Bullet points are not inherently evil

October 21, 2004 2:14 AM

You've seen the art, you've read the Gettysburg address, but is Microsoft Powerpoint responsible for the Decline of Civilization and is impactful a real word? (note: the last link is a Real audio file)
posted by johnny novak (32 comments total)

Also, Edward Tufte, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint
posted by hattifattener at 2:58 AM on October 21, 2004

Has anyone got a good recommendation for alternatives?
My own preference would be just to stand up and speak, maybe with a whiteboard, but a whiteboard is not always available, and my writing/drawing can't always keep up with my thoughts.
It takes a long time to craft a clear, concise, and interesting lecture - time that is not always available. I think powerpoint sacrifices 'interesting' for 'clear' and 'concise'. I'd like to hear what techniques other people are using to communicate their ideas to larger groups.
posted by bashos_frog at 3:31 AM on October 21, 2004

I have used this slide show program. Just pictures and music can be very effective.
posted by JohnR at 4:31 AM on October 21, 2004

I think the main reason for PowerPoint's existence is a crutch for public speaking, a way for someone to get started with the blank page of facing an audience. (which the Gettysburg address guy says in the audio.)

But it can force the audience into a totally passive role, and keep the presenter from ever having to go into more depth, killing digression. It protects the presenter from having to go off topic, 'cause there is always another slide to get to. But that also hobbles the presenter from displaying the depth of their knowledge. It may not be inherently evil. It sure is a boon to the bullshitters. That it's been so universally accepted probably says more about fear of public speaking than general idiocy. That said, it's retarded a lot of folks from improving their public speaking.
posted by bendybendy at 4:56 AM on October 21, 2004

I try to always have a policy that questions are OK at any time during the presentation. If the question is something that is answered later on, I just say that. But often times this leads into interesting digressions. As long as I stay mindful of the time, I think it is nice to let the audience steer discussion a little.
Of course, this is only good up to a certain size audience - maybe 50 people or so.
posted by bashos_frog at 5:09 AM on October 21, 2004

Bashos: Freehand, export to PDF.
posted by signal at 5:26 AM on October 21, 2004

F.W.I.W., I don't feel that PowerPoint forces you to do crappy, chart-junky presentations. It just makes it very, very easy. Way too much noise, not enough me.
posted by signal at 5:27 AM on October 21, 2004

Has anyone got a good recommendation for alternatives?

The pdfslide package for LaTeX. Generate your outline as a, well, any class you want. Add a line to the beginning for \usepackage{pdfslide} and it turns every section into a slide or set of slides.

There are switches and controls for different transitions and the like, if you want to bother with them. They don't have any content, so I don't.

Other folks use prosper, another LaTeX package, and like it. I don't like that prosper files end up requiring more than one line to translate between print and slides.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 5:59 AM on October 21, 2004

PowerPoint doesn't force you to suck, but most people who use it know little about design (especially instructional design), so it's no suprise that their presentations suck. I use PowerPoint though I have also used OpenOffice Impress and Macromedia Flash, and good ole' HTML/CSS. Used well, it keeps the plot moving along and provides a visual reference. Used badly, it's a distraction and a crutch.
posted by wheat at 6:01 AM on October 21, 2004

I've been told that an awful lot of the bandwidth used by the US armed forces during the Iraq invasion was for...you guessed it...transmitting PowerPoint presentations. An NROTC instructor friend of mine makes all his students learn to use it, too.
posted by alumshubby at 6:10 AM on October 21, 2004

We use a combo of pshop and indesign to create pdf files, and project using OSX preview. Acrobat 6 is a bit of a beast on OSX. There is also this by Eric Meyer, though it's pretty bullet point as well. I try to avoid bullets and use natural sentence structure in any presentation that I do.
posted by grimley at 7:02 AM on October 21, 2004

This company specialises in solely making non boring presentations. They have an interesting presentation on Attention Spam(zipped PDF) which deals with why so many presentations suck.
posted by PenDevil at 7:13 AM on October 21, 2004

alumshubby- I can just see it:

Shock and Awe
- time and place of our choosing
- major face off routs Republican Guard
- hail the liberators

Freedom Rings
- De-Bathification (mos. 1-6)
- New Marshall plan seeds infrastructure (mos. 4-12)
- Islamists
--- the carrot
--- the stick
- Elections (month 12)

Future Prospects
- Syria
- Iran
- Palestine
- What about the Sauds?

posted by bendybendy at 7:20 AM on October 21, 2004

I think that when bashos_frog asked for alternatives, he was talking about alternatives to slide-based presentations, not different software that does the same thing..

I think the biggest problem with PowerPoint is the culture that has grown up around it. "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." So it seems like one of the common complaints about PowerPoint is that it's created a culture in which normally smart and productive people don't feel like they can scratch their ass without a PowerPoint summary of how and why it itches, and why scratching is the best solution to the problem. Sometimes, a three-sentence memo saying, "I'm doing this, any objections" is better communication.

