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Why PowerPoint should be banned

• yellowapple 11y ago
  This article (and the presentation the article is about) entirely misses the point (or what should be the point) of a slideshow: to serve as a visual aid for a spoken lecture, speech, or other monologue. When displayed in this context, even the seemingly-worst slides make sense. What the presentation in question does is simply yank out a bunch of slides from not only their context within the overall slideshow, but also from their broader context of a presentation-assisted monologue. You're not supposed to try to encapsulate the entirety of a subject into a series of bullet points; you're supposed to capture the key topics in those bullet points and expand on them through monologue and (should questions be fielded) dialogue/discussion/debate/fruit-throwing/etc. Yeah, I'd probably agree that the case studies of why PowerPoint should be banned also missed the point of a slideshow, but that's hard to know without having a transcript or recording of the finished presentation. Basically, there's more to a presentation than just the slides.
• kaspm 11y ago
  I think perhaps instead of saying "powerpoint should be banned" perhaps poorly built diagrams and powerpoint slides with too much data that are meant to be read should be banned. Slides and visuals as part of a presentation are used to focus the listener visually on the main point being discussed. People are (generally) visually oriented and enhancing a presentation with visuals using slides can make your presentation better.
  • techdevman 11y ago
    Agreed. Just because people can design ugly and confusing slides using powerpoint doesn't say much about the software itself. You can make ugly presentations using any similar software.
  • sp332 11y ago
    PowerPoint should be banned because its interface encourages the creator to add distractions. It has almost no tools for making things simpler.
    • mashmac2 11y ago
      So... PPT really just needs a new design interface?
      • dyates 11y ago
        The MS Office suite in general is incredibly overcomplicated for what the average person is actually going to need or even use. The ribbon interface I think helped (mainly because it removed/hid Clipart and Wordart), but not enough. Many people I know have stopped using Office entirely in favour of the free and much lighter weight Google Docs suite, with no complaints about missing features. MS does seem to be simplifying (or arguably dumbing down) their interfaces a lot these days, so maybe we'll see this kind of a redesign.
      • niels_olson 11y ago
        To an extent. I use iPython with RISE or a deck.js based system. I really like the deck.js method because my interface is vim.
        • jszymborski 11y ago
          I just searched up RISE, and as a guy who loves reveal.js and spends a lot of time writing python in IPython (and who wants to bridge out into Julia), this is a godsend. Thanks for bringing it up!
    • cristianocd 11y ago
      After banning it and getting dizzy from watching some bad Prezi presentations, you'll want PowerPoint back.
      • youngtaff 11y ago
  • throwaway125 11y ago
    techdevman: Your account is shadow banned. Looking at your history I think it was for your first article submission. It seems in error. No contact info in your profile so I wrote this reply.
• deleted 11y ago
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• gjvc 11y ago
  looks like this article ripped off Don Watson https://vimeo.com/9369655 https://vimeo.com/9369655
• webtards 11y ago
  Powerpoint is just an enabler for crap presentations. Maybe the trick is to make it harder to fill the canvas, so the pages become a bit sparser, and revert back to their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for the presenter to actually present, to use them as a reinforcement of the content, as a guide, and not, really not, something they just read verbatim from the slide!
  • VLM 11y ago
    "and not, really not, something they just read verbatim from the slide!" That interferes with the very popular use of distributing powerpoints to be read verbatim as official company policy etc. Its a micromanagement tool. You will read exactly this syllabus line as written in class. Its very difficult to get micromanagers to divest themselves of a powerful tool.
  • niels_olson 11y ago
    > their original intended purpose, an aide memoire for the presenter to actually present No. That's how they are currently used. They should be used to add value for the audience's understanding. Empathic slide authoring is quite difficult. I think mainly because people get into this anxiety of wondering what, exactly, does my audience know? What will I remember? All of a sudden, you've got six levels of bullet points and no one in the room can complete sentence.
• grecy 11y ago
  I worked in Defense for a year. There were soldiers and staff getting close to a "10,000 hour powerpoint" badge.
  • Retra 11y ago
    I was at a command brief once where one of the officers was presenting a 300+ slide powerpoint show. Fortunately his boss was having none of it, and spared us most of the lecture.
• venganesan 11y ago
  This is like saying food makes us fat, ban food! Nonsensical
  • coldtea 11y ago
    If we're to use logic, how about use it properly? For one, food is essential for our survival. Powerpoint is not. So while banning food would be nonsensical (for that reason), banning Powerpoint doesn't have the same issue. A better example would be: "French fries make us fat, ban french fries". Not as nonsensical. French fries are not essential to eat in the first place, and cause harm according to most studies.
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      And thus, after banning french fries, the world was less fat. I think you made GP's point better than he did. Banning the medium and hoping that fixes the root issue is a bit foolish. Not to say banning the medium isn't always a bad idea, but doesn't mean it'll help.
      • coldtea 11y ago
        >And thus, after banning french fries, the world was less fat. Well, maybe not french frieds, but HFCS sure.
    • igravious 11y ago
      In fairness, didn't they use a bad analogy rather than faulty logic? Apart from that I approve of your pedantry.
    • ksk 11y ago
      >For one, food is essential for our survival. The analogy isn't based on 'essentiality'. The point that was made, was correct - Banning something does not solve the original problem. Sorry for spelling it out. I didn't realize comprehending it would be so troublesome for some. There is no such thing as a perfect analogy. If an analogy can't break down, it wouldn't be called an analogy. You would just say the thing that was to be said.
• markbnj 11y ago
  Whatever your feelings about Powerpoint, and mine personally fall close to the "Powerpoint makes us stupid" line, you can't help but admire that Gettysburg Address slide.
