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“One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech (2016)
- peterburkimsher 9y agoWhen the IEEE article was posted last week, I followed a link to a book written by one of the developers of the original PowerPoint. I got very little work done that Friday, but it was very interesting, particularly thinking about the difference between OHPs and 35mm slides. http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul... I'd like to hear Robert Gaskins give a TED talk. I emailed him to ask if he also wants to, and if he's willing then I think we can nominate him through the TED website. It's quite meta, because I think TED would never really exist without PowerPoint. http://speaker-nominations.ted.com http://speaker-nominations.ted.com
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoEvery time I sit down to work on a presentation, I intentionally recall Cristian's retort [0]: "We used a helium neon laser, captured its phase shift with a photo sensor, and manually corrected by 30 percent to account for the index of refraction," Cristian answered rapidly, keyed up on adrenaline. Cameron had peppered them with questions on the drive to Santa Barbara, and Cristian was ready. Swean raised a bushy, graying eyebrow. He asked about motor speed, and Lorenzo sketched out their combination of controllers and spike relays. Oscar answered the question about signal interference in the tether by describing how they'd experimented with a 15-meter cable before jumping up to one that was 33 meters. "You're very comfortable with the metric system," Swean observed. "I grew up in Mexico, sir," Oscar said. Swean nodded. He eyed their rudimentary flip chart. "Why don't you have a PowerPoint display?" he asked. "PowerPoint is a distraction," Cristian replied. "People use it when they don't know what to say." "And you know what to say?" "Yes, sir." [0] https://www.wired.com/2014/12/4-mexican-immigrant-kids-cheap-robot-beat-mit/ https://www.wired.com/2014/12/4-mexican-immigrant-kids-cheap...
- jjjensen90 9y agoThat's such a great quote! Before I came on board at my current job the teams would occasionally create 350mb (embedded videos, etc), multi-hour PowerPoint presentations used for showing business users what their team had been doing and what was on their road map. Needless to say, attendance to these presentations was abysmal and people would play mobile games and catch up on email for the duration. When I came on we switched to a new system where each lead engineer got 5 index cards and could prepare main points and notes on there, and could otherwise only do live demos of the products for showing things off. I found that with the PowerPoints they would spend hours on designing the slides, read directly off of them, and often include way, way too much detail for business users. The new system is going great, and I wish I had done that in my college career. And slightly off-topic: the Carl Hayden story is just so damn awesome. I think the whole story shares some lessons about building a product. I'm looking forward to the movie.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoThose things need to be strictly timeboxed. Assume your audience has a 15 minute attention span, maybe per subject / team. If you can summarize it in 15 minutes then you're good. Shorter is even better. Longer might work if you have a really interesting subject, but usually, product demos etc aren't, especially if they're a recurring thing.
- sanderjd 9y agoI guess I don't really get it... How are powerpoint slides any different than flip chart sheets? It seems to me that either thing can be used illustratively by people who do know what to say, or as a crutch by people who don't.
- guardian5x 9y agoI guess when everyone uses it, its not cool anymore. The quote "People use it when they don't know what to say." sounds a bit arrogant.
- EliRivers 9y ago
- phantom_oracle 9y agoHow does the community feel about well-presented talks using very few or none slides? I kind of feel that even in tech, you would come across as unprepared or "lazy" for not having slides/PowerPoint
- dragonsky67 9y agoI was invited to a speech night for the class of my 8 year old daughter. Members of the class were to do a "multi modal" presentation on subjects ranging from global warming to their favourite band. It was sad to see that most of the kids had PowerPoint decks full of words that they just stood and read. Of the class of about 25 kids only a very few did something different. A couple didn't use the screen at all, choosing to do a "show and tell" style of presentation showing relevant objects. The "My favourite Band" girl, talked about her band whilst playing a recording, and a couple gave their talk unassisted (well maybe palm cards) whilst referring to well selected pictures on the screen. I can still remember the talk about the impact of tropical storms (not my daughters) because of the well selected dramatic images that were used to emphasise the points made in the talk. PowerPoint presentations are not necessary bad, but use the tool for what it's best at, that is displaying information that cannot be displayed either in a written report or verbally. Use it to support what you are saying, not be what you are saying. If you do this the people in the room actually have to listen to you, not sit there reading the screen, and let's face it, in most cases you want them concentrating on you, otherwise what are you their for?
