Even though my primary working computer is a PC, I always default to Apple keynote for presentation slides. I feel it just works better for me. At my work, we make presentations all the time, and our presentations are generally more detailed because we want people to be able to review them later.
The problem with Powerpoint is that it is 'not the web'. So a great amount of resource goes into a deck of slides with the graphics department doing images, someone else getting reports and someone else editing the whole thing for the boss to present.
There may actually be great things in this presentation, things that should be on the main website but they are not on the main website, they are only available in this proprietary presentation format.
By now the small to medium size business has a whole team of people bothering themselves with these presentations and probably working in CMYK for the graphics. This team did not think to try using HTML and the web, they got stuck in Powerpoint, Word, Excel and the 1990's way of working non-collaboratively. Information gets prepared for the boss in these slide decks rather than be widely available for logged in web users to the company website.
PDF files used for website design proposals are my pet peeve. However it is the legacy workflows and duplication of effort that bugs me, when companies aren't willing to step up and use the new tools but bumble along the 'Powerpoint way'.
The main reason for using PPT is a presentation during a meeting, not to put something out on the web. And you may prefer the feature set from Word or Excel over Google Docs for some tasks, where the resulting documents can easily be emailed or put on a shared drive. Also Office 365 offers online versions of Office, or you could upload to Google Docs.
IME, they are used for the kind of meeting that isn't really a meeting at all. Nothing is discussed, and some idea is "presented" to a Powerful Person by the Presenting Person, plus some other people who are there to spectate for no obvious reason. At the end of it, Powerful Person says they will think about it, and Presenting Person will send out a summary of the meeting in email.
Why not just send the email to begin with, with a full, coherent summary of the proposal, have Powerful Person email their approval or rejection, and skip the several person-days worth of meetings?
First, Presenting Person, like nearly all people, is borderline illiterate, hasn't written a report or essay since college, and probably simply couldn't do so coherently in any reasonable length of time. For them, PowerPoint is a crutch to avoid having to actually commit their proposal to writing. Instead, they put up some bullet points that are vaguely related and just talk about it.
Second, there is Powerful Person. They are again, like most people, borderline illiterate, and haven't read anything longer that a listicle since B-school, so they'd rather sit back and stroke their beard for 20 minutes than bother with possibly needing to look up a word they don't understand. More importantly, the presentation or "meeting" is an opportunity to display primate dominance. Essentially they are "holding court" to demonstrate to everyone that they are the ones in charge. The idea that Presenter Person may have stayed up late getting every slide pixel-perfect in preparation for this meeting only enhances this function.
Finally, there are the spectators. Powerful Person needs them there for the primate dominance function already discussed. The more people there are to witness Presenting Person prostrating themselves before Powerful Person, the greater utility the ceremony has in this regard. Luckily, all of these people are easily convinced to show up for the meeting, because it's a way to schedule a surreptitious break into a workday that has probably had all actual breaks like lunch breaks, coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, slowly eliminated over the course of years and decades.
In short, nobody can read, nobody can write, and showing up for meetings is easier than real work. Enter PowerPoint: the software package tool-using social primates reach for most when nominally attempting to make business decisions.
Do you mean that graphic designers should bother themselves with CSS instead of dragging shapes? I must have misinterpreted what you said.
Also, I find the PDF format to be quite practical for real world use, just because it is easy to print them and then annotate them by hand in a meeting or while reading them.
The other problem with Powerpoint is that it enables the some of the worst professional behavior in us individually and in groups. Some people don't like to write. Some people don't like to read. Or read mail-outs before a meeting. And some people like to hide in endless meetings to appear as if they are busy (working), while they are just busy in endless meetings not working.
Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate a case for present and future audiences.
But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some? many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in my mind - but I could be wrong)
EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?
> Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?
Up to you.
If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.
However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the meeting?
The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings by useless people (sadly too common).
In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get indignant responses of:
"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"
"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."
"Ummmmmmmmmm."
"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."
I don't get it. Powerpoint is literally perfect. There are no downsides. It's up to you to not overdo the designs and the animations.
Personally, I always use the default theme (Black Calibri text on white background), with no animations or transitions. The included drawing tools are also world class, and help get your point across as long as you don't make it too complex.
I mean, if I'm looking at a presentation on some topic, I could't care less about what the author used as a tool, as long as it works properly.
