Why PowerPoint should be banned

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/05/26/powerpoint-should-be-banned-this-powerpoint-presentation-explains-why/?tid=pm_pop_b

by SimplyUseless • 11 years ago

284 207 11 years ago

washingtonpost.com

kaspm• 11 years 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.

sp332• 11 years ago

PowerPoint should be banned because its interface encourages the creator to add distractions. It has almost no tools for making things simpler.

mashmac2• 11 years ago

So... PPT really just needs a new design interface?

cristianocd• 11 years ago

After banning it and getting dizzy from watching some bad Prezi presentations, you'll want PowerPoint back.

throwaway125• 11 years 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.

gjvc• 11 years ago

looks like this article ripped off Don Watson https://vimeo.com/9369655

webtards• 11 years 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• 11 years 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_olson2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

I worked in Defense for a year. There were soldiers and staff getting close to a "10,000 hour powerpoint" badge.

Retra2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

This is like saying food makes us fat, ban food! Nonsensical

coldtea3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

igravious• 11 years ago

In fairness, didn't they use a bad analogy rather than faulty logic?

Apart from that I approve of your pedantry.

ksk2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

Retra2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

delecti• 11 years ago

That'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• 11 years ago

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.

vezzy-fnord• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Instead of banning specific tools, try promoting officers and enlisted personnel who do a good job, including public speaking and presenting ideas.

kejaed• 11 years 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

[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi

peter3034• 11 years ago

I saw a version of #1 online.

users.ha.uth.gr/tgd/pt0501/09/Tufte.pdf

peter3034• 11 years 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."

gknoy2• 11 years 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-int...

thupten• 11 years ago

dont' blame the tool. If a website is ugly, should we ban the internet?

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

Arguably, yes.

jedberg• 11 years 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• 11 years 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?

collyw5• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

We always called them transparencies or "the overhead". I suppose the modern incarnation is the smartboard, which isn't too bad.

ghaff6• 11 years 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.

jsingleton6• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Really? Why not ban Word because people write bad books?

peter3034• 11 years ago

My favorite example was the Gettysburg Address - choppy idea presentation and too much distracting colors.

philippnagel• 11 years ago

I think it is wrong to blame the tool. It all comes down to usage.

brudgers4• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

brudgers4• 11 years 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.

DanBC• 11 years ago

People had to prepare transparancies and it was time-consuming and expensive, so they took a bit of care over it.

I can dump 7,000 words into powerpoint, chose a terrible font and terrible colours, fill it with weird clip art and transitions, and then bore and confuse my audience.

I like the idea of powerpoint. But there are far too many examples of suboptimal powerpoint presentations.

Perhaps there should be a gallery of good presentations (this probanly exists) which have the slides but also a video of the actual presentation, so people can compare the sparse slides and detailed talk.

collyw5• 11 years ago

I spend ages whenever I have to do a powerpoint (or libreoffice) presentation.

Drawing a box with text in it will take me maybe ten time longer in PP compared to a transparency. Admittedly the lines will be straight, and the text more readable (assuming I choose a reasonable font size), but its so time consuming in comparison.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

Agreed. Powerpoint is good when its NOT a set of bullet points. Instead, show data rendered in a way that can't easily be explained in a word or two. Use the maxim that 'a picture is worth 1000 words'. There the presentation shines.

Data representation should properly be at least two variables plotted against one another, neither of which is time.

InclinedPlane3• 11 years ago

Prior to PowerPoint people would... write entire reports filled with all of the substantive details, in clear language explaining everything. That got replaced with pitch culture, which is brain dead in comparison.

brudgers4• 11 years ago

But how many people read them? Once you wind up having to point to the contract, the relationship is already south bound. Today people are readily writing software in languages with no specification other than the prototypical implementation. When communication was expensive, investment in big documentation was usually sound.

Today, I don't need an atlas of Georgia Counties. I've got Wikipedia and the US Census Bureau and free long distance on my cell-phone plan and minutes that go unused every month. If I have a question about Ubuntu, I don't need a manual. There's StackExchange and Google. There are lots of lightweight channels.