• vkb 11y ago
  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 managers, it's hard to understand what you're working on. I don't say this cynically; I say it truthfully, because it's human nature. Tufte suggests banning Powerpoint and giving people handouts to read at meetings; I don't see this getting a lot of traction in most places, simply because people have a lot of other stuff going on. 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.
  • Retra 11y ago
    Anything you do that distracts from the speaking is probably not a good idea. Don't pass around papers, treats, demos, and don't clutter your slides with too much reading. Keep your audience focused on what you are saying.
    • mynameisvlad 11y ago
      Bingo. I use Powerpoint to highlight the key points I'll discuss on any particular slide. Very high-level, broad, 1-2 word descriptions. It helps people keep up with the flow (if they zoned out for a few seconds, for example), and reminds them afterwards when they review the slides.
  • Kluny 11y ago
    I'm in favor of that, but my education has included plenty of powerpoint education. For context, I'm 25 and attended a typical Canadian high school and community college. We had units on presenting material in every english, social studies and "life skills" class in several different years in high school. Usually the classes included all the guidelines for delivering a high quality, useful presentation. Same in college - we had a whole class one semester dedicated to learning how to present material effectively using powerpoint. Even still, my classmates would insist on giving boring, monotone lectures with far too much info on each slide. It got better toward the end of that college course though. My takeaway from all that is that public speaking and presenting are DIFFICULT skills, that require not just a couple weeks of instruction, but many years of intensive instruction over the course of a schooling career. People do get better at it, but it takes a lot of work to get them there. Blaming powerpoint or any other tool is a simplistic approach that doesn't help the problem.
• vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  The smartass in me would be tempted to get around this hypothetical ban by using LibreOffice Impress. More seriously, you could make the exact same arguments for banning Photoshop. The more widely adopted software is, the higher the numbers of people who use it improperly. Not much of a solution here beyond deliberately crippling functionality.
• gcv 11y ago
  Instead of banning specific tools, try promoting officers and enlisted personnel who do a good job, including public speaking and presenting ideas.
• kejaed 11y ago
  One of the slides in the WP story credits Edward Tufte, who has written and published an essay on the subject, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within" [1]. This, along with his seminal text "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" [2] are great reads, and I think should be required reading for anyone who has to present anything, technical or otherwise. [1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp [2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
  • peter303 11y ago
    I saw a version of #1 online. users.ha.uth.gr/tgd/pt0501/09/Tufte.pdf
  • peter303 11y ago
    Two salient points from Tuft's essay: 1) a reference books like an almanac averages 150 characters per square inch; a printed power point slide 7 characters per square inch (page 22): the visual brain starves for stimulation during a poor PP presentation. 2) Tufte recommends high resolution handouts accompany PP image slides. Eschew low content slides. "Avoid elaborate hierarchies of bullet lists. Never read aloud from slides. Never use PP templates to format paper reports or web screens. Use PP as a projector for showing low-resolution color images, graphics, and videos that cannot be reproduced as printed handouts at a presentation." "Paper handouts at a talk can effectively show text, numbers, data graphics, images. Printed materials, which should largely replace PP, bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspapers, magazines, books, and internet screens. A useful paper size for handouts at presentations is 11 by 17 inches (28 by 43 cm), folded in half to make 4 pages. This piece of paper can show images with a resolution of 1,200 dpi and up to 60,000 characters of words and numbers, the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 typical PP slides of text and data. Thoughtfully planned handouts at your talk tell the audience that you are serious and precise; that you seek to leave traces and have consequences. And that you respect your audience."
    • gknoy 11y ago
      Agreed. He advises us to make high resolution (paper!) handouts, and give them out as people walk in. I was lucky enough to attend a presentation of his this year where he did exactly that, and its effect was amazing. Say, "Here, read this," and then give them ten or fifteen (or more, if it's a longer talk!) to read as much as they can, before talking. This helps because people can quickly skim the parts they don't care about, jot down questions, focus on the parts that are interesting or that they want to understand better -- and not everyone feels the same about each part of your presentation. Then, in your talk, you can basically follow a similar rubric, or allude to the handout, and people can (and will!) ask questions about the meaningful parts. He also notes that it's important NOT to send them ahead of time in emails, as no one will read them. Force people to read them (or play on their phones); the people who are most busy will scour the paper for useful info. Jeff Bezos' [0] meetings follow a similar pattern. 0: (apologies for lazy searching :)) http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-fortune-interview-2012-11 http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-amazon-fortune-int...
• thupten 11y ago
  dont' blame the tool. If a website is ugly, should we ban the internet?
  • dredmorbius 11y ago
    Arguably, yes.
• jedberg 11y ago
  Part of the problem is that Powerpoint guides you to these terrible presentations (and Google Presentations is even worse). At least Keynote tries to stop you from doing awful things to some extent. But at the end of the day it's really the people using the tool that are doing it wrong. People just need to learn the difference between a Presentation, an Infodeck and an Essay, and when to use each one.
• samspot 11y ago
  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?
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • collyw 11y ago
    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.
    • Vexs 11y ago
      We always called them transparencies or "the overhead". I suppose the modern incarnation is the smartboard, which isn't too bad.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Those had their own limitations. But, yes, today's equivalent--whiteboarding--can be an effective communication tool for someone who knows and understands material having a discussion with a (preferably small) audience. 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.
• jsingleton 11y ago
  I think it can work as long as it's kept simple with high contrast, low content and no transitions or animations. A good tip if you are running an event is to ask the speakers to provide slides in PDF format (with one slide per page, no builds). This forces them to keep it simple.
• XCSme 11y ago
  Really? Why not ban Word because people write bad books?