But what some people inflict on others with their "designed" slides is just beyond cruel. And honestly: If there are people that can present complex algorithms on a black and white slideset - and there are astoundingly good presentations that do this! - you can keep it simple, too. No reason to use ugly pixelated (and stolen!) ClipArt, ugly background images that clash with the foreground etc. Yuck.
>It's up to you to not overdo the designs and the animations
That's why I like LaTeX Beamer (at least as long as I don't need anything else in my presentation other than bullet point text and some math): in LaTeX, writing text and equations is relatively easy, but everything else (complicated animations? messing with the default style?) requires non-significant amount of work ... thus the presentations created with Beamer tend to be simple and beautiful.
Ideally, it's best practice to create two things: the powerpoint presentation that allows you to exhibit diagrams and charts that illustrate what you are saying, but then secondly a handout that puts in text what you've said, and includes the same diagrams. You speak your piece, using PPT to show diagrams only, not slide-after-slide of words (the words are coming from your mouth). That means the PPT as a handout is useless, and you have to create a separate 3 page (or so) text document that also includes the graphics.
That however is extra work - and a lot of extra time, and hardly anyone does it. The real culprit here is the "time saving shortcut" of simply printing out your PPT as a handout. In order to make it useful, you need the words on the slides. Now you've got slide-after-slide of bullet point lists and text, and that urges you to commit the second sin, which is turning your back to the audience and reading the slides from the stage.
To automatically to revert to good form, the trick is to realize there are three things: the words you speak, the images you project on the screen, and a handout that combines both. That allows PPT to revert to what it is truly good at, which is showing pictures on the screen.
Powerpoint is not useful for engineering presentations. The problem is that most engineers SUCK at presentations. Consequently, Powerpoint looks useful because it forces an absolute minimum of organization onto shitty presenters.
To me, having a flip chart and/or whiteboard (preferably with ruled squares) is a necessity for a useful engineering presentation. I can operate in Powerpoint, but it requires a lot more effort. If I have to use Powerpoint for an engineering presentation, I'm either A) being forced by somebody in management or B) plan to give the presentation multiple times. In case B), I can amortize the time I have to waste putting the presentation into "Powerpoint Normal Form" over several iterations.
Somebody said power point is a crime against humanity. I don't agree fully as it is a great tool if used in the right way. Unfortunately it is almost always overused and crammed with too much information. I have seen decks of 90+ slides full of charts and tables made in various excel files and all numbers had to tie. Such presentations cost organization millions of wasted labor and don't even get to the point. They give a false sense of "knowing what is going on" while in reality nobody analyses the problems well enough. In fact everyone is too busy preparing and tidying off slides.
Also somebody here in the comments said this ready: slides are locked in files poorly shared across the organization. There is a huge amount of valuable information that nobody can search. It is sometimes easier to find detailed information on any random fact on the web than key information in your company.
I think banning power point might be too strong, but companies should force a "code of conduct" on this tool and should seriously figure out a better way for information to surface to employees when they need it.
PowerPoint is a fantastic tool when used as designed - to create slide decks to provide assistive material for an in person presentation, or longer report.
The issue is, most people don't use PowerPoint like that, rather than being assistive, it becomes the end result, so you end up with very complex material distilled down to a single slide, loosing much of its value and context - or worse, inscrutable diagrams and charts crammed with so much detail no one could understand them, and again, often lacking in context.
I once worked for a large telecom - everything came 'round in a slide deck;
Need an account for this service? PowerPoint
Need to understand this complex technical issue? PowerPoint
Need directions to configure some software? PowerPoint
Need some common links for services? PowerPoint
It was absurd - I joked that if PowerPoint suddenly disappeared, no one at the office would know how to get anything done.
On the other hand, the slides i see from places like GDC and Siggraph are by themselves almost always good enough to be self contained (the presentations are certainly better but by making the slides usable by themselves you make them useful for a lot more people).
As an example the main reason the last game i worked at had screen space decals was that i randomly read Pope Kim's SSD SIGGRAPH 2012 slides [1] which had enough detail for me to create a quick prototype in the editor and toss around the artists. Considering how much the artists used SSDs all over the place, the slides being self contained certainly made a difference.
Personally, as someone who doesn't tend to visit conferences and instead prefers to read things from his computer (and watch on youtube too, but i still prefer to read than watch), i'd hate it if slides were reduced to just assistive material :-P.
That’s the rub. Pretty much none of the external decks I create are intended to be self-contained. They’re whatever I thought was best to support my talk. Now ideally there are speaker notes or a separate doocument that serves as backup. Of course, there often isn’t.
