Our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint

http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...

I recently had a colleague, who fancies himself the master hacker, ask me how to edit a file on ‘this Linux thing’. I went over to his desk and he was copying shell commands from a PowerPoint presentation into PuTTY running on a Windows VM on his Mac. The mind boggles.

Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia they were, to some extent.”

There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and only slideware).

Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on track? Probably not.

Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual work.

That's why I like LaTeX Beamer (at least as long as I don't need anything else in my presentation other than bullet point text and some math): in LaTeX, writing text and equations is relatively easy, but everything else (complicated animations? messing with the default style?) requires non-significant amount of work ... thus the presentations created with Beamer tend to be simple and beautiful.

I worked for hours putting together a presentation to the VPs and owners of the company.

To make it extra special I used background water marks from rainbow infrared scans of very hot equipment. With the transparency set to around 15%, each slide made a very appealing pastel presentation.

At the start of the presentation something went wrong because the software rev of the machine to present on was lower than the one I developed on.

All my water marks came out in full intensity. My presentation looked like an Andy Warhol psychedelic acid tripping fantasy.

My boss, on seeing the first slide, said roll with it, as he motioned with his hand, moving with a circular motion, because you know, time is money, and more importantly, the big bosses have no capacity for waiting on peons.

So side 1 wasn't so bad, but as each slide progressed, each infrared back ground became more and more intense. The CFO owner on each slide would grimace, reminding me of the kid in Home Alone, looking like he was pushed back in his chair by a stiff breeze.

The topic could be interesting to a processing engineering nerd, but under ordinary circumstances it would be lost on all but 2 others in the room. This presentation, however, is burned into the memory of everyone in the room. I am certain nobody remembers a thing I said, but they remember the trippy presentation by sTevo.