141–150 of 215 posts
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PowerPoint should be banned because its interface encourages the creator to add distractions. It has almost no tools for making things simpler.
After banning it and getting dizzy from watching some bad Prezi presentations, you'll want PowerPoint back.
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> Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file? You generate your PDF presentation from LaTeX, which is stored in git! Multiple simultaneous editors with sane merging, unlike a group of people editing a PPT file on the network drive. But those are probably not the PDF presenters you're talking about.
So you're really talking bout LaTeX, not PDF then. PDF is a publishing format, not a collaboration format. Now you run into the WYSIWYG issue, where the collaboration format needs to be "printed" in order to see the output. Is there a WYSIWIG collaboration tool for LaTeX over git?
Even 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.
The truth is PowerPoint is a very effective tool and you used it properly. If you are ignorant, lazy or stupid, no great tool can help you.
Disclaimer: 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 f…
Personally, I like to use Powerpoint as talking points and just go with the flow for the remainder of the conversation.
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That is absolutely absurd, and I'm horrified that that's being taught.
It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides. I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about. Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to…
At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.
It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
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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 Burea…
The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion.
As I wrote in another post, how I would drive getting off of the pitch-train is through internal blogs, wikis, and possibly forums. The way things are today you tend to have 2 main tools in use: the pitch and then reactionary response (the email thread, bug trail, backlog, what-have-you). That's very limiting, myopic, and reactionary. It makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions at a meaty level of detail on things (designs, architectures, directions, etc.) Those things tend to happen in email threads which get unwieldy rather quickly.
You certainly don't need to have a report/document/memo/manifesto about every little thing. But when you need to have a discussion about, say, the direction of your whole product stack, major engineering changes, that sort of thing, it hurts when what should be a conversation at a level of an RFC is reduced to a pitch-deck that people then either thumbs up or thumbs down.
People 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.
That said, I remember lots of transcription from a professor's notes to a blackboard to students' notebooks with very little value-add along the way.
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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.
One of the problems with "Powerpoints" is that they serve at least two different functions--as a visual aid for the the audience during the presentation and as a leave-behind/documentation (or slideshare, etc. independent of a presenter). One presentation is very unlikely to be optimal for both. At the same time, you're right that it's unrealistic to expect multiple versions.
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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 slid…