• peter303 11y ago
  My favorite example was the Gettysburg Address - choppy idea presentation and too much distracting colors.
• philippnagel 11y ago
  I think it is wrong to blame the tool. It all comes down to usage.
• brudgers 11y ago
  Power Point is ubiquitous because it offers improved communications. Just because some journalist isn't old enough to remember slides and overhead projectors doesn't mean such things didn't exist. If there's a shortcoming with Power Point it's that it is based on the idea of printing everything out rather than dynamic interaction. It's an old paradigm, but it's hard to beat something modelled on the physical world.
  • phren0logy 11y ago
    I disagree. In the pre-PowerPoint era it was more common for people to actually prepare a talk rather than hide behind hastily-created slides that usually serve more as prompts for the speaker than visual enhancements to the content. It is certainly possible to give bad presentations without PowerPoint, and good presentations with it, but most people only learn bad habits. PowerPoint PRO TIP: The "b" key will bring up a black screen, and the "w" key will bring up a white screen, so people can look at your actual face when you are talking to them.
    • brudgers 11y ago
      In my experience, well prepared presentations were not more common in any absolute sense. Perhaps it was more common in a relative sense since carefully prepared presentation slides were often the purview of a more select few. In those days a third grade teacher might have some overheads. These days, the third grade students are preparing pptx's as part of the curriculum. Banning Power Point because there are so many mediocre Power Points out there is like banning email because there are so many poorly written emails. Power Point provides unprecedented access to presentation tools as part of the "computer on every desk and in every home" revolution. A presentation no longer requires a draftsman and special print media. People can do it themselves. Even those for whom visual communication and on stage presentations are not core competencies. Most presentations aren't very good. They don't need to be. They just need to be good enough. My Tip from making architectural presentations: Place yourself on the audience side of the fourth wall and point to your images as you tell your story. If it's about you and not the content, you're already on the wrong track because it's about you and not the audience.
  • 11y ago
• BinaryIdiot 11y ago
  Ha, as someone who has worked in the public sector the army (hell most of the defense community) essentially RUNS on PowerPoint. They should certainly move away from it but there are so many workflows that have been established for so many years moving is going to be painful and likely require custom solutions for each type of report.
• jasonlotito 11y ago
  PowerPoint isn't the problem. The problem is asking people who aren't proficient speakers or presenters to present on something. We are literally asking them to present on a topic they know about and communicate it in a way that is effective and informative. PowerPoint isn't the issue. The issue is one of training. PowerPoint (and other presentation software) is easy enough to use, it gives you all the tools you need to prepare an excellent presentation. But just because I have a kitchen filled with chef-quality tools and the best food available doesn't mean I'm immediately a professional cook, let alone a chef. I might be able to hobble together a meal suitable for the family dinner table, but I'm not quitting my day job. But no one is suggesting we ban burners and bowls from the kitchen. The call to ban PowerPoint is harmful. It ignores the real problem while pretending to solve things it cannot really solve. The result will be that the real underlying problem goes unfixed longer, while those that don't use PowerPoint will effectively be given a pass: "You aren't using PowerPoint, you must know what you are talking about." Knives might be dangerous, but when you are trained to use them, they are useful. Don't ban knives from the kitchen.
• Someone1234 11y ago
  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 put on a good presentation using it. One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong. Putting exactly what you're saying into your slides verbatim is generally a mistake (although putting key points or a list, and expanding on it vocally can work well). Generally most people put too much content into single slides as they're worried about having to advance the slideshow mid-point. This means that your point is too expansive, and you should cut your point in half and then cutting your slides in half follows naturally (e.g. instead of doing a yearly projection with summaries of each quarter, just do each quarter individually and sum the year as a whole alone at the end). I certainly don't think I'm an expert at presentations, I just care slightly more than your average person, and have copied elements from what I consider good deliveries.
  • cordite 11y ago
    At a few dev meetups, some presenters just did markdown documents with enough new lines to be equivalent to a page. That way they just pressed pgdn on their laptop. On another note, some lecture-style slides (where review post-presentation or without presentation) can be really helpful for understanding concepts otherwise described in math and without examples in official papers. Many CS publications seem to make this mistake in my eyes--that is, presenting something novel without bridging the gap via examples.
    • Shorel 11y ago
      Opera had a nice presentation mode for such things. I have seen also some pages with similar functionality, and a couple of flash apps. Even a PDF created from Latex works wonders for that purpose.
    • unclesaamm 11y ago
• potomak 11y ago
  Well, about presentations, a couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation about a tool[0] to create text adventures with Markdown and created a slide deck using that tool. So the deck was itself a "presentable" text adventure[1]. [0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt [1] https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403 https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403
• krylon 11y ago
  Part of me wants to agree with the article. It is easy to use PowerPoint to cover up the fact you don't have a clue what you are talking about by using lots of flashy effects and "bling" that PowerPoint offers. The style I prefer is rather minimal and mainly uses PowerPoint as a "cheat sheet" to give me cues on what I want to tell my audience. This encourages me to focus on the audience rather than the computer running PowerPoint and speak more freely. An occasional image can help illustrate a point, but I tend to use them very sparingly. (The disadvantage is that someone simply looking at the slides afterwards won't have a clue what I said, but I can live with that.) The feedback I have received was very positive, although I never spoke to Marketing people who seem to be all about the pretty pictures and flashy transitions. My point, I guess, is that PowerPoint can be abused, badly, but I am not sure if it is fair to blame it for that. The world would not be that much worse off without PowerPoint, but people looking to distract from their cluelessness will find a way to do so anyway. A more realistic article might be titled "Use PowerPoint only when nothing else will do" or "Stop talking at your audience and start talking to them". EDIT: Fixed a typo
• tomphoolery 11y ago
  So we should ban PowerPoint because a bunch of old people with zero relevance on my life can't figure it out? Why not just ban the Internet and those con-flab-it programmable VCRs? I'm also not of the opinion that slides are ever necessary. I'd rather just watch a talk recording with the guy explaining what I see in the slides. Usually slides for any talk I give are comical or non-sensical in nature.
