It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
I've never understood why the ire gets directed towards PowerPoint rather than the people who construct poor presentations.
Why PowerPoint should be banned
131–140 of 215 posts
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#132Even 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…
> One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said.
Agreed. In my opinion, the slides should supplement the presentation and sum it up in as few words as possible. Having concise slides that sum up a presentation makes it so much easier to go over the presentation and learn the subject more thoroughly (edit: assuming you have access to the slides).
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#133My old powerpointless? page is still up at http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/ - "A list of articles discussing the impact of a reliance on PowerPoint® and bullet-point based communication."
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#134I'd like to see the article about why we should invest time in communicating effectively rather than bashing on the tools that people misuse. Seems like on every level there is room for improvement on conveying ideas to other people even with all the technological improvements we've had.
Specifically I'd like to see us get better at expressing the core ideas but still having the ability to easily dig deeper into the details even if it is offline. Especially interesting is when a presentation allows the user to play with the data additionally. Something like Mike Bostock's work[1] that conveys a lot of information densely and also builds on an open platform to let audience explore the data interactively.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#135Even 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…
Although I agree that people are poorly educated on presentation making I think the main reason they use PP is because of the 'I have a computer' syndrome. Tufte illustrates it perfectly in with 5 colors for 2 data points example in his "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". People would not recreate PP but abuse watever else they could find.
What is worse is that this syndrome is affecting high school students. At least here in Lima Peru, homework is demanded to be done in the computer because it is 'more professional'. So the minimum effort way copy and pasting becomes trivial. In the old way of pen a paper our inherit aversion to effort pushed the student to learn to summarize as writing more demanded more effort. I would prohibit high school homework to be done in the computer. But I digress.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#136Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, on PowerPoint. Here are a few of my reactions (mine alone, not Microsoft's):
* Presenting an idea is one of the most subtle arts of the human experience. It draws on skills like storytelling, communication, and persuasion which are way outside the scope of any software application. The best typewriter in the world is going to let Ernest Hemingway's Great American Novel flow directly from his mind onto the paper, but it isn't going to make me even a tiny bit more capable of writing a great novel.
* A single PowerPoint presentation is often called into double duty, both as a visual aid to a live presentation, and a standalone document that serves as the summary of the presentation for those who couldn't attend. ("I can't make it this afternoon -- please send me the deck.") This requirement forces the PowerPoint presentation and spoken content to become 100% redundant with each other, yielding the meetings where people read verbatim off an overly dense PowerPoint slide. PowerPoint has features that try to address this problem, such as hidden slides that show up in the printed document but not the slide show, and narration recording so that you can distribute the audio along with the slides, but presenting from the "leave-behind deck" is still common.
* There's always a tension between giving the user full control, and making the experience as simple as possible. Also, the more structure you embed in an authoring application about what the output "should" look like, the more you encourage everyone towards a homogenous vision defined by the product designers. PowerPoint does make it easy to insert simple diagrams such as with SmartArt, but fundamentally the application is designed to let the user take full control of the content. I wouldn't want a text editor that didn't allow me to write a grammatically incorrect sentence. However, a suggestion that "the grammar in this sentence might be wrong" could be useful, if presented in a non-obtrusive way.
These are issues we think about every day in the PowerPoint team, and I appreciate reading the various viewpoints here.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#137Power 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.
But how many people read them? Once you wind up having to point to the contract, the relationship is already south bound. Today people are readily writing software in languages with no specification other than the prototypical implementation. When communication was expensive, investment in big documentation was usually sound.
Today, I don't need an atlas of Georgia Counties. I've got Wikipedia and the US Census Bureau and free long distance on my cell-phone plan and minutes that go unused every month. If I have a question about Ubuntu, I don't need a manual. There's StackExchange and Google. There are lots of lightweight channels.
Don't get me wrong, I love books and deep knowledge. But the six months that it takes to produce, publish, and disseminate a tome doesn't offer slam dunk ROI. The agilists have a point.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#138Powerpoint is only as good as the content behind the slides
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#139Last 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.
However, just by researching and using open alternatives to PowerPoint, I demonstrated free thought, which, in turn, bears relevance to making a good presentation.
The root of the problem isn't PowerPoint itself or how people use it; it's that it doesn't even occur to them that using something other than PowerPoint (or not using anything of that sort at all) is even an option.
Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned
#140haters gonna hate. The real issue: don't write power-points that are meant to be studied -- power-points are meant as a presentation addition.
the only things I demand on a power-points are two numbers at the bottom
1) the slide number we are on
2) the total number of slides in the deck
that way I can decide if I should slit my wrists immediately or if I can push through and wait the deck out.