Don't get me wrong, I love books and deep knowledge. But the six months that it takes to produce, publish, and disseminate a tome doesn't offer slam dunk ROI. The agilists have a point.

BinaryIdiot• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

That seems extremely painful without explicit page break characters, because if you were to rewrite anything, you would have to adjust the corresponding whitespace or else everything would get misaligned.

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

At the time I found http://remarkjs.com/#1 visually appealing and dev-oriented.

dredmorbius2• 11 years ago

SliTeX

bhartzer• 11 years ago

The worst is when people don't/can't/won't use PowerPoint and they use MS Word or a PDF to create "slides".

I don't think PowerPoint should be banned, just the misuse of PPT should be banned.

jsingleton6• 11 years ago

PDF can work really well. Prevents transitions and less worries about compatibility on the presenting machine.

collyw5• 11 years ago

So that includes the vast majority of people who don't/can't/won't use it well.

thesimpsons1022• 11 years ago

I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.

JoshTriplett4• 11 years ago

That is absolutely absurd, and I'm horrified that that's being taught.

mattstocum2• 11 years ago

Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.

shalmanese• 11 years ago

I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands.

It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count.

Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome.

Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life.

More education should be structured around such a philosophy.

ddingus7• 11 years ago

This being good advice depends on the audience and desired outcome of the presentation.

Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide.

(I hate it when people just read the slides)

Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form.

IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight.

I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.

josephmx• 11 years ago

At my school we were marked down if we put more than X words on a slide (The rule was if you can't read the entire slide on a projector across the room, you have too much text), everything else should be in the slide notes.

jsingleton6• 11 years ago

Agreed the talk should work without slides. Another way of putting it is that the deck shouldn't really work on its own. You can't just read the slides after without explanation.

gknoy2• 11 years ago

While this is great for making a presentation, it makes it Really Hard to learn anything at all from a presentation for which you do not have a video recording.

I've frequently seen Slideshare (or similar) presentations that look like a disjoint selection of code examples and meme images, with a narrative that is only barely hinted at.

sliverstorm• 11 years ago

Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong

I'm torn. Yes, slides are a supplement. But a purely verbal presentation on things like financials or schedule without some supporting data feels like complete fluff, and while the speaker could be spitting out data verbally, that doesn't "work" when you have more than one or two data points - the audience can't hold lots of data in their head as you recite it. That's what visuals are for.

mbreese• 11 years ago

I think that one of the points of the article is that PowerPoint presentations have taken over from technical reports and briefings. Instead of having a written report with data (with figures) and then a subsequent briefing to go over the findings, we are left with presentations that try to do both: present data and explain it.

So if the alternative to PowerPoint is better, more technical, reports -- I'm all for it.

JoshTriplett4• 11 years ago

If you're presenting raw data, sure, all of it should be on the slide. However, when you're presenting analysis of that data, explain it verbally, and summarize your explanation on the slides.

lqdc13• 11 years ago

I really like when people put a lot of information on the slides.

It makes going over past presentations very easy. For example, when a new ML algorithm comes out, the only way to easily grasp how it works without reading a bunch of papers is to find some Power Point slides by the author. I guarantee people wouldn't make two sets of slides either.

jasode• 11 years ago

If the slides are dense with text and the intended audience likes it that way (learning a complex algorithm), that's just PPT acting like a landscape version of a Microsoft Word or LaTeX document.

The reverse is also true: one can use MS Word with sparse text and make it act like a PowerPoint.

In the context of the thread, it's when the wall of text on the slides is negatively affecting the delivery of important information. Dense slides when not appropriate will bore the audience (like those military presentations shown in the article.) To add insult to injury, the typical unpolished speaker will then recite. every. single. word. on the slide.