• AngeloAnolin 11y ago
  PowerPoint is not the problem. It is the content being delivered through it.
• engi_nerd 11y ago
  My personal definition of hell, that I experienced my final year of college: 8 AM Thermodynamics course, lecture consisted of a monotone-voiced prof reading directly from a set of Powerpoint slides. The interest I had in the topic at the beginning of the semester was nearly crushed entirely.
• edw519 11y ago
  Slide 1 ------------------ | Programmer | | and | | Manager | | Kidnapped | | by | | Terrorists | ------------------ Slide 2 ------------------ | | | Company | | Refused | | to pay | | Ransom | | | ------------------ Slide 3 ------------------ | | | Death | | Sentence | | Imposed | | | ------------------ Slide 4 ------------------ | | | Last | | Wish | | Granted | | | ------------------ Slide 5 ------------------ | Manager's | | Last Wish: | | To Give Final | | 89 Slide | | Powerpoint | | Presentation | ------------------ Slide 6 ------------------ | Programmer's | | Last Wish: | | | | "Kill Me | | First" | ------------------
• kropotkinlives 11y ago
  Powerpoint doesn't kill people. People kill people.
• beat 11y ago
  Debating this is sort of a "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" argument. PowerPoint is not inherently bad. Poor communication skills are inherently bad.
• peter303 11y ago
  In my town we have monthly science meeting called the Cafe Scientifique. A speaker must present his topic in twenty minutes without a projector (sort of an expanded elevator pitch). It can work even for the most complicated topics. The speaker is forced into a more story-telling style. And to focus on a few points told well. P.S. The speaker may distribute a single handout or have a couple images as a large poster.
  • cesarbs 11y ago
    That's really awesome. Which town is that?
• kazinator 11y ago
  Last time I made a presentation with slides was some 15 years ago. I used SliTeX. (It seems that has been superseded by a slides document class in LaTeX2e.) The slides were very plain: just black text on a white background; no animations. On the other hand, great looking formulas, nicely formatted source code snippets and such. I had a talk prepared; it wasn't a slide-reading marathon. The slides just anchored what I was saying. Today if I did slides, I would probably make them into static HTML pages with simple navigation links. Or perhaps a dual frame: navigation pane with screens.
  • akeck 11y ago
    You might like https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js .
  • mattstocum 11y ago
    You could accomplish all of that using PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn't the problem, bad presentations are the problem. It's the same problem Access has. It's not a bad program, but people use it to do bad things.
    • kazinator 11y ago
      However, just by researching and using open alternatives to PowerPoint, I demonstrated free thought, which, in turn, bears relevance to making a good presentation. The root of the problem isn't PowerPoint itself or how people use it; it's that it doesn't even occur to them that using something other than PowerPoint (or not using anything of that sort at all) is even an option.
• InclinedPlane 11y ago
  You can't just ban PowerPoint without replacing it, and without changing the corporate culture. PowerPoint cultivates a pitch based culture. Taking away PP will still leave that culture in place, they'll just find some other tool to make their pitches. The problem is the culture, which needs to be cut down and have the stump pulled out of the ground. It sounds like a lot of work because it is a lot of work. Before PowerPoint the way that kind of work got done was through lots of long form written work. RFC-style documents, very long memos that bordered on essays or research papers, that sort of thing. Today the art of communicating that way has to a significant degree been lost in the modern office. The closest thing to it that exists today would probably be internal blogs and wikis. Which is precisely what I'd focus on as a replacement for PowerPoint. Want to push some new project? Don't pitch it, blog it. Want to spread knowledge of something to other teams, don't pitch it, document it in a wiki.
• fsloth 11y ago
  Additional horrors of powerpoint: people drawing faux ui mockups combined with few bullet points explaining the planned logic and calling this the design phase of software development.
• joshdance 11y ago
  Steve Jobs: "People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint"
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• Zigurd 11y ago
  If I'm not talking in front of a big room, I prefer to whiteboard notes and diagrams as I'm talking, based on an outline that would otherwise be pretty near to what I'd put on slides. One big advantage of whiteboarding is that you're much more likely to draw a diagram. People seem to pay more attention. If they want a take-away, you can photograph the drawings and notes. For whatever reason, trying to do the same in a big room with an overhead projector is much harder.
• SQL2219 11y ago
  Sign me up!
• blattus 11y ago
  I work in consulting; I have seen my fair share of badly-drawn graphics and spend more time using PowerPoint than I would care to admit. The reality is that for most of Corporate America banning PowerPoint is not going to happen anytime soon. In our industry, decks are viewed not just as presentations but general fodder for deliverables, handouts, etc. I've been on several engagements where we intentionally jam-packed slides full of content (including multiple levels of footnotes) so they "stood on their own" in case someone picked up or distributed the deck after the meeting in which it was used. If I was giving a talk I'd agree that presentation style would be overkill, but I've been in meetings with C-level execs and VPs where the extra info has paid off by being able to preempt questions and provide additional justification for the conclusion. Sometimes having a crowded slide is more "professional" in a meeting context than alt-tabbing to the detailed Excel worksheet showing the assumptions.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    Yeah, keynote/"compelling conference content" presentations are very different animals. Even if some would prefer my presentations of the former type stood on their own better, my focus there is on the live experience. If you're presenting the findings of a consulting project? Not so much. In that case, the charts and graphics should be professional and clean but also focus on data/recommendations/etc. Very different animals.
