Additional horrors of powerpoint: people drawing faux ui mockups combined with few bullet points explaining the planned logic and calling this the design phase of software development.
Why PowerPoint should be banned
61–70 of 215 posts
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#62Even 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…
Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong
I'm torn. Yes, slides are a supplement. But a purely verbal presentation on things like financials or schedule without some supporting data feels like complete fluff, and while the speaker could be spitting out data verbally, that doesn't "work" when you have more than one or two data points - the audience can't hold lots of data in their head as you recite it. That's what visuals are for.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#63Even 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 thi…
Opera had a nice presentation mode for such things.
I have seen also some pages with similar functionality, and a couple of flash apps.
Even a PDF created from Latex works wonders for that purpose.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#64I'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…
I'm in favor of that, but my education has included plenty of powerpoint education. For context, I'm 25 and attended a typical Canadian high school and community college. We had units on presenting material in every english, social studies and "life skills" class in several different years in high school. Usually the classes included all the guidelines for delivering a high quality, useful presentation.
Same in college - we had a whole class one semester dedicated to learning how to present material effectively using powerpoint. Even still, my classmates would insist on giving boring, monotone lectures with far too much info on each slide. It got better toward the end of that college course though.
My takeaway from all that is that public speaking and presenting are DIFFICULT skills, that require not just a couple weeks of instruction, but many years of intensive instruction over the course of a schooling career. People do get better at it, but it takes a lot of work to get them there. Blaming powerpoint or any other tool is a simplistic approach that doesn't help the problem.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#65Even 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…
I really like when people put a lot of information on the slides.
It makes going over past presentations very easy. For example, when a new ML algorithm comes out, the only way to easily grasp how it works without reading a bunch of papers is to find some Power Point slides by the author. I guarantee people wouldn't make two sets of slides either.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#66Steve Jobs: "People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint"
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#67[deleted]
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#68Even 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 thi…
That seems extremely painful without explicit page break characters, because if you were to rewrite anything, you would have to adjust the corresponding whitespace or else everything would get misaligned.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#69Even 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…
I really like when people put a lot of information on the slides. It makes going over past presentations very easy. For example, when a new ML algorithm comes out, the only way to easily grasp how it works without reading a bunch of papers is to find some Power Point slides by the author. I guarantee people wouldn't make two sets of slides either.
If the slides are dense with text and the intended audience likes it that way (learning a complex algorithm), that's just PPT acting like a landscape version of a Microsoft Word or LaTeX document.
The reverse is also true: one can use MS Word with sparse text and make it act like a PowerPoint.
In the context of the thread, it's when the wall of text on the slides is negatively affecting the delivery of important information. Dense slides when not appropriate will bore the audience (like those military presentations shown in the article.) To add insult to injury, the typical unpolished speaker will then recite. every. single. word. on the slide.
Instead of the PPT being a set of helpful diagrams or pictures that are superior to wordy descriptions, the text-heavy slide deck becomes a glorified transcript of the talk.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#70If I'm not talking in front of a big room, I prefer to whiteboard notes and diagrams as I'm talking, based on an outline that would otherwise be pretty near to what I'd put on slides.
One big advantage of whiteboarding is that you're much more likely to draw a diagram. People seem to pay more attention. If they want a take-away, you can photograph the drawings and notes.
For whatever reason, trying to do the same in a big room with an overhead projector is much harder.