Even though I try hard to avoid meetings in general, and business meetings in particular, I have sat through my share of PowerPoint presentations. In general, I hate them.
There are at least two big problems with PowerPoint presentations. The first is that the speaker, because he’s got the visual crutch of the slide show, doesn’t work very hard to communicate well with his actual words. If the slides are really good, you can get away with this — but then you start wondering why the guy didn’t just send you his slides and leave you alone.
The second problem is that PowerPoint seems to encourage a kind of bullet-point thinking that’s just not that interesting, and in its reductiveness can be downright dangerous. That, at least, is the argument of Edward Tufte, the visual-data guru who hates PowerPoint so much that he wrote a monograph about its failings.
I was reminded of all this today while reading Lee Gomes‘s column in today’s Wall Street Journal. PowerPoint, it so happens, has just turned 20 years old, and Gomes’s piece swiftly covers a lot of interesting ground: its origins as a Mac program (which I didn’t know), its rapid sale to Microsoft for $14 million, and Tufte’s objections to how PowerPoint has come to be used.
But by far the best part of the column is the reflections of Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, the creators of PowerPoint. To a large degree, they share the frustration of everyone like me and Tufte about how PowerPoint has come to be used: “It’s just like the printing press,” Austin tells Gomes. “It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed.” As Gomes writes, Austin and Gaskins also like “telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.”
FWIW, I recently saw a great PowerPoint presentation, given by the writer Josh Kilmer-Purcell at this Google conference. It can be done. Spurred on by today’s Gomes piece, I vow to adopt a new outlook: don’t hate PowerPoint; hate the PowerPointers.
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I have to disagree with the agnosticism regarding the tool; PowerPoint encourages users to develop mind-numbing presentations. Just take a look at the templates, which are used for 95% of the grating, cookie-cutter presentations you wish you’d never been to.
Get down to an Apple store and play with a copy of Keynote, Apple’s presentation software. While functionally very similar to PowerPoint, it manages to guide users into more stimulating presentations. Of course the ultimate effectiveness of any presentation is up to the designer and presenter, but there’s no reason the software should encourage lazy habits.
(Do what I do; use Keynote to create a presentation and save it as a PowerPoint preso – then get mobbed after the presentation by people wanting to know how I’d gotten PowerPoint to “look so good”.)
I have to disagree with the agnosticism regarding the tool; PowerPoint encourages users to develop mind-numbing presentations. Just take a look at the templates, which are used for 95% of the grating, cookie-cutter presentations you wish you’d never been to.
Get down to an Apple store and play with a copy of Keynote, Apple’s presentation software. While functionally very similar to PowerPoint, it manages to guide users into more stimulating presentations. Of course the ultimate effectiveness of any presentation is up to the designer and presenter, but there’s no reason the software should encourage lazy habits.
(Do what I do; use Keynote to create a presentation and save it as a PowerPoint preso – then get mobbed after the presentation by people wanting to know how I’d gotten PowerPoint to “look so good”.)
Confusingly, “PowerPoint” has become a generic term for computer slide presentations, even those developed with better tools. I use the mathematical typsetting software LaTeX (Beamer) for my presentations and as a Microsoft-free person, it’s always funny (and sad) to get complimented on my excellent use of PowerPoint after giving a talk.
There are some excellent computer slide presentations, developed with a variety of tools. There was an engaging TEDtalk on the direction of the Pentagon by Thomas Barnett, at http://blog.ted.com/2007/06/thomas_barnetts.php which actually kept me riveted for the full 20 minutes and had good, non-disruptive use of slides.
Confusingly, “PowerPoint” has become a generic term for computer slide presentations, even those developed with better tools. I use the mathematical typsetting software LaTeX (Beamer) for my presentations and as a Microsoft-free person, it’s always funny (and sad) to get complimented on my excellent use of PowerPoint after giving a talk.
There are some excellent computer slide presentations, developed with a variety of tools. There was an engaging TEDtalk on the direction of the Pentagon by Thomas Barnett, at http://blog.ted.com/2007/06/thomas_barnetts.php which actually kept me riveted for the full 20 minutes and had good, non-disruptive use of slides.
On a google/powerpoint note, Google apparently just bought an “online slide presentation” company. It’ll be interesting to see how they present it to the public. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html
On a google/powerpoint note, Google apparently just bought an “online slide presentation” company. It’ll be interesting to see how they present it to the public. http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/06/more-sharing.html
I once gave a ‘Keynote’ presentation. The 10 or so slides were all the same.
But all of the slides were blank!
Aside from the ‘blank’ looks from the audience (especially when I told them I didn’t even know you can duplicate slides – and that I had to create each one individually,) needless to say I got their attention. They actually listened to my words instead of reading them.
I once gave a ‘Keynote’ presentation. The 10 or so slides were all the same.
But all of the slides were blank!
Aside from the ‘blank’ looks from the audience (especially when I told them I didn’t even know you can duplicate slides – and that I had to create each one individually,) needless to say I got their attention. They actually listened to my words instead of reading them.