    • qznc 11y ago
      The question is: Why use Powerpoint to present the findings of a consulting project? Handout-only would probably be superior. Amazon does it like this. http://conorneill.com/2012/11/30/amazon-staff-meetings-no-powerpoint/ http://conorneill.com/2012/11/30/amazon-staff-meetings-no-po...
• oldmanjay 11y ago
  Banning things should be banned.
• Joeri 11y ago
  Powerpoint is not the problem. People thinking the tool makes them a presenter is the problem. Being a good presenter is not an easy thing to learn, and using a tool like powerpoint doesn't make you any better at it. The best resource I've found so far for learning how to present is macsparky's field guide to presentations, but if anyone knows of a better resource I'm all ears.
• matiasz 11y ago
  Jean-luc Doumont gives excellent advice on how to avoid making slides like the ones mentioned in this article. http://www.principiae.be/X0800.php http://www.principiae.be/X0800.php
• mfringel 11y ago
  The good news about PowerPoint is that it only takes five minutes for a previously untrained person to make a slide presentation. The bad news is roughly the same.
• MarcScott 11y ago
  A comedic take on the use of PowerPoint https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjcO2ExtHso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjcO2ExtHso
• Shivetya 11y ago
  Sadly those NSA/Etc horrid presentations could just as well come from where I work. Having been asked about them before I simply replied, "wall of text" and you guys did a great job of not getting to the point. See, they don't ascribe to that rule of no more than three to five bullet points per slide. I have seen Excel Spreadsheets embedded in slides. I think Powerpoint serves two very important purposes. In the hands of good management it conveys what is important and how it will be addressed. In the hands of bad management it clearly shows their lack of focus reinforced in slide form. (of course a 68 question survey on what you like and don't like about work wasn't a damn clue)
• apalmer 11y ago
  There is neither anything inherently wrong with PowerPoint, and even more 'controversially' there is nothing inherently wrong with information dense slides. Especially in the case where it includes complex graphics such as maps and charts as shown here. The small information limited bullet point laid out form of presentation is derived from marketing/persuasive presentations. In that context then yes the narrative should drive the discussion, and slides should just reinforce the 'take away' points. These slides should be light for the same reason Elevator Pitches should be less than 2 minutes. However other presentations such as some of the ones shown in the article are not intended to persuade but intended to share dense information. For instance saying that the military should not put dense maps in presentations intended for brass who have to visualize the geographic layout based on the presentation is pretty clueless. Its a tool, not everyone is using it to accomplish the same goals as the author is. Truth is 99% of times the marketing format of presentations is the way to go, but it is not 100% of the time.
• verganileonardo 11y ago
  Is he suggesting that we ban Powerpoint because the users are not using it in the right way? I work at a MMB management consulting company and we use Powerpoint all day to create really good presentations - full of insightful information and easy to read.
• collyw 11y ago
  But excel first please! (Especially as a database).
• giltleaf 11y ago
  Title should be: Ban people like Katrin Park and untrained gov bureaucrats from using power point. Just because people don't know how to use something doesn't mean it should be banned, or even that it's negative. Especially when her "challenging the hegemony" point is 'use Prezi."
  • lvs 11y ago
    I've seen a couple of Prezi talks, and I have to say that that the only way a Prezi talk could possibly be more discombobulating would be if I was forced to watch it on an Oculus Rift while riding a city bus.
• mratzloff 11y ago
  In a class I took in college, we had to give a final presentation to go along with a paper we wrote. The presentations were to be about 30 minutes (not too hard to come up with content, as my paper ended up being 50 pages). With the paper, this was essentially our entire grade for the class. I decided to do it without PowerPoint. I was the only one. Instead of relying on slides, I looked people in the eye and gave a presentation from memory, with a set of index cards as backup. I told stories and tried to make it relatable. Now, I've gotten better at these kinds of things over the course of my career, but even in college I was pretty confident in my ability to give these kinds of presentations. (I even took an acting class just to refine my public speaking skills.) Anyway, after I was finished I felt good about how I did. I got a C-. Literally the only feedback the professor gave me was that I should have had a PowerPoint presentation "to give people something to look at while I talked".
  • ddingus 11y ago
    IMHO, that grade maybe was appropriate. I applaud you for doing that, and I personally would have gotten a lot out of your talk. Good, clear, verbal communication is fantastic! Good on you for attempting it. I have similar leanings and skills. The hard truth I've learned is not everyone can take in it that form. If you have any sort of an audience, the potential for those people will be actualized, and you lose on overall communication fidelity for those people without a visual reference. Secondly, there are people who really need to vocalize to learn, or do something, or experience it in tactile ways, etc... You will find these people asking questions, seeking to be a part of the dialog, taking notes, making motions, drawing, closing their eyes... Multi-sensory communication is high fidelity as well as broadband. Think of the different axis possible. We often do this with young people, giving a talk, letting them speak, having them touch it, or do it, take notes, etc... Adults work the same way, though their greater body of experience generally means they are well equipped to handle visual / aural presentations fairly well. You can get the majority of them with a dual style. This takes some extra work, and might not be in your personal sweet spot, but it's generally worth doing. YMMV, but 20+ years of communicating to individuals, small groups and crowds composed of amateurs, business people and techies speaking here.
    • 11y ago
• geophile 11y ago
  Pens can be used to write dull, cliched, uninspired novels. Many bad novels have been written using pens. Therefore pens should be banned. Disclaimer: I do, in fact, hate powerpoint.