- analog31 9y agoI think that to pull it off, you need to convey the impression that you're too important and busy to create PP slides, and that you're showing stuff that's just so urgent and great that you didn't want to make them wait for a PP. Also, practice will improve your ability to give those presentations, so it's worth practicing on low profile meetings before doing it in front of the CEO.
- robaato 9y agoI remember a presentation by Martin Fowler which was without slides - talking extempore about his latest thinking on software development - and very engaging it was too!
- everyone 9y agoPersonally I like to be able to keep presentations really really short and dense by showing a live demo, gifs, or pictures. .. I think when pp presentations start having text or bullet points is when it starts to go wrong.
- stmw 9y agoThis article has too small font, too many words, I lost interest part way through. Is there a presentation somewhere that covers the authors' main points? Thanks. :) j/k
- Turing_Machine 9y agoThe words are pretty much par for the course in academic writing. That font, though, is inexcusable.
- PeachPlum 9y agohttp://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: > I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: > Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account. This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
- mbrock 9y agoPowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF as a kind of indicator that the material is printworthy and serious; the obsessive numbering of pictures as "figures"; the use of academic shibboleths like contextualize, performative, forms of sociality, critique, etc; the refusal to summarize an argument; the namedropping of historical studies to give an impression of endless scholarly depth; the vaguely critical attitude that carefully avoids explicit moral judgments; the long-winded "narrative" form like a New Yorker reportage mixed with excerpts from monographs and textbooks. McLuhan once said that when reading texts for research, he skips the odd pages and only reads the even ones, because he had observed "a huge amount of redundancy in texts" and that having to fill out the remaining pages with his imagination kept him alert and wakeful... This article, which I enjoyed skimming, if you think about in terms of "the medium being the message", seems like a piece of advocacy for literate print culture. The authors mention designing and inventing new and interesting forms of communication and persuasion beyond PowerPoint—but their own choice of form is highly conservative.
- vanderZwan 9y agoAnyone reminded of Alan Kay's way of presenting with Smalltalk? He always takes a moment to point out how horribly limiting PowerPoint is too. I recall reading about another alternative OS where the "desktop" was a zoomable canvas and files were opened by zooming in far enough. Presentations on that machine apparent were a simple matter or aligning files next to each other and scrolling.
- Waterluvian 9y agoDo you have an example? I'm interested.
- itronitron 9y agosounds like Pad++ from UMD ... http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/ http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/
- vanderZwan 9y agoWasn't what I had in mind, but thanks for that! I'm interested in the history of UI experimentation, and this looks interesting.
- sattoshi 9y agoSounds a lot like Prezi
- eovwm23neuo 9y agoI've watched a presentation done with an app that works like this and it's nauseating. All the zooming in and out gave me a headache. It was literally one of the worst presentations I've ever viewed.
- enzanki_ars 9y agoI am assuming you are referring to Prezi. I agree that Prezi is one of the worst presentation software out there. Both presenting, viewing, and creating one of those presentations is the worst.
- twic 9y agoThe best-constructed talk i ever saw as as scientist was by a medic who considered himself far too busy and important to spend time mucking around with Powerpoint. The only slides he had were figures of his results - photomicrographs of tissue, graphs of drug effects, etc - probably lifted from a paper in preparation, and so probably done by his graduate students anyway. This meant that there were only a handful of slides, so very few distracting transitions to distract from his talking, and the screen was always full of important content. Needless to say, that this guy's combination of laziness and arrogance had led to him to have a much better presentation than me with much less effort left me absolutely furious.
- hkmurakami 9y agoQ - medic = doctor in British(?) Terminology?
- twic 9y agoYes. Specifically one who practices medicine rather than surgery (who would be a surgeon). This guy was a consultant, ie a very senior doctor, and got to do research as a sideline. If the context had been clearer, i would have said "a consultant", but on HN that could mean anything! I think in the US such people might be called "internists", which is also a weird and confusing term in its own way.
- make3 9y agoI don't see a field medical technician having grad students, so I would think so
- jackweirdy 9y agoYes
- mattmanser 9y agoIt's a university term really, the students studying Medicine are called medics by everyone else, tend to be very cliquey.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
- Systemic33 9y agoI always use the mantra that power points should only be used when you need to show something you can't draw in 5 seconds. If it's not strictly needed, then it does more harm than good, by distracting listeners.
- abtinf 9y ago“By inadvertently privileging the relationships between personal computing and networked forms of sociality...” What a bunch of gibberish.