Instead of the PPT being a set of helpful diagrams or pictures that are superior to wordy descriptions, the text-heavy slide deck becomes a glorified transcript of the talk.

ghaff6• 11 years ago

One of the problems with "Powerpoints" is that they serve at least two different functions--as a visual aid for the the audience during the presentation and as a leave-behind/documentation (or slideshare, etc. independent of a presenter). One presentation is very unlikely to be optimal for both. At the same time, you're right that it's unrealistic to expect multiple versions.

pcurve• 11 years ago

Yes, I like powerpoint that is self contained and makes sense without the presenter. I'm not saying each slide should be crammed with information. I'm fine with 80 page ppt as long as it's self-contained, and narrative, with appropriate amount of information density. It should have a story.

MarcScott2• 11 years ago

But this is not what PowerPoint was created for, it is designed to be an accompaniment to a speaker. If a slide deck is placed online for viewing without the speaker, the speaker notes should provide the extra detail, not the slides themselves.

dangoor• 11 years ago

Documents and presentation visuals should be two different things, ideally.

There is the notion of a Slidedoc:

http://www.duarte.com/slidedocs/

JoshTriplett4• 11 years ago

Record a video of the speaker giving the talk.

Bonus if you have a transcript.

lucb1e2• 11 years ago

It makes going over past presentations very easy

But that is not what the presentation is for. If you have a hundred words on each slide (and I've seen that), you might as well give everyone the written dialogue. A visual, in this case Powerpoint but it could be an image in a report as well, is to support your story. It is not the story itself.

itsdevlin• 11 years ago

There are to very specific versions of how a presentation should be made: As a supplement to a live presentation or a replacement of it.

If you're using it as a supplement to something you're saying live, the slides should be simple, limited, and support the big points which you should be making verbally.

If you're using it as a handout (or essentially in lieu of a live presentation), it should be much more information-dense.

xenophonf• 11 years ago

As someone firmly in the slides-as-illustration school, I love PowerPoint for its outline and speaker's notes views. That's precisely where detailed content should go---alongside the slides or something that can be printed in handouts. Even better is how PowerPoint works with dual-monitor setups, with the speaker's view on one and the presentation on the other. I use that all the time.

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

PP exists to replace the bulleted memo or prop stand poster, which have existed for god knows how long in corporate culture. Most PP complaints seem to be about broken meeting "culture" than PP itself. Most meetings are about self-promotion, bureaucracy, etc than productivity. Changing the tools won't matter. If the boss expects a weekly meeting from your department, then it will continue to happen and will probably happen with PP, especially if the boss uses PP.

BorisMelnik• 11 years ago

agree, same thing with Infographics. Infographics can be a really useful tool but too many people simply make a huge wall of text instead of creating a graphical representation of the topic at hand.

the way I like to think about presentation slides is they should almost be talking point cues or reminders for the speaker. they should compliment the talk, not dominate it.

butterfinger• 11 years ago

One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said.

Agreed. In my opinion, the slides should supplement the presentation and sum it up in as few words as possible. Having concise slides that sum up a presentation makes it so much easier to go over the presentation and learn the subject more thoroughly (edit: assuming you have access to the slides).

PuercoPop• 11 years ago

Although I agree that people are poorly educated on presentation making I think the main reason they use PP is because of the 'I have a computer' syndrome. Tufte illustrates it perfectly in with 5 colors for 2 data points example in his "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". People would not recreate PP but abuse watever else they could find.

What is worse is that this syndrome is affecting high school students. At least here in Lima Peru, homework is demanded to be done in the computer because it is 'more professional'. So the minimum effort way copy and pasting becomes trivial. In the old way of pen a paper our inherit aversion to effort pushed the student to learn to summarize as writing more demanded more effort. I would prohibit high school homework to be done in the computer. But I digress.

aaron695• 11 years 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).

This is exactly what is to be banned. PowerPoint, Word, Impress, old school slides, blah, blah, blah.

You aren't getting around a PowerPoint ban, you are defying it. Which is part of the point, it better be dam good if you are defying the rule.

It's interesting that they give the thumbs up to Prezi though.