• cognivore 11y ago
  PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations - people do.
• anir 11y ago
  As someone already said "If you use a hammer as a saw, you can't claim the tool is faulty."
• lucb1e 11y ago
  This is about the tenth time I've heard Powerpoint should be banned. It's prohibited at Amazon I've heard. It's almost as evil as WordArt apparently. But they all fail to convey one point: what should I do instead? Today I gave a powerpoint presentation. In fact almost every presentation I gave has been with Libreoffice Impress or Microsoft Office Powerpoint. Should I get rid of slides altogether and just talk (I usually hate talks that do that)? The main point of OP's article seems to be that bullet points are not a form of coherent thought, but who says all my Powerpoints are bullet points? I put much less text on slides than my average classmate or colleague. Am I doing it badly? Should I be using a different program? Please, I'm all ears.
• janci 11y ago
  The problem is not in PowerPoint, but in people using it.
• vlunkr 11y ago
  This is quite a silly article. You can't blame a tool because it's been misused.
  • JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Hah! That's every gun-control argument, ever.
• jsingleton 11y ago
  "Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint" [0] [0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/930564-the-jennifer-morgue-laundry-files-2 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/930564-the-jennifer-mo...
• rcurry 11y ago
  It's a poor craftsman who blames his tools. I've never understood why the ire gets directed towards PowerPoint rather than the people who construct poor presentations.
• moderation 11y ago
  My old powerpointless? page is still up at http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/ http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/ - "A list of articles discussing the impact of a reliance on PowerPoint® and bullet-point based communication."
• chuckcode 11y ago
  I'd like to see the article about why we should invest time in communicating effectively rather than bashing on the tools that people misuse. Seems like on every level there is room for improvement on conveying ideas to other people even with all the technological improvements we've had. Specifically I'd like to see us get better at expressing the core ideas but still having the ability to easily dig deeper into the details even if it is offline. Especially interesting is when a presentation allows the user to play with the data additionally. Something like Mike Bostock's work[1] that conveys a lot of information densely and also builds on an open platform to let audience explore the data interactively. [1] http://bost.ocks.org/mike/ http://bost.ocks.org/mike/
• qq66 11y ago
  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 from his mind onto the paper, but it isn't going to make me even a tiny bit more capable of writing a great novel. * A single PowerPoint presentation is often called into double duty, both as a visual aid to a live presentation, and a standalone document that serves as the summary of the presentation for those who couldn't attend. ("I can't make it this afternoon -- please send me the deck.") This requirement forces the PowerPoint presentation and spoken content to become 100% redundant with each other, yielding the meetings where people read verbatim off an overly dense PowerPoint slide. PowerPoint has features that try to address this problem, such as hidden slides that show up in the printed document but not the slide show, and narration recording so that you can distribute the audio along with the slides, but presenting from the "leave-behind deck" is still common. * There's always a tension between giving the user full control, and making the experience as simple as possible. Also, the more structure you embed in an authoring application about what the output "should" look like, the more you encourage everyone towards a homogenous vision defined by the product designers. PowerPoint does make it easy to insert simple diagrams such as with SmartArt, but fundamentally the application is designed to let the user take full control of the content. I wouldn't want a text editor that didn't allow me to write a grammatically incorrect sentence. However, a suggestion that "the grammar in this sentence might be wrong" could be useful, if presented in a non-obtrusive way. These are issues we think about every day in the PowerPoint team, and I appreciate reading the various viewpoints here.
  • newman314 11y ago
    I once read somewhere that there are decks for verbal presentation and decks to present summary information for offline review. Conflating the intended purpose causes issues and that's always stuck with me as good advice. Personally, I like to use Powerpoint as talking points and just go with the flow for the remainder of the conversation.
  • colechristensen 11y ago
• paulpauper 11y ago
  Powerpoint is only as good as the content behind the slides
• keithgabryelski 11y ago
  haters gonna hate. The real issue: don't write power-points that are meant to be studied -- power-points are meant as a presentation addition. the only things I demand on a power-points are two numbers at the bottom 1) the slide number we are on 2) the total number of slides in the deck that way I can decide if I should slit my wrists immediately or if I can push through and wait the deck out.
• vph 11y ago
  Edward Tufte already called for the demolition of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is still alive and well. It won. 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.
• MrTonyD 11y ago
  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.
• bbcbasic 11y ago
  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!
• DigitalSea 11y ago
  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.
• frederickf 11y ago
  Whenever I see an article about banning PowerPoint I think of Peter Norvig's humorous PowerPoint rendition of the Gettysburg Address http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
• grayclhn 11y ago
  I haven't seen anyone mention it here, so a little off topic, but if you have to make lots of presentations with slides Emacs's org mode pdf export [1] (via LaTeX beamer) is a godsend. Easily the fastest way to put together slides I've used, and you get pretty good math and source code support. An example pdf (not great content, but...): http://gray.clhn.org/dl/macros_etc.pdf http://gray.clhn.org/dl/macros_etc.pdf edit: and the .org source file, which is probably more relevant: https://github.com/heike/stat590f/blob/master/macros/macros_etc.org https://github.com/heike/stat590f/blob/master/macros/macros_... [1]: http://orgmode.org/manual/Beamer-export.html http://orgmode.org/manual/Beamer-export.html
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• donlzx 11y ago
  Powerful speakers seldom use slides, ordinary people like me rely on PowerPoint slides to get the job done badly , when not having a strong compelling case :) The fundamental reason is that speech are more powerful than visual presentation. When people listen their subconsciousness is activated and they tend to accept things told (think about Hypnosis), when people open their eyes their brain kick in and start analysis, they won't listen. Slides also get in the way of speaker's body language, which is another most import factors in communication. The use of PowerPoint in class and training process is also debatable. When in college, I could understand quite clearly the fundamental principles when my professor used the tradition chalkboard to go over the equations, however, I could hardly remember any of those equations and bullet points shown using slides.