PowerPoint is a good advance organizer, and I've heard that it is a great scaffold for non-native English speakers. However, it is not the best tool for all kinds of jobs, and it does not replace a full text. DON'T give me print-outs of your slides if you have a paper draft.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:26 AM on October 21, 2004

True enough Kirk. I was at a conference a while back and one of the presenters did not use any visuals at all - this was an architecture history thing, where slides are the standard - and it was by far the best presentation. Granted we had knowledge of what he was talking about, but the lack of visuals made you think of what he was saying, not what he was showing.
posted by grimley at 7:34 AM on October 21, 2004

Isn't this the classic and flawed idea that it's not the person but the program? One can do bad work in Photoshop as well, or HTML, etc. Similarly you hear you could only do this or that on a Mac not a PC. Nonsense.

I don't care for PowerPoint in term of it's power or features, but blaming the program for bad presentations is absurd. You can choose to use all the bells and whistles, but it's you doing so, not the program.

Of course this leads to the question, what is good speaker support? Personally, I usually stress just that, support. Which usually means three or four points of text (a word or two each) that the audience can use to remain focused, without it dancing about as if it's happy to be read. And of course, the occassional graph to refer to if absolutely necessary. If the speaker is using PowerPoint as a crutch then they are quite clearly a bad speaker.

In freelance gigs I've done I absolutely love it when presenters just ditch the support entirely and rely on their personality.
posted by juiceCake at 7:45 AM on October 21, 2004

juiceCake: Isn't this the classic and flawed idea that it's not the person but the program? One can do bad work in Photoshop as well, or HTML, etc. Similarly you hear you could only do this or that on a Mac not a PC. Nonsense.

Well, I would not be so quick to hold the program blaimless. Tufte is dead on in that PowerPoint supports a handful of discourse styles very well, and really lacks support for other discourse styles. What I don't see in the PowerPoint apologies is an acknowledgement of the basic fact that PowerPoint does put constraints on how you present. Sometimes these constraints are appropriate. But you gotta go into desiging for the medium knowing the constraints.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:51 AM on October 21, 2004

I went to a church once where the preacher preached from Power Point. As if fundamentalist sermons weren't enough like sales pitches already.
posted by dagnyscott at 8:21 AM on October 21, 2004

Any media you choose to assist you in making your point, including the choice to not use support media at all, will shape the message: media and message are intertwined. You can't effectively present text-heavy discourse using PowerPoint (that's why we still have books). If you try, you're using the wrong tool for the job. PowerPoint can add a veneer of organization to a crappy presentation, but that wears thin pretty quickly. The tool is not blameless, but neither are uncreative presenters.
posted by wheat at 9:14 AM on October 21, 2004

I think the biggest problem with PowerPoint is the culture that has grown up around it.

Bingo. I work in a place where PowerPoint is the lingua franca which is very different than my previous place of employment, a university. At the U, a premium was placed on communication that involved complete sentences and even paragraphs. In a PPT world ideas and concepts are typically reduced to bullet points and the logical flow of ideas can become a series of jump cuts, sometimes masking the fact that there is no logical flow.

PPT decks force things to be parsed into the chunks the "size of one slide," even if they really shouldn't be. And this invites the decapitation of thought with a slide here or a slide there being taken out of one deck and placed in another one. Sometimes this facilitates the rapid diffusion of an idea or understanding, other times it creates the illusion of understanding. This phenomena also pretty quickly erases a clear sense of authorship/ownership and that can make accountability hard to establish. A couple of years ago, a colleague was admonished by a new exec for presenting a slide that he felt fell short. She was somewhat patronizingly shown a slide in this executive's presentation that elegantly conveyed a complex point, with the suggestion that she should aspire to level of quality. Her eyes widened and she shouted: "I MADE THAT SLIDE TWO MONTHS AGO."
posted by donovan at 9:32 AM on October 21, 2004

I don't deny the progarm itself has limits (I just recently did some freelance work on a number of presentations myself and personally can't stand the application, but one must pay the bills), but it's still a choice, first to use it at all, and second, how to use it within the application's capabilities. If one uses PowerPoint to create a bad presentation than the one who created the presentation is responsible. I wouldn't be surprised if the presentation was equally as bad without PowerPoint. One could use overheads just as badly, or Director, or Flash, or HTML, etc.

donovan: Great story. The author does indeed make a huge difference and this sort of casual authorship theft is not limited to PowerPoint of course.
posted by juiceCake at 11:32 AM on October 21, 2004

bendybendy -- that's the spirit, but it lacks all the cool military-themed clip art that's available in CorelDRAW and other graphics packages.
posted by alumshubby at 11:50 AM on October 21, 2004

PPT decks force things to be parsed into the chunks the "size of one slide," even if they really shouldn't be.

