Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why PowerPoint should be banned

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 215 posts

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#151

Post by colechristensen »

qq66 wrote: post #136

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…

The core problem is that PowerPoint is a tool that changes user behavior. Without PP a person sees their task as "how do I communicate my message to these people", with PP it's "how do I finish my slide deck". There are people who use PP to the end of much more effective communication, but those people are unicorns.

Almost universally, my experience with people is they only want to finish slides and spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about fonts and backgrounds and arrangements. When it comes time to present it's the usual awkward slide-reading and the slides only serve to distract the viewers from the messenger.

"Send me the deck" ends up being fairly useless as well because not enough context or content is actually in the slides. Sometimes you get a few bits of hyperlink gold or some single valuable piece of data.

In the end, I think PowerPoint is a powerful tool for effective communication that shouldn't be used in most circumstances (because in that "most" it makes communication worse). I appreciate the hard work and difficulty you must go through trying to design a tool to effect human behavior to promote good communications.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#152

Post by semi-extrinsic »

qq66 wrote: post #136

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…

Is there a reason why you rescale the font size when the user inputs too much text? Changing it so that you'd have to really dig deep in some menu in order to put 200 words on each slide seems like it would be a big improvement. Beamer and the various HTML5 backends to Pandoc all do this and I really like it.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#153

Post by MrTonyD »

I'm an old timer. I remember a time before PowerPoint existed - and we did communicate with reports, whiteboard, flip-charts, and talks. Trust me - PowerPoint is better.

If nothing else, if forced people to put more thought into their talk - since they had to write down something on those slides. And it allowed for the potential to create something persuasive with graphs and sequence to accompany a talk. That really didn't exist.

And use a Word Processor for talks? I've done that - it can be done, but it doesn't compare to a specialized tool you can use to put together a slide set in a matter of minutes.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#154

Post by MrTonyD »

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #152
qq66 wrote: post #136

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…

Is there a reason why you rescale the font size when the user inputs too much text? Changing it so that you'd have to really dig deep in some menu in order to put 200 words on each slide seems like it would be a big improvement. Beamer and the various HTML5 backends to Pandoc all do this and I really like it.

I suspect that most casual users appreciate that feature. And for myself, as a "power user" - who usually builds multi-hundred page slide decks - I often construct drafts of my presentations that might include slides with a cut/paste of material from documentation or the Internet - to be processed later. So autosizing makes it possible for me to revise that raw material into slides later.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#155

Post by bbcbasic »

qq66 wrote: post #136

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…

I attended a programming conference last week.

Everyone used PowerPoint or similar.

The slides mostly had code on, and some occasional light hearted stuff (but not distracting).

Without slides this would have been too fiddly for some presenters, e.g. messing around with a text editor or worse just explaining code with no visual.

However rarely was there a slide where the talker just read off it. I think there was 1 slide I witnessed where that happened.

So +1 for PowerPoint if used correctly.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#156

Post by MrTonyD »

mattstocum wrote: post #117
thesimpsons1022 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#157

Post by bbcbasic »

Just want to mention Toastmasters for anyone wanting to improve their presentation skills.

I learned there a lot about making presentations FOR the audience.

To PowerPoint or not is just one of many decisions to make depending on the talk and the audience. Sometimes appropriate, sometimes it is not.

At Toastmasters (or at least the club I went to) no PowerPoint was used, but sometimes props were used. Practicing presenting with just your voice is definitely a worthwhile character building experience!

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#158

Post by analog31 »

vkb wrote: post #12

I'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…

What I do see as a possible are classes on visual design at both the grade school and college level. Even just one a year can make younger people better at presenting information and will eventually trickle up.

I've got two kids who have been through grade school. Actually, they spent a fair amount of time making visual presentations. But as with most of their lessons, I would prefer that the work be done without a computer.

Re: Why PowerPoint should be banned

#159

Post by DigitalSea »

PowerPoint used correctly can be great. The article seems a little over-the-top, just because a few people are misusing it is not cause for going and make statements like PowerPoint should be banned. a can of spray paint in an artists hands can make a piece of art, a spray paint can in the hands of a teenager painting graffiti on a billboard is vandalism and misuse.

If we banned PowerPoint, people would just find another way to create an abomination of a slideshow using something else. The tool isn't the problem. Just like paint cans aren't to blame for graffiti and car manufacturers aren't to blame for drivers who misuse their cars speeding. There are bigger problems going on in the world that we should be worrying about more than we should bad PowerPoint presentations.

Post reply on HN