Agreed. Some of the old SIGGRAPH course material like Baraff's PBM stuff[0] was simple/clear and stood on its own legs.
He didn't use the Notes section of PPT to print leave behinds (like my lazy own self does) - but took the time to interleave his talking points with his slides for the "leave-behind".
Karl Sims ... Same thing.
I still use some of the old SIGGRAPH material to teach/tutor my now university age kids how to create interesting projects (like the old x-springies) around numerical methods and creating little toy beginner physics engines.
I currently work at a large telecommunications corporation. This is exactly the situation, PowerPoint all the things. It’s infuriating. I wonder is it the same place. Ring a Bell?
I recently had a colleague, who fancies himself the master hacker, ask me how to edit a file on ‘this Linux thing’. I went over to his desk and he was copying shell commands from a PowerPoint presentation into PuTTY running on a Windows VM on his Mac. The mind boggles.
I worked for \\\ - we were doing network support and deployment for the yellow cell carrier, I in particular worked on network gear made by a Korean company.
Surprisingly I'd love to work for a large telecom again, I enjoy the work, and surprisingly even the large corporate environment, plus, I'm in the PNW right now, and I'd like to relocate to 'not here' (Ideally DFW, but I'm not picky, just someplace warmer).
Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia they were, to some extent.”
There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and only slideware).
Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on track? Probably not.
Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual work.
My experience is that the best talks have useless slidedecks. That's because the decks support the talk and do not provide a foundation for the talk. Less good talks often use the deck as a documentation platform; in that case decks become much more useful for reading offline. The exception is when decks are commented heavily for people reading it offline. But I don't see this happening often. Usually, comments are used for the speaker to have some information ready when needed during the talk.
I tend to put my narrative / talking-points / take-aways in the Notes section so that I can print them out together with the slides themselves and leave them behind for the audience after the talk.
That way - I'm not reading the slides to the audience - and am able to create context for later readers without cluttering the slides with too much verbiage.
Most of my meaty slides have to do with process, charts of various data sets and maybe high level technical architectural concept-ware. Much of the narrative is often about context, relevance and impact: "so what?".
I worked for hours putting together a presentation to the VPs and owners of the company.
To make it extra special I used background water marks from rainbow infrared scans of very hot equipment. With the transparency set to around 15%, each slide made a very appealing pastel presentation.
At the start of the presentation something went wrong because the software rev of the machine to present on was lower than the one I developed on.
All my water marks came out in full intensity. My presentation looked like an Andy Warhol psychedelic acid tripping fantasy.
My boss, on seeing the first slide, said roll with it, as he motioned with his hand, moving with a circular motion, because you know, time is money, and more importantly, the big bosses have no capacity for waiting on peons.
So side 1 wasn't so bad, but as each slide progressed, each infrared back ground became more and more intense. The CFO owner on each slide would grimace, reminding me of the kid in Home Alone, looking like he was pushed back in his chair by a stiff breeze.
The topic could be interesting to a processing engineering nerd, but under ordinary circumstances it would be lost on all but 2 others in the room. This presentation, however, is burned into the memory of everyone in the room. I am certain nobody remembers a thing I said, but they remember the trippy presentation by sTevo.
Over the past two months at my job, I had the task to sift through our intranet, finding as it turns out mostly PowerPoint presentations and then sticking all of that information into a OneNote document.
Transfering information from one badly indexable, not deep-linkable and completely inappropriate documentation format to the next.
And then I was told to put the link to the OneNote document into a PowerPoint presentation, so that the PowerPoint with the link in it could be uploaded to the intranet.
I hate "PowerPoint", but what I really hate is bad meetings with the veneer of professionalism from having a presentation. I've wasted plenty of my life in such meetings (sometimes giving the presentation).
Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides.
IMHO, things would go better if:
* meetings had a clear objective, so you could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or discuss to achieve it.
* people focused on the story, not the document. I've found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual aids.
* we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting, and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's hard to do either one well.
I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry, humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more complex information.
The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2 page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story itself.
35 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 93.9 ms ] threadThere may actually be great things in this presentation, things that should be on the main website but they are not on the main website, they are only available in this proprietary presentation format.
By now the small to medium size business has a whole team of people bothering themselves with these presentations and probably working in CMYK for the graphics. This team did not think to try using HTML and the web, they got stuck in Powerpoint, Word, Excel and the 1990's way of working non-collaboratively. Information gets prepared for the boss in these slide decks rather than be widely available for logged in web users to the company website.