- Finnucane 9y agoIt's not gibberish. The meaning is clear. In English, you would say, "We got sidetracked by the rise of social media platforms and forget that people do other stuff with computers." There's a difference between gibberish and obfuscation, a difference upon which hangs tenure.
- scrumper 9y agoIs that what that meant? Must admit I couldn’t parse it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- macspoofing 9y agoWe use power point to prototype our UIs. It's actually quite powerful and works surprisingly well given that we don't usually go into complex workflows when prototyping. I don't think I've seen a better commercial product for throwing something together real quick.
- hatmatrix 9y agoThis is an interesting idea. How does that work, exactly? Edit - nevermind, I guess I'm the only one in the dark [1][2]. [1] https://medium.com/unqut-inc/ui-design-rapid-prototyping-in-powerpoint-da6d3d09cdc2 https://medium.com/unqut-inc/ui-design-rapid-prototyping-in-... [2] http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/ http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/
- macspoofing 9y agoThat's funny. I thought we were so clever because as far as I know we just tried it one day and it worked really well. I guess others had the same idea :)
- glaberficken 9y agoI have used Power Point for a long time as my go to "image composition tool". You know, when you just want to annotate a photo or a map, or superimpose a few images on each other (like for quick workplace jokes) It is the fastest tool I found to do these sorts of quick and dirty jobs. I call it "PowerShoping" =)
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoI had a colleague that did that too, either with Powerpoint or MacOS' version; he used it to create pretty complex graphics and everything with it.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- waynecochran 9y agoIf only Lincoln has PowerPoint https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm https://norvig.com/Gettysburg/sld001.htm
- eovwm23neuo 9y agoDid you not see this example in the article? What's your point?
- CalChris 9y agoLimit presentations to 10 slides. This works for VC pitches. It should probably work for anything. Guy Kawasaki even has his 10 20 30 rule [1]. 10 slides, 20 minutes, 30 point font. I had a writing assignment once in college. The limit was 1000 words. And then there was a list of points we had to address. Enforced brevity was the challenge. On the other end of the spectrum, there's David Byrne I Heart Powerpoint [2] which I had the pleasure to see at Berkeley. He's mentioned in the article. [1] https://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/ https://guykawasaki.com/the_102030_rule/ [2] http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1.html.
- matwood 9y agoIt's not a Powerpoint problem, but a presenter problem. Slides should be short and concise with a few words or graphics. If someone can read a presenters slides, and understand the presentation then too much was put on the slides.
- probably_wrong 9y agoOr, as my public speaking instructor put it: reading is faster than listening. If I can read what you are going to say, then why are you here? I'd rather just read it.
- mgbmtl 9y agoTo some extent, people could also just watch the recording online, and skip through the boring content. When I attend a presentation, it's usually to engage with the speaker and with other people in the room. Powerpoint or not, if the speaker is just reading an overly rehearsed script, I'll probably fall asleep.
- dkersten 9y agoI'd rather read. Skipping over video is an exercise in frustratingly watching snippets to see if you've overshot or not.
- matwood 9y agoWhat you want to read then is the transcript of the presentation along with slides to follow along.
- dkersten 9y agoYeah, that would be pretty good. Although, having said that, I find a written article is usually better written than a transcript of spoken language, since spoken language tends to go off point or include filler or whatever, while written articles are generally better edited. But transcript + slides are pretty good, when available.
- harry8 9y ago"It has likely been used to raise more money than any other tool in history." Hmm, I'm going to have to think for all of 2 seconds and say I can't see a way of interpreting "used to raise more money" such that powerpoint is going to come in ahead of the pen. And the hyperbole continue. "Are we really thinking here or is this just so much pointing and clicking." https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Are-we-thinking-here-or-is-this-just-so-much-pointing-and-clicking-New-Yorker-Cartoon-Posters_i9172134_.htm https://www.allposters.com/-sp/Are-we-thinking-here-or-is-th... It would seem the author wishes to blame a tool for their own failings..?
- foolfoolz 9y agoI don't buy the PowerPoint hate at all. we are in a time where you plug your computer into a projector. your computer can display anything you want, but I believe most people would still show PowerPoint for a presentation. yes there's a lot of bad presentations out there, there's patterns that make your ppt bad. but that doesn't mean PowerPoint is a bad tool, I think that really just highlights giving a presentation is difficult. PowerPoint may make it seem easy because you can make them fast but making a good one is still difficult lots of websites suck but we don't blame the web lots of apps suck but we don't blame the platform
- sanderjd 9y ago> lots of websites suck but we don't blame the web > lots of apps suck but we don't blame the platform Actually, I see both of these things a lot.
