As someone already said
"If you use a hammer as a saw, you can't claim the tool is faulty."
Why PowerPoint should be banned
111–120 of 215 posts
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But this is not what PowerPoint was created for, it is designed to be an accompaniment to a speaker. If a slide deck is placed online for viewing without the speaker, the speaker notes should provide the extra detail, not the slides themselves.
Excel was created to be used as a spreadsheet, yet I am pretty sure it is used as a database far more often.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#113Title should be: Ban people like Katrin Park and untrained gov bureaucrats from using power point. Just because people don't know how to use something doesn't mean it should be banned, or even that it's negative. Especially when her "challenging the hegemony" point is 'use Prezi."
I've seen a couple of Prezi talks, and I have to say that that the only way a Prezi talk could possibly be more discombobulating would be if I was forced to watch it on an Oculus Rift while riding a city bus.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#114Power 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.
Prior to PowerPoint people would... write entire reports filled with all of the substantive details, in clear language explaining everything. That got replaced with pitch culture, which is brain dead in comparison.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#115Last time I made a presentation with slides was some 15 years ago. I used SliTeX. (It seems that has been superseded by a slides document class in LaTeX2e.) The slides were very plain: just black text on a white background; no animations. On the other hand, great looking formulas, nicely formatted source code snippets and such. I had a talk prepared; it wasn't a slide-reading marathon. The slides just anchored what I…
You could accomplish all of that using PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn't the problem, bad presentations are the problem. It's the same problem Access has. It's not a bad program, but people use it to do bad things.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#116This is about the tenth time I've heard Powerpoint should be banned. It's prohibited at Amazon I've heard. It's almost as evil as WordArt apparently.
But they all fail to convey one point: what should I do instead?
Today I gave a powerpoint presentation. In fact almost every presentation I gave has been with Libreoffice Impress or Microsoft Office Powerpoint. Should I get rid of slides altogether and just talk (I usually hate talks that do that)? The main point of OP's article seems to be that bullet points are not a form of coherent thought, but who says all my Powerpoints are bullet points? I put much less text on slides than my average classmate or colleague. Am I doing it badly? Should I be using a different program? Please, I'm all ears.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#117Even 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 remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.
Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#118Even 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.
> It makes going over past presentations very easy
But that is not what the presentation is for. If you have a hundred words on each slide (and I've seen that), you might as well give everyone the written dialogue. A visual, in this case Powerpoint but it could be an image in a report as well, is to support your story. It is not the story itself.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#119People who currently use powerpoint to be ineffective will find other ways to be ineffective without it. People also write terrible emails and create horrible documents. Ridiculous books are written. Zero-content instant messages are sent. Some people don't get how to use the phone. Shall we discard them all?
I am sure it wasn't as bad back in the day with transparent sheets and a marker pen. (Whatever those things were called). Most diagrams were drawn on the fly - meaning a minimalistic approach, only conveying the information necessary.
We always called them transparencies or "the overhead". I suppose the modern incarnation is the smartboard, which isn't too bad.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#120The problem is not in PowerPoint, but in people using it.