PDF files used for website design proposals are my pet peeve. However it is the legacy workflows and duplication of effort that bugs me, when companies aren't willing to step up and use the new tools but bumble along the 'Powerpoint way'.
Why not just send the email to begin with, with a full, coherent summary of the proposal, have Powerful Person email their approval or rejection, and skip the several person-days worth of meetings?
First, Presenting Person, like nearly all people, is borderline illiterate, hasn't written a report or essay since college, and probably simply couldn't do so coherently in any reasonable length of time. For them, PowerPoint is a crutch to avoid having to actually commit their proposal to writing. Instead, they put up some bullet points that are vaguely related and just talk about it.
Second, there is Powerful Person. They are again, like most people, borderline illiterate, and haven't read anything longer that a listicle since B-school, so they'd rather sit back and stroke their beard for 20 minutes than bother with possibly needing to look up a word they don't understand. More importantly, the presentation or "meeting" is an opportunity to display primate dominance. Essentially they are "holding court" to demonstrate to everyone that they are the ones in charge. The idea that Presenter Person may have stayed up late getting every slide pixel-perfect in preparation for this meeting only enhances this function.
Finally, there are the spectators. Powerful Person needs them there for the primate dominance function already discussed. The more people there are to witness Presenting Person prostrating themselves before Powerful Person, the greater utility the ceremony has in this regard. Luckily, all of these people are easily convinced to show up for the meeting, because it's a way to schedule a surreptitious break into a workday that has probably had all actual breaks like lunch breaks, coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, slowly eliminated over the course of years and decades.
In short, nobody can read, nobody can write, and showing up for meetings is easier than real work. Enter PowerPoint: the software package tool-using social primates reach for most when nominally attempting to make business decisions.
But it is!
https://talkjs-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/egbert_talkj...
Also, I find the PDF format to be quite practical for real world use, just because it is easy to print them and then annotate them by hand in a meeting or while reading them.
Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate a case for present and future audiences.
But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some? many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in my mind - but I could be wrong)
EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?
Up to you.
If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.
However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the meeting?
The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings by useless people (sadly too common).
In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get indignant responses of:
"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"
"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."
"Ummmmmmmmmm."
"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."
Personally, I always use the default theme (Black Calibri text on white background), with no animations or transitions. The included drawing tools are also world class, and help get your point across as long as you don't make it too complex.
Only if you can refrain from the Design tab, something that MS seems to emphasize with every update.
I mean, if I'm looking at a presentation on some topic, I could't care less about what the author used as a tool, as long as it works properly.
But what some people inflict on others with their "designed" slides is just beyond cruel. And honestly: If there are people that can present complex algorithms on a black and white slideset - and there are astoundingly good presentations that do this! - you can keep it simple, too. No reason to use ugly pixelated (and stolen!) ClipArt, ugly background images that clash with the foreground etc. Yuck.
That's why I like LaTeX Beamer (at least as long as I don't need anything else in my presentation other than bullet point text and some math): in LaTeX, writing text and equations is relatively easy, but everything else (complicated animations? messing with the default style?) requires non-significant amount of work ... thus the presentations created with Beamer tend to be simple and beautiful.
That however is extra work - and a lot of extra time, and hardly anyone does it. The real culprit here is the "time saving shortcut" of simply printing out your PPT as a handout. In order to make it useful, you need the words on the slides. Now you've got slide-after-slide of bullet point lists and text, and that urges you to commit the second sin, which is turning your back to the audience and reading the slides from the stage.
To automatically to revert to good form, the trick is to realize there are three things: the words you speak, the images you project on the screen, and a handout that combines both. That allows PPT to revert to what it is truly good at, which is showing pictures on the screen.
But ... it's more work!
To me, having a flip chart and/or whiteboard (preferably with ruled squares) is a necessity for a useful engineering presentation. I can operate in Powerpoint, but it requires a lot more effort. If I have to use Powerpoint for an engineering presentation, I'm either A) being forced by somebody in management or B) plan to give the presentation multiple times. In case B), I can amortize the time I have to waste putting the presentation into "Powerpoint Normal Form" over several iterations.
Also somebody here in the comments said this ready: slides are locked in files poorly shared across the organization. There is a huge amount of valuable information that nobody can search. It is sometimes easier to find detailed information on any random fact on the web than key information in your company.