- geraldcombs 9y ago- Powerpoint - has - terrible - default - settings
- dkersten 9y agoOn the other hand, powerpoint has good font size defaults. I haaaaate when people use one of those javascript presentation things (or, shudder, something home grown), because their fonts are ALWAYS[1] too small for me to read (I don't have great eyesight, even with glasses, I can't always read everything at a distance), while powerpoint is typically pretty readable (as long as you have no more than 5 points on a slide... after that, it gets too small) [1] in my experience thus far
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoYeah, this; if you really are going to show code, make it huge. No such thing as too big when it comes to that. Stick to 40 character lines tops and make them fill the whole screen. Prefer to use the full slide for a code example, and put the most important thing at the top of the screen (usually the bottom half of a presentation / beamer screen is unreadable)
- jordigh 9y agoI've found doitlive is a good way to give a quick, non-interactive talk, for example, where you know you won't have time to answers questions from the audience. I used a proto-doitlive, which inspired the actual doitlive, to present a lightning talk on Mercurial revsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSLvERZQSok#t=965 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSLvERZQSok#t=965
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI understand the powerpoint hate, but seriously when you are presenting data plots you dont want to draw it. You want to show the data. Another benefit of slides are that researchers post them on the internets, with presenter notes. These are often very informative.
- hydrox24 9y ago> when ... presenting data plots you dont wnat to draw it. You want to show the data. I agree with you whole-heartedly. The criticism of powerpoint is not so much it's broader context. There are plenty of ways to present structured data with computers promoting good-practices. The criticism is that Powerpoint doesn't encourage people to show the data in the first place. TL;DR: This issue isn't what Powerpoint can do, it is what it nudges people to do.
- tacosmell 9y agoIn fact, that this guy's combination of laziness and arrogance had led to him to have a much better presentation than me with much less effort left me absolutely Mad.
- gautamdivgi 9y agoI generally avoid power points - but I think the hate is misplaced. The reason people put detail in power points is because there is no expectation of prior reading/review/preparation from an audience. It makes things worse with a remote work culture where a power point gets treated as a "summary".
- ryandrake 9y agoThe text on this site is confined to a very narrow column that is about 15% the width of my display. Whatever point the author has about the goodness or badness of PowerPoint as way to present is diminished thanks to the site's inability to present its own content.
- weej 9y agoBezo's reasoning on Amazon's no powerpoint policy: "Well structured, narrative text is what we're after rather than just text. If someone builds a list of bullet points in word, that would be just as bad as powerpoint. The reason writing a 4 page memo is harder than "writing" a 20 page powerpoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what's more important than what, and how things are related. Powerpoint-style presentations somehow give permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the innerconnectedness of ideas." http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-email-against-powerpoint-presentations-2015-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-email-against-powe...
- blhack 9y agoIf you want to see what a good powerpoint looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3RnDD4kETI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3RnDD4kETI Bad powerpoints are bad, and good powerpoints are good. They're a useful tool. If they're used well, then they help the talk. (This is also a excellent talk. I recommend watching it.)
- a_d 9y agoI am surprised there isn’t more on this in this thread: Persuasion is the center-piece of business activity. One of the most powerful ways to persuade is through storytelling. Well storytelling is central to our social and cultural experience. No wonder that it finds its way in our work — esp work at big companies (more humans = more social, cultural). Most presentations, discussions or meetings are exercises in persuasion via storytelling. For years stories are told with theatrics or embellishment. That’s PowerPoint. In the hands of a good storyteller — someone who has something to say and a compelling way to say it — PowerPoint will seem like a great tool. Conversely, the tool will suck (in the same way a guitar sucks when i play it, but becomes magical in the hands of jimmy page :)) Now, as a storytelling tool — just the fact that PowerPoint has found its way into a Billion computers — is astounding. Probably makes it one of the most useful tools invented!
- Kenji 9y agoI don't get the PowerPoint hate. You can have a wonderful presentation while having PowerPoint slides. As an additional benefit, your audience can keep the presentation PDF which makes it easier for them to remember the cornerstones of the talk.