I tend to think good talkers do things well, crap talkers do things badly. Banning their boring slides won't stop their boring talk.

At least slides can be designed and checked by someone good with a lot of time before the talk. Correlation, not causation.

Handwash• 11 years ago

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.

I agree. You cannot make the tool as an excuse of not giving a good presentation. PP is there to help you do things, like any other tools. You need to know how to use it properly and wisely.

I think, the widespread use of PP is because of its capability to present ideas concisely, especially to the management level where they won't spend their time reading a long document. This is especially prominent in the area of Strategy Consulting, where they can just arrange picture and text to be presented to the board of directors.

elliotec• 11 years ago

I have not been educated in presentation making. My experience comes entirely from watching others. I had my first presentation today, used slides.com. What makes a presentation good, or more importantly, not bad? I had no notes and tried to expound on the things in the slides, but definitely read them verbatim first. Here's mine from today for reference: http://slides.com/michaelelliott/art-music-webapps-clojure

jbergens2• 11 years ago

I agree with you but there is another thing people sometimes forget. If the material is for a training course or similar people wants something to take home afterwards but that should probably be some kind of documentation instead of a Powerpoint presentation. When it is the same document one might get tempted to write too many slides with too much text on them.

yellowapple• 11 years 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.

potomak• 11 years 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

[1] https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403

krylon• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

PowerPoint is not the problem. It is the content being delivered through it.

engi_nerd• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Powerpoint doesn't kill people. People kill people.

beat• 11 years 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.

peter3034• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

That's really awesome. Which town is that?

kazinator2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

You might like https://github.com/hakimel/reveal.js .

mattstocum2• 11 years 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.

kazinator2• 11 years 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.

InclinedPlane3• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Steve Jobs: "People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint"

Zigurd• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

Sign me up!

blattus• 11 years 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.

ghaff6• 11 years 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• 11 years 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-po...

oldmanjay• 11 years ago

Banning things should be banned.

Joeri• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

mfringel• 11 years 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.

MarcScott2• 11 years ago

A comedic take on the use of PowerPoint

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjcO2ExtHso

Shivetya• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

collyw5• 11 years ago

But excel first please! (Especially as a database).

giltleaf• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

mratzloff2• 11 years 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".

ddingus7• 11 years 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.

mratzloff2• 11 years ago

Great reply, thanks for the insight. I'm still not sure about the grade being correct; most of the presentations were dreadful--of the "read the PowerPoint to you" variety--but I'm guessing at least some of them got Bs if not As. That said, I'll keep it in mind going forward. Any presentations I do these days are much less formal, which helps with interactivity.

geophile• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations - people do.

anir• 11 years ago

As someone already said "If you use a hammer as a saw, you can't claim the tool is faulty."

lucb1e2• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

The problem is not in PowerPoint, but in people using it.

vlunkr• 11 years ago

This is quite a silly article. You can't blame a tool because it's been misused.

JoeAltmaier2• 11 years ago

Hah! That's every gun-control argument, ever.

jsingleton6• 11 years ago

"Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint" [0]

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/930564-the-jennifer-mo...

rcurry• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

My old powerpointless? page is still up at http://sooper.org/misc/ppt/ - "A list of articles discussing the impact of a reliance on PowerPoint® and bullet-point based communication."

chuckcode• 11 years 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/

qq662• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

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

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

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

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

semi-extrinsic• 11 years ago

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

MrTonyD3• 11 years ago

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

ddingus7• 11 years ago

I love that feature actually.

Sometimes, a quick presentation is in order. When that happens, I setup a very minimal, easy to view style, then blast the material in. Usually, this is for familiar audiences and it's a mix of technical and sales type material. People will be referring to it later, and it needs to be talked through.

So use one document, put it out there, do the review, and right there, add, edit, delete, until it's all sorted. Distribute, or take the end result into some other format.

bbcbasic2• 11 years ago

I attended a programming conference last week.

Everyone used PowerPoint or similar.

