21–30 of 204 posts
> this foam, falling nine times faster than a fired bullet Wouldn’t the foam initially be travelling as fast as the spacecraft? So it’s just the time between it’s release and hitting the wing to accelerate.
I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…
PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy. [EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how thes…
In general, we give people too much of a pass for not bothering to read what they are supposed to (and I myself am guilty of this as it seems like it preparedness for meetings is useless as nobody else reads even on the rare occasions I do speak). That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meetin…
> That is part of the reason Powerpoint is everywhere. You cannot assume that people have read anything before the meeting, you cannot assume they will read during the meeting, so you need to read it out loud to have a decent chance of it being received. I've been told—very seriously—by multiple management consultants that public and private sector executives alike won't read a damn thing unless it shows up in powerp…
These managers were REALLY that braindead? These are NASA managers in charge of life-or-death decisions, and their dull eyes glaze over as spittle puddles underneath them because they're too stupid to read one whole entire paragraph worth of text without ignoring subheadings because they "don't look important"? I hope they're happy with the result of their childish intellectual laziness.
I've seen presentations with Powerpoint that suck the life out of you and also ones that inspire and excite. It's not the tool, it's the presenter and how they wield the tool. Reading word for word off a text-heavy deck in a monotone with no images or diagrams is a recipe for disaster. I tend to have my decks (back when I was doing presentations) be relatively text-lite and involve images/diagrams that back up my tal…
PowerPoint decks for the upper tiers of an organization can take on a whole different character. I shit you not that it's common to pass them around in email as if they were a document format, even for information that is never intended or expected to be presented. As if they were PDFs or something. It's crazy. [EDIT] There's also a kind of horrendous, illegible house style some places, that's expected to be how thes…
1. Title slide with company logo
2. Content slide with 2 or 3 bullet points
3. Closing/thank you slide with contact infoThat's not how I remember it being presented to the public. The official word at the time was that there were no feasible rescue options. Yes, they could have done a spacewalk to inspect the damage but if it had been bad there still wasn't anything that could have been done. I think the main problem with launching a rescue mission was the time it took NASA to get a shuttle ready for launch.
I give Tufte's (admittedly imperfect) thoughts on this deck and David Foster Wallace's This is Water ( https://fs.blog/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/ ) to every new member of my team to read and make it apparent that I expect them to have command of each document's implications.
> Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documentation. Yet, this is a typical, acceptable approach. PowerPoint (or Keynote) is a tool for displaying visual information, information that helps you tell your story, make your case, or prove your point. PowerPoint is a terrible tool for making written documents, that's what word processors are for.
I think that’s on point for many companies. A lot of the terrible slides you see in meetings are actually intended as documentation after the fact, and few people recognize (or care) that this makes for a terrible presentation.
Ironically, I think Powerpoint isn’t such a bad tool for creating handouts. If the intended reader reads the document on their screen instead of printing it, a nice PDF with screen-shaped pages might actually be close to optimal.
You just have to be 100% clear whether you’re creating a document or a presentation.
[1] http://mamamusings.net/archives/2005/11/19/the_culture_of_th...
One slide and bad culture killed seven people.