- oeuviz 9y agoI wish this website was summarized in a few slides.
- oeuviz 9y agoPeople forget that especially in the business world PowerPoint presentations are not only used for presenting content but also as a medium of distribution. The author presumably does not see need to assamble two sets of the content and just uses the same slides intended for presentation also as handout - resulting in eiter an overloaded presentation or useless handouts. I try to avoid that by integrating all necessary background info in the presentation but skip that during the presentation and only display it if asked for.
- anon946 9y agoI think this very fact may be part of the issue. The slides may serve multiple purposes: (1) Notes for the presenter, (2) visuals, text for the viewer, and (3) a document for the person who found it via Google. They thus end up being a compromise at all of them. In the ideal world, there would be three separate documents for the above, but PowerPoint is good enough at all of them that we tend to just create a single document that does all three.
- cm2187 9y agoYeah. But these are two different exercises. You have on screen presentations on one side, which is probably less than 5% of the use of powerpoint in large companies, and pitchbooks which are probably like 95%. Pitchbooks are never meant to be shown on-screen. They are paper handouts (or on-screen on a tablet or PC). They are as much a visual aid for the meeting for charts and bullet points, than a take away to avoid people having to take notes. It de facto replaced word documents in large companies outside of a few formal documents. So it has to be concise enough to be efficient. The rule of thumb is that you should be able to read the title and subtitle of every slide only and get the message that the pitch carries. It should have an executive summary that serves the same purpose. But it needs to be detailed enough, with an appendix and footnotes, for someone who didn't attend to get all the important details.
- _raoulcousins 9y agoI wish that was the case at my company. I'm required to create slide decks that are supposed to be usable as presentations and can stand alone without anyone presenting them. I don't think it's actually possible.
- anon946 9y agoI think one point that sometimes gets overlooked is that there are different types of presentations. For example, a set of slides that are designed to accompany lectures for a course on partial differential equations should be very different from a set of slides designed to pitch a business idea, especially if the lecture slides are intended to also serve as notes/textbook.
- debacle 9y agoMy son is finally to the age where he needs to submit/present PowerPoint presentations for homework assignments. After walking him through the best practices for presenting + making sure his presentation was ship-shape, he received a C. His teacher sent a rubrick for the next assignment with criteria like: must have at least one animated transition; must use at least two backgrounds; must use at least 3 text animations; must not be in outline format; use complete sentences. I was floored, but in the end explained to him that he's doing something for a grade, not for it to be good, and that there is a right and wrong way to do a PowerPoint presentation.
- dajohnson89 9y agoThat is a microcosm for how awful (and non-educating) school can be.
- kemiller2002 9y agoA little bit of my soul died when I read that. Teaching how to convey information is so difficult and especially to children, because they don't have the exposure to other examples to refer to what worked and what didn't. Add to this that children are often taught to not question what teachers teach is a recipe for disaster.
- nihonde 9y agoMaybe present yourself as a seasoned presenter and business veteran and offer to help the teacher prepare a top-notch lesson plan for next year's PP segment?
- debacle 9y agoI cause enough trouble at school as it is.
- ringaroundthetx 9y agoThey were teaching him how to use powerpoint's features and get used to finding things. Making it good with those limitations would leverage the creative aspect. It wasn't about making a cookie cutter corporate presentation that doesn't make you look out of touch.
- thesumofall 9y agoI know it's fun and easy to bash PowerPoint but I strongly believe it has its merits. I guess, as a strategy consultant I have to say so :) As there are ways to properly structure a text document, there are ways to properly use PowerPoint. E.g., for detailed management briefings, a PowerPoint, if done right, allows the reader to get the main messages within minutes but also allows for in-depth reading of key points. Typically, such presentations would be structured results/recommendations-first [1] and using the assertion/evidence model [2] [1] Most people structure their PowerPoints sequentially ("we started doing this, then we did that..."). In most cases it is better to start with the final outcome ("we recommend doing x") and then provide all the required backing [2] State the learning from the slide in the title and present the required evidence in the content part. This allows people to just skim all the titles and get the full story but also dive deep where needed Edit: To be precise: such presentations are not intended to entertain. They are a tool to guide people as effectively as possible through complex content and allow pre-reading / post-reading
- hammock 9y ago> the box-shaped selection tool that allows speakers to select a portion of the slide for public display is hidden from the audience What tool is this? I am unfamiliar