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

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

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

So +1 for PowerPoint if used correctly.

6stringmerc• 11 years ago

As a person who has made a living with MS Office products throughout the B2B sales cycle, I am fundamentally grateful for the tools created. PowerPoint is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, the one thing it "needs" the ability to do - train people how to use it effectively - isn't really a core competency. Practically speaking, I don't think instruction on how to use PowerPoint is genuinely possible, insofar as different business and cultural applications will have varying approaches and implementations.

The only thing that bothers me about PowerPoint, on a personal/professional level, is that it is so easy to use. Any semi-literate person with an ojbective and enough time on their hands can realistically create a deck. In a lot of ways, I see PowerPoint and Garageband as similar in this regard - sure, the software can help "make" a presentation or song, but will it be any good for an audience?

Basically, I think your first point is spot-on, and should be used as a buffer from undue criticism. In my professional experience, I've seen far too many "experts" in their fields try to tell me, the "presentation expert" what to do, how to do it, and be stupidly stubborn in fighting the collaborative process. To put it another way, many professionals talk trash about a liberal arts degree (such as creative writing) or the pursuit of experience in live performance (such as drama or comedy in front of audiences) until they realize that the highest stakes business situations are simply concentrated, higher pressure versions of those types of performances. It takes quite a while for a professional to get to a point in their career whereby they might have this epiphany, and those who do "get it" rise to the top in competitve opportunities. They understand the art of presentation, and they embrace guidance and support from artists (wordsmiths, graphic designers, etc) to achieve their vision.

My thesis topic for a Masters in Education (Curriculum Design) focused on the balance of technological tools versus internal intellectual development. Somewhat akin to the hypothesis of "If I have this ubiquitious computer program that will correct my spelling / grammar for me, do I really need to know how to write well in the first place? No!" From what I found in research / studies, yes, that appears to be the trend.

PowerPoint unfortunately allows its users to fall into the same trap, insofar as people can fire up the program, get started, and plow through to their objective ("create a presentation") without the due diligence to plan, structure, and consider their audience's expectations and attention span. That's not the software's fault...well, maybe in some respects because it doesn't have the hard learning curve to keep it out of the hands of those who shouldn't be diddling with it (Garageband vs. Ableton Live is a reasonable comparison), but there's nothing inherently bad about PowerPoint. Nope, it's a good piece of kit. The idiots that use it on the other hand? Yeah, software can't fix them, nope, no way, no how...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back to deleting 17 extra Master Slides, adjusting page numbers so they all align, re-pasting graphics from Excel as Enhanced Metafiles instead of JPGs, fixing the header font size to be consistent, and wondering what kind of demon decided to change the font from Arial to Calibri in random places! (Not really, but been there, done that, got the T-shirt)

qq662• 11 years ago

I like the analogy of GarageBand vs. Ableton Live. As a mass-market application, PowerPoint has to be as easy to get started with as GarageBand, but support advanced customized features for power users, such as motion paths, custom shows, and of course the features that developers can add through the API.

Teaching users how to use PowerPoint is important, and something that we must continuously improve, but teaching users how to effectively communicate and idea is out of scope for us. That's a skill that takes a lifetime to master.

paulpauper• 11 years ago

Powerpoint is only as good as the content behind the slides

keithgabryelski• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

MrTonyD3• 11 years 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.

bbcbasic2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

grayclhn• 11 years 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

edit: and the .org source file, which is probably more relevant: https://github.com/heike/stat590f/blob/master/macros/macros_...

[1] http://orgmode.org/manual/Beamer-export.html

donlzx• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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

[2] http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013297133X

NeutronBoy• 11 years 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.

danek2• 11 years 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=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

ddingus7• 11 years 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.

danek2• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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.

ghaff6• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years 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• 11 years ago

We also need to ban hammer and showels, lot of people just don't know how to use them properly.

jcchin41• 11 years 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 [2] http://www.treesmapsandtheorems.com/

Why PowerPoint should be banned

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