4 ms·
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 m
by 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 agoAnything 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 agoBingo. 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 agoI'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.
- delecti 11y agoThat's actually how it's done at Amazon. The presenter brings printouts for the attendees, or simply links to an internal wiki article. At the beginning of the meeting, everyone reads it in silence, and then after they've had a chance to do so, the discussion starts.
- analog31 11y agoWhat I do see as a possible are classes on visual design at both the grade school and college level. Even just one a year can make younger people better at presenting information and will eventually trickle up. I've got two kids who have been through grade school. Actually, they spent a fair amount of time making visual presentations. But as with most of their lessons, I would prefer that the work be done without a computer.