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.
Agreed. Just because people can design ugly and confusing slides using powerpoint doesn't say much about the software itself. You can make ugly presentations using any similar software.
I just searched up RISE, and as a guy who loves reveal.js and spends a lot of time writing python in IPython (and who wants to bridge out into Julia), this is a godsend.
The MS Office suite in general is incredibly overcomplicated for what the average person is actually going to need or even use. The ribbon interface I think helped (mainly because it removed/hid Clipart and Wordart), but not enough. Many people I know have stopped using Office entirely in favour of the free and much lighter weight Google Docs suite, with no complaints about missing features.
MS does seem to be simplifying (or arguably dumbing down) their interfaces a lot these days, so maybe we'll see this kind of a redesign.
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.
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!
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>The point that was made, was correct - Banning something does not solve the original problem
That point might have been correct, but it wasn't the one made.
If the analogy wasn't intented to be based on "essentiality" then picking something undeniably essential (and pointing that it's "nonsensical" to ban it because of some problem it causes) was the wrong choice.
But actually the point wasn't even correct. The correct point would be rather: "Banning something does not solve the original problem in _some_ cases". For there are many cases were banning something does solve the original problem. It might not solve it 100%, but it does solve it to a satisfying degree. That's the core idea behind the law banning things actually, and has worked for millenia.
>There is no such thing as a perfect analogy.
No, but there are such things as badly formulated analogies.
It is within the realm of possibility that you simply interpreted the comment incorrectly, and chose to be pedantic about minutia that a reasonable person would not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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) 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're confusing a bunch of stuff together here. Agile and powerpoint aren't the same thing. And BDUF/waterfall isn't the same thing as writing specs nor is it the same thing as using reports/essays/documentation to drive discussion and design.
The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion.
As I wrote in another post, how I would drive getting off of the pitch-train is through internal blogs, wikis, and possibly forums. The way things are today you tend to have 2 main tools in use: the pitch and then reactionary response (the email thread, bug trail, backlog, what-have-you). That's very limiting, myopic, and reactionary. It makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions at a meaty level of detail on things (designs, architectures, directions, etc.) Those things tend to happen in email threads which get unwieldy rather quickly.
You certainly don't need to have a report/document/memo/manifesto about every little thing. But when you need to have a discussion about, say, the direction of your whole product stack, major engineering changes, that sort of thing, it hurts when what should be a conversation at a level of an RFC is reduced to a pitch-deck that people then either thumbs up or thumbs down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?
Plus, PDFs can be generated from Powerpoint.
The real key would be for some App to codify good presentation rules and target OOXML output. I'm not talking Keynote - It needs to be more focused and opinionated, and make that part easier.
Is that even possible? Would Microsoft permit it to exist?
> Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?
You generate your PDF presentation from LaTeX, which is stored in git! Multiple simultaneous editors with sane merging, unlike a group of people editing a PPT file on the network drive.
But those are probably not the PDF presenters you're talking about.
Sure. But if we're talking about using a PDF as "slides" like bhartzer mentioned, it's always going to be made somewhere else and published. Unless they draw the entire thing out of annotations in Acrobat.
Google Slides program does a good job at multi-user support. I usually export it to PDF on a thumbdrive just in case I don't have internet where I'm at and can't hook up my own computer.
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.
It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides.
I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about.
Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
If you were to use something like Presentious (https://presentio.us/) to give your talk, you can capture all of the information presented without reading from your slides. And at the end of your talk, everything can be shared with your audience. For example: https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs
Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.
And very few people watch full-length 45 min. videos of presentations even when they're made. Views drop off after 3-5 mins.
At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.
It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
I think some slide notes could be created even if it takes some extra time. Some viewers might be there to learn and wants some notes/references while others are there for entertainment. If everyone is forced to take their own notes it might take attention away from the presentation itself.
I find that notes are a natural result of preparing a talk. I write the notes to work out what I plan to say while designing the slides to support the script. The notes are the main way to communicate with people who weren't there or who need a reminder of what was said or to follow up references.
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.
Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.
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.
You make a great point. Although I think that the line about producing broken people is overwrought. I manage a number of college grads who have achieved a lot under this system and I actually think, as a manager, it is quite helpful to have them "broken in" and follow what may seem like arbitrary rules - oftentimes seemingly arbitrary rules are actually quite rational and it may just take too long to explain to a new employee (which is what our education system is aimed at creating) exactly why a problem should be approached in a certain (again seemingly arbitrary) manner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can put the presentation with speaker notes (possibly curated) on the web. That may not be optimal for 'leave-behind' version, but it isn't that hard, and it would be huge improvement.
Speaker notes are one (sub-optimal) solution. I've also had years of experience trying to get people to write speaker notes for sales presentations much less for one-off conference presos. Hard to get it done. I try to do it myself but I probably do it in practice 25-50% of the time because it simply isn't a priority.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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].
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".
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 238 ms ] threadThanks for bringing it up!
MS does seem to be simplifying (or arguably dumbing down) their interfaces a lot these days, so maybe we'll see this kind of a redesign.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, maybe not french frieds, but HFCS sure.
Apart from that I approve of your pedantry.
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.
That point might have been correct, but it wasn't the one made.
If the analogy wasn't intented to be based on "essentiality" then picking something undeniably essential (and pointing that it's "nonsensical" to ban it because of some problem it causes) was the wrong choice.
But actually the point wasn't even correct. The correct point would be rather: "Banning something does not solve the original problem in _some_ cases". For there are many cases were banning something does solve the original problem. It might not solve it 100%, but it does solve it to a satisfying degree. That's the core idea behind the law banning things actually, and has worked for millenia.
>There is no such thing as a perfect analogy.
No, but there are such things as badly formulated analogies.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_pp
[2] http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi
users.ha.uth.gr/tgd/pt0501/09/Tufte.pdf
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."
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...
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.
Most diagrams were drawn on the fly - meaning a minimalistic approach, only conveying the information necessary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Data representation should properly be at least two variables plotted against one another, neither of which is time.
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.
The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion.
As I wrote in another post, how I would drive getting off of the pitch-train is through internal blogs, wikis, and possibly forums. The way things are today you tend to have 2 main tools in use: the pitch and then reactionary response (the email thread, bug trail, backlog, what-have-you). That's very limiting, myopic, and reactionary. It makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions at a meaty level of detail on things (designs, architectures, directions, etc.) Those things tend to happen in email threads which get unwieldy rather quickly.
You certainly don't need to have a report/document/memo/manifesto about every little thing. But when you need to have a discussion about, say, the direction of your whole product stack, major engineering changes, that sort of thing, it hurts when what should be a conversation at a level of an RFC is reduced to a pitch-deck that people then either thumbs up or thumbs down.
I guess we'll just have to agree to agree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't think PowerPoint should be banned, just the misuse of PPT should be banned.
Plus, PDFs can be generated from Powerpoint.
The real key would be for some App to codify good presentation rules and target OOXML output. I'm not talking Keynote - It needs to be more focused and opinionated, and make that part easier.
Is that even possible? Would Microsoft permit it to exist?
You generate your PDF presentation from LaTeX, which is stored in git! Multiple simultaneous editors with sane merging, unlike a group of people editing a PPT file on the network drive.
But those are probably not the PDF presenters you're talking about.
Now you run into the WYSIWYG issue, where the collaboration format needs to be "printed" in order to see the output.
Is there a WYSIWIG collaboration tool for LaTeX over git?
Which I can now imagine someone doing. Gross.
PDF would not be the main format but it works well to export to that from powerpoint (or whatever) before presentation.
Wish it had ooxml support.
I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about.
Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.
It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
Example: https://git.csx.cam.ac.uk/x/ucs/u/fanf2/talks/2014-03-nws42....
If they miss the talk, send them straight to the more detailed docs, and they can ask questions.
As sibling posts mention, there could've been a need for explicit slides (maybe in lieu of a write-up).
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.
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.
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.
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.
So if the alternative to PowerPoint is better, more technical, reports -- I'm all for it.
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.
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.
There is the notion of a Slidedoc:
http://www.duarte.com/slidedocs/
Bonus if you have a transcript.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://github.com/potomak/gist-txt
[1] https://potomak.github.io/gist-txt/#737a452d6f38c2b87403
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