• eghri 11y ago
  This is largely just an argument against bad presentations - PowerPoint or otherwise. I agree that PowerPoint is not the right medium for many things (e.g. technical reports), but a lot of these critiques are also the strengths of PowerPoint. The lack of space forces the presenter to slim down their argument to the essentials. That shouldn't encourage burying important information in sub-bullets, but to the contrary, encourage highlighting key risks/concerns. The downside of technical reports and white papers is that it's far too easy for people to blather on without purpose, and it's far too hard for me as the audience to review. I can skim through a PowerPoint in minutes and get a good sense for whether it's worth my time. It's much harder to do that with a long free-form text. I also think the presenter is more important than the medium in most cases: I bet the same person making those awful NSA slides would write an awful white paper (and vice-versa). Long story short, people have a really hard time concisely and precisely expressing their arguments, and we all need constant practice to get better. Everyone should also have several options in their presentation tool kit and be able to use the right one for a given task.
• nemanja 11y ago
  Putting together an effective presentation and visual aid (i.e. slide deck) is very time consuming, very iterative, requires a lot of thought and reflection, at least a few reviewers that are removed from putting it together and/or the topic, and a lot of practice. Reducing presentation to simply putting together a slide deck is a fail from the get-go. Blaming bad presentations on the tools used to put them together is shallow. While there is really no substitute for good coaching, first hand experience, mistakes made and good feedback, here are a few quick tips that I've picked up over the years - 1. The best and most engaging presentations simply have a title that captures the key point and a nice/fun background photo that supports/illustrates the story. Audience will pay attention to the story instead of reading text off the slide. 2. To highlight a fact, keep it to one fact per slide. Make it short and direct (e.g. "3x faster" rather than "212.32% performance improvement"). 3. To illustrate a quantitative point, one chart per page is okay, but it must be super simple and easy (absolutely no 3D nonsense, at most 3-4 bars/2 lines/3-4 pie slices, clearly labeled axes). Multiple charts are sometimes okay, but they must be each super simple, belong together, have the same scales and tell a clear and obvious story. Effective charts are a topic of its own, anything by Tufte is a great head start. 4. If you must have more than one point on a slide, keep it at 3 direct, concise bullets per page (if any bullet wraps with a large font, it's too wordy and unclear). No sub-bullets or additional explanations should be necessary. Two bullets is too little (i.e. condense it to one key point), four is too much. 5. No more than one simple diagram per page. Best to keep it to the title that captures they key point and a diagram. Additional explanatory text should not be necessary - if title + diagram can't stand on their own, they are not good enough. Also, if the point of the diagram is not immediately obvious to someone looking at it for the first time, the diagram sucks. 6. Avoid wall of text (e.g. that NASA slide on Columbia's tiles) at all costs. Audience will start reading the slide, completely tune out what you are saying and then get bored half a way through and give up. 7. Contrasting points or showing contradictory data/ideas requires extra care to avoid cognitive dissonance. 8. Background should be as plain as possible. White is best, black/gray could be okay. Anything else pretty much sucks. All text in one color, with great contrast to the background. 9. Timing/length of presentation is super important. Generally, it is very hard for people to stay focused for more than ~7 minutes, so it's good to cover a point in less than 7 minutes and then change it up a bit (e.g. change presenters, show a video, get to a different topic). Overall, presentations should be less than 30 minutes, 45 minutes tops. Anything longer than that is simply too long, you'll lose the audience. Here are two books on the topic I found helpful. They are easy to follow, very short and to the point - "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" [1] and "Guide to Managerial Communication" [2]. * * * Overall, the piece feels quite trashy - it dumps all the blame where it doesn't belong (tool vs. lack of presentation/communication skill). Those slides could have very well been made in Keynote or Reveal.JS and they wouldn't suck any less. The piece is also not constructive, it doesn't give reader any hints or tips how to make presentations better. Finally, a great counterexample to the main point of the piece is pretty much every slide deck that comes with Apple/Steve Jobs' keynote. The best part is that no one remembers or pays particular attention to the deck, but if you analyze the presentation more closely or watch it a couple of times, it becomes clear how effective the decks are. [1] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226899152 http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226899152 [2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013297133X http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013297133X
• NeutronBoy 11y ago
  Powerpoint is a tool, that like email, can be used correctly or incorrectly. PP is great at making slides for presentations. People are terrible at making slides for presentations.
• danek 11y ago
  Edward Tufte argues that powerpoint is indeed the problem. PowerPoint is a slideware operating system which forces the presenter to contort the content into its low-resolution format. This necessarily makes the content less understandable, unless the content happens to be photographs and your topic is something like art history. It's easy to say it's the fault of bad presenters, but other formats don't necessarily make your audience dumber; with PowerPoint it is the rule rather than the exception. "The average number of numbers on a powerpoint slide is 12. This is slightly better than communist propaganda (Pravda 1982). For comparison, see the sports page." --me, poorly paraphrasing Discussion of how slideware led to 2 space shuttle explosions: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... Tufte's textbooklet on powerpoint (an excerpt from his book Beautiful Evidence): The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint
  • ddingus 11y ago
    I don't understand "low resolution" Frankly, PPT has as much resolution as you need. The question really is, "what resolution makes the best sense?" Up-thread, somebody mentioned paper handouts being distributed just before the talk. That's a great idea, and it can mitigate some of the resolution perception issues, and or help when using higher fidelity isn't so appropriate. But not all PPT presentations actually are delivered as presentations in the classic sense. One really great use case is reviews between peers, or maybe a smaller group, with one person managing the PPT, edits being made, etc... One can pack considerable detail into a PPT, rich with media, or just dense with text / illustrations. Maybe there is just a lot of pressure or expectations of low-fi, but it's not seemingly an artifact of the software to me.