I'm not sure that PowerPoint's core defect lies here. There is a fundamental limit to how much coherent visual/textual information can be presented at once, and I'm pretty sure that limit is smaller than is allowed on a PPT slide. It's easily possible to put too much information on a single slide, in fact. It's the very nature of human cognition and comprehension that forces ideas to be parsed into chunks.

It's the job of the presenter to fashion visual cues and language into a coherent point. Sometimes, this might be best accomplished with no visual aid at all. Other times, equations on a black board might be the best way to go. PowerPoint, however, provides a simple, portable solution for displaying visual information.

...PowerPoint does put constraints on how you present. Sometimes these constraints are appropriate. But you gotta go into designing for the medium knowing the constraints.

While I agree with this, I'm not sure that it's at the core of the problems with PowerPoint, either. When you think about the constraints imposed by the program, well, they really aren't that great. You need to put things in sequence, and your visual information needs to fit on a powerpoint slide. I really don't look at sequencing as a constraint inherent to powerpoint: a good coherent presentation should have a clear sequence (an argument, a logical progression) regardless. Donovan's idea about "decapitation of thought" is clearly related to sequencing, but it's not so much a constraint of the program as a danger introduced by the freedom the program gives you to edit and resequence. Size is more of an issue, but as I said earlier, I think most pieces of coherent visual information fit well on a powerpoint slide.

At the U, a premium was placed on communication that involved complete sentences and even paragraphs. In a PPT world ideas and concepts are typically reduced to bullet points and the logical flow of ideas can become a series of jump cuts, sometimes masking the fact that there is no logical flow.

Now we're getting more to the crux of things, I think. It's about language, but not in the way that donovan suggests. Complete sentences and paragraphs are key to a good presentation, but they need to be part of the verbal presentation. The presenter needs to engage their audience verbally. What powerpoint does is to make textual communication so easy. The slide templates and bullet points invite the written word; and a verbal presentation to a live audience is simply not the proper forum for the written word. The text on powerpoint slides guides the speaker towards a disjointed, bullet-point oriented monologue, while the echo of the speakers words projected on the screen lull the audience into inattention. In short, contrary to the title of this post, bullet points are inherently evil.

Powerpoint is a great tool for presenting visual information in conjunction with a good talk. It fails in that it invites the display of distracting and oversimplified textual information.
posted by mr_roboto at 11:51 AM on October 21, 2004

I think most pieces of coherent visual information fit well on a powerpoint slide.

I agree and you're correct in noting that a core problem with PPT is that it makes "textual communication so easy" which is something it's not particularly suited for.

Powerpoint is a great tool for presenting visual information in conjunction with a good talk.

It absolutely can be and we should make a distinction between purely presentational, one-to-many uses of PPT (or other technologies) like giving a talk, a lecture, etc and uses of PPT for the purposes of collaborative decisionmaking as when PPT is used as the basis for a meeting or a project review.

In the first case, it really comes down to whether the presenter knows how to organize and present information effecitvely and give a good talk. It's this second case where I see "the culture of PowerPoint" becomeing pernicious.

I've seen PPT used (across multiple tech companies) as an inadequate replacement for what used to be called "the memo." Memos are often the subject of Dilbert-inspired derision, but another way to think about this fading communication technology is that they are formal written narratives designed to communicate within or between organizations. Email can sometimes play this role, but often fails due to the informal nature of the medium and the way people actually use email. I'd argue that PPT almost always fails at this.
posted by donovan at 1:20 PM on October 21, 2004

mr_roboto: And darn, just as I was about to head out to lunch:

here is a fundamental limit to how much coherent visual/textual information can be presented at once, and I'm pretty sure that limit is smaller than is allowed on a PPT slide.

Um, no. Have you seen kids, (or even adults) devour Harry Potter? Reasonably good narrative can scaffold a person through the presentation of entire chapters of text. PowerPoint pretty much limits you to one title, and 7 short lines of text.

Other times, equations on a black board might be the best way to go. PowerPoint, however, provides a simple, portable solution for displaying visual information.

"Simple" here is deceptive. Portable? Not really.

I really don't look at sequencing as a constraint inherent to powerpoint: a good coherent presentation should have a clear sequence (an argument, a logical progression) regardless.

Certainly, but is that sequence best presented in chunks of about 50 words, further chopped up into chunks of 7 words? Sometimes the argument you make is best served by that kind of chunking, sometimes it isn't. For some of the research I'm involved in, coding schemes that might include as many as 20 different codes might be useful. Chunking these up onto separate slides can be tedious, and a handout might be better.

Furthermore, the disjointed lack of Context for PowerPoint can make it difficult to present information that is more than two layers deep. Powerpoint by default is a flat linerar structure, not one that permits recursion into more detail easily.

Size is more of an issue, but as I said earlier, I think most pieces of coherