: "You aren't using PowerPoint, you must know what you are talking about."
Knives might be dangerous, but when you are trained to use them, they are useful. Don't ban knives from the kitchen.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#33Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory).
In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to put on a good presentation using it.
One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong. Putting exactly what you're saying into your slides verbatim is generally a mistake (although putting key points or a list, and expanding on it vocally can work well).
Generally most people put too much content into single slides as they're worried about having to advance the slideshow mid-point. This means that your point is too expansive, and you should cut your point in half and then cutting your slides in half follows naturally (e.g. instead of doing a yearly projection with summaries of each quarter, just do each quarter individually and sum the year as a whole alone at the end).
I certainly don't think I'm an expert at presentations, I just care slightly more than your average person, and have copied elements from what I consider good deliveries.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#34Earlier 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?
The MS Office suite in general is incredibly overcomplicated for what the average person is actually going to need or even use. The ribbon interface I think helped (mainly because it removed/hid Clipart and Wordart), but not enough. Many people I know have stopped using Office entirely in favour of the free and much lighter weight Google Docs suite, with no complaints about missing features.
MS does seem to be simplifying (or arguably dumbing down) their interfaces a lot these days, so maybe we'll see this kind of a redesign.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#35Power Point is ubiquitous because it offers improved communications. Just because some journalist isn't old enough to remember slides and overhead projectors doesn't mean such things didn't exist. If there's a shortcoming with Power Point it's that it is based on the idea of printing everything out rather than dynamic interaction. It's an old paradigm, but it's hard to beat something modelled on the physical world.
I disagree.
In the pre-PowerPoint era it was more common for people to actually prepare a talk rather than hide behind hastily-created slides that usually serve more as prompts for the speaker than visual enhancements to the content.
It is certainly possible to give bad presentations without PowerPoint, and good presentations with it, but most people only learn bad habits.
PowerPoint PRO TIP: The "b" key will bring up a black screen, and the "w" key will bring up a white screen, so people can look at your actual face when you are talking to them.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#36One 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. [1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/…
I saw a version of #1 online.
users.ha.uth.gr/tgd/pt0501/09/Tufte.pdf
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#37This article (and the presentation the article is about) entirely misses the point (or what should be the point) of a slideshow: to serve as a visual aid for a spoken lecture, speech, or other monologue. When displayed in this context, even the seemingly-worst slides make sense.
What the presentation in question does is simply yank out a bunch of slides from not only their context within the overall slideshow, but also from their broader context of a presentation-assisted monologue. You're not supposed to try to encapsulate the entirety of a subject into a series of bullet points; you're supposed to capture the key topics in those bullet points and expand on them through monologue and (should questions be fielded) dialogue/discussion/debate/fruit-throwing/etc.
Yeah, I'd probably agree that the case studies of why PowerPoint should be banned also missed the point of a slideshow, but that's hard to know without having a transcript or recording of the finished presentation.
Basically, there's more to a presentation than just the slides.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#38Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory). In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to…
At a few dev meetups, some presenters just did markdown documents with enough new lines to be equivalent to a page. That way they just pressed pgdn on their laptop.
On another note, some lecture-style slides (where review post-presentation or without presentation) can be really helpful for understanding concepts otherwise described in math and without examples in official papers. Many CS publications seem to make this mistake in my eyes--that is, presenting something novel without bridging the gap via examples.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#39Well, about presentations, a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about a tool[0] to create text adventures with Markdown and created a slide deck using that tool. So the deck was itself a "presentable" text adventure[1].
[0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt
[1] https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#40Part of me wants to agree with the article. It is easy to use PowerPoint to cover up the fact you don't have a clue what you are talking about by using lots of flashy effects and "bling" that PowerPoint offers.
The style I prefer is rather minimal and mainly uses PowerPoint as a "cheat sheet" to give me cues on what I want to tell my audience. This encourages me to focus on the audience rather than the computer running PowerPoint and speak more freely. An occasional image can help illustrate a point, but I tend to use them very sparingly. (The disadvantage is that someone simply looking at the slides afterwards won't have a clue what I said, but I can live with that.) The feedback I have received was very positive, although I never spoke to Marketing people who seem to be all about the pretty pictures and flashy transitions.
My point, I guess, is that PowerPoint can be abused, badly, but I am not sure if it is fair to blame it for that. The world would not be that much worse off without PowerPoint, but people looking to distract from their cluelessness will find a way to do so anyway. A more realistic article might be titled "Use PowerPoint only when nothing else will do" or "Stop talking at your audience and start talking to them".
EDIT: Fixed a typo