    • danek 11y ago
      By low-res, Tufte is referring to the concept of stacking information in time, rather than placing it adjacent in space. (this is all his insight, not mine) It's "low res" in the same way a phone voice-mail menu is low-res "press 1 for x, press 2 for y, press 3 for z, etc". You get bits of information sequentially, stacked in time. The onus is on you, the receiver, to piece the information together into some sort of mental matrix so you can make your decision. A high-res counter-example would be seeing all options together, like you would in a table of contents. One way PPT is low-res is that there is not enough room on a slide to type full sentences. It wants you to dilute your thoughts into a bullet list or some similar fragmented format. Often a presentation involves a series of slides, and ideally you'd want the audience to make comparisons between slides e.g. Before XXX, After XXX, & Therefore XXX is good. The sequentiality of slides is another example of it being low-res. This increases the cognitive effort needed to engage with your content, making it difficult for anyone to actually think critically about what you are saying. In other words, it's a great sales tool! The paper handout is an excellent idea. You can fit the information of about 250 ppt slides onto a standard 11x17 sheet of paper. PPT can be useful in other cases (I've used it for drawing seating charts), but it tends to be pretty terrible for presenting any sort of analytical content. I've seen a many PPT presentations from accomplished, smart people, and I can't recall a single one that wouldn't have been more effective as a paper handout.
• ryan90 11y ago
  This is so idiotic. Click/share-bait at it's finest. Yes, there are awful powerpoint presentations. Yet as someone who has worked at a company where business cases and data visualization is extremely important, I can say that Powerpoint decks are easily the most effective communication tool. When done properly, they tell a story. They can be standalone, or an aid to a presentation. Yes, there are awful powerpoints. Many people abuse them. Or use them as a knowledge dump. Or fail to keep the reader in mind when creating them. That does not mean that the platform itself is flawed. And sure, some business areas could do better without them. Just because there are terrible papers written, doesn't mean Word documents are bad. Just because most people write terrible emails, doesn't mean email is a poor communication tool. The key - as with any medium - is learning how to use it to effectively communicate.
• Tycho 11y ago
  I always wonder what the point of slides is... it usually seems to lead to the awkward situation where someone either reads the slide verbatim, which is pointless, or says something different from what the slide says, which is distracting. I think only Steve Jobs style keynote addresses really use presentation software well, but that's far too much effort for most instances. On the other hand, there's definitely some merits to the format. It forces people to be concise and boil their commentary down to the essential insights. It lets people use structure more in their text: nested bullet points, different font sizes, dedicating a whole slide to one statement, etc. It also lets non-textual elements take equal prominence. It prompts readers to think about the implications of a statement for themselves rather than just skimming sentences. Basically it gives people more flexibility than just writing a report or an email. I can see why they are popular. I do think better training so people could emulate Steve Jobs if they wanted to would be very welcome.
  • ghaff 11y ago
    Keynote presentations (not the software but the basic presentation format) aren't justified in effort nor are appropriate for many presos. Many business presentations are intended to be interrupted and to veer off in new directions as appropriate. Thar said, presentation training is worthwhile and too many presentations have too many words.
• hudibras 11y ago
  I worked in the Pentagon and I've both built and received many, many DoD Powerpoint briefs over the years. The comments here about "don't blame the tool" are spot-on. But I also want to point out that all or nearly all of the hopelessly complicated wire diagram slides (such as the PRISM slide or JSF org chart slide) are supposed to look that way because the briefer is trying to show that something is too complicated and that you, the person being briefed, should do something about it. They're being used ironically, in other words. It's actually become an overused rhetorical technique and some people will call you out if you use it. "Why is the FBI on this slide?" "Uh, we emailed them once a couple years ago so we connected them with a dotted line..."
• CarloSanta4 11y ago
  Blame methods not tools! This has nothing to do with PowerPoint. This is about bad or wrong methods of presenting ideas or concepts. Methods are how something is done, e.g. graphically by a diagram or textual in short form or by speech. PowerPoint is just a tool. You can use the wrong method of presenting an idea (e.g. graphically) with a different tool (e.g. a sheet of paper and a pen) as well.
• vincentbarr 11y ago
  While I find PowerPoint cumbersome to use and strongly dislike the idea of wasting time aligning and realigning elements arbitrarily, I think the larger problem isn't due to the software itself but that it's overused and often the wrong tool for the job at hand. Presentations are not substitutes for documents. At a workshop on presenting information, Edward Tufte introduced the idea of beginning meetings with a high-resolution transfer in the form of a printed document. In short, you prepare a document in advance, print a copy for each attendee, share it at the beginning of the meeting, and give people plenty of time to read and digest the information. The benefits: -each person can read and learn according to their cognitive style and at their rate of consumption. -time spent taking notes is converted to time spent thinking and analyzing -information can be communicated much, much more quickly than it would be through oration and a deck
• sytelus 11y ago
  We also need to ban hammer and showels, lot of people just don't know how to use them properly.
• jcchin41 11y ago
  Following Jean Luc Doumont's simple advice on creating powerpoints has dramatically helped me create more effective presentations that hold people's attention. I highly recommend his book [1] and presentations [2] on reducing noise in slides to maximize the effectiveness of key-takeaways. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meBXuTIPJQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meBXuTIPJQk [2] http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/ http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/