I think banning power point might be too strong, but companies should force a "code of conduct" on this tool and should seriously figure out a better way for information to surface to employees when they need it.
The issue is, most people don't use PowerPoint like that, rather than being assistive, it becomes the end result, so you end up with very complex material distilled down to a single slide, loosing much of its value and context - or worse, inscrutable diagrams and charts crammed with so much detail no one could understand them, and again, often lacking in context.
I once worked for a large telecom - everything came 'round in a slide deck;
Need an account for this service? PowerPoint
Need to understand this complex technical issue? PowerPoint
Need directions to configure some software? PowerPoint
Need some common links for services? PowerPoint
It was absurd - I joked that if PowerPoint suddenly disappeared, no one at the office would know how to get anything done.
As an example the main reason the last game i worked at had screen space decals was that i randomly read Pope Kim's SSD SIGGRAPH 2012 slides [1] which had enough detail for me to create a quick prototype in the editor and toss around the artists. Considering how much the artists used SSDs all over the place, the slides being self contained certainly made a difference.
Personally, as someone who doesn't tend to visit conferences and instead prefers to read things from his computer (and watch on youtube too, but i still prefer to read than watch), i'd hate it if slides were reduced to just assistive material :-P.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/blindrenderer/screen-space-decals...
He didn't use the Notes section of PPT to print leave behinds (like my lazy own self does) - but took the time to interleave his talking points with his slides for the "leave-behind".
Karl Sims ... Same thing.
I still use some of the old SIGGRAPH material to teach/tutor my now university age kids how to create interesting projects (like the old x-springies) around numerical methods and creating little toy beginner physics engines.
[0] https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-00-winter/paper... (slides - including Witkin's are after the whitepaper-ish looking stuff at the front of the file)
I recently had a colleague, who fancies himself the master hacker, ask me how to edit a file on ‘this Linux thing’. I went over to his desk and he was copying shell commands from a PowerPoint presentation into PuTTY running on a Windows VM on his Mac. The mind boggles.
Surprisingly I'd love to work for a large telecom again, I enjoy the work, and surprisingly even the large corporate environment, plus, I'm in the PNW right now, and I'd like to relocate to 'not here' (Ideally DFW, but I'm not picky, just someplace warmer).
http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...
Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia they were, to some extent.”
There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and only slideware).
Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on track? Probably not.
Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual work.
That way - I'm not reading the slides to the audience - and am able to create context for later readers without cluttering the slides with too much verbiage.
Most of my meaty slides have to do with process, charts of various data sets and maybe high level technical architectural concept-ware. Much of the narrative is often about context, relevance and impact: "so what?".
It's a tool. Its only fault is that it made it easy to visualise concepts, and was used by poor presenters to visualise poor concepts.
It's like blaming fire for poorly cooked food.
I worked for hours putting together a presentation to the VPs and owners of the company.
To make it extra special I used background water marks from rainbow infrared scans of very hot equipment. With the transparency set to around 15%, each slide made a very appealing pastel presentation.
At the start of the presentation something went wrong because the software rev of the machine to present on was lower than the one I developed on.
All my water marks came out in full intensity. My presentation looked like an Andy Warhol psychedelic acid tripping fantasy.
My boss, on seeing the first slide, said roll with it, as he motioned with his hand, moving with a circular motion, because you know, time is money, and more importantly, the big bosses have no capacity for waiting on peons.
So side 1 wasn't so bad, but as each slide progressed, each infrared back ground became more and more intense. The CFO owner on each slide would grimace, reminding me of the kid in Home Alone, looking like he was pushed back in his chair by a stiff breeze.
The topic could be interesting to a processing engineering nerd, but under ordinary circumstances it would be lost on all but 2 others in the room. This presentation, however, is burned into the memory of everyone in the room. I am certain nobody remembers a thing I said, but they remember the trippy presentation by sTevo.
Transfering information from one badly indexable, not deep-linkable and completely inappropriate documentation format to the next.
And then I was told to put the link to the OneNote document into a PowerPoint presentation, so that the PowerPoint with the link in it could be uploaded to the intranet.
Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides.
IMHO, things would go better if: * meetings had a clear objective, so you could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or discuss to achieve it. * people focused on the story, not the document. I've found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual aids. * we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting, and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's hard to do either one well.
I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry, humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more complex information.
The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2 page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story itself.
Cool thing is that audience can ask 'what if' questions and you can show them in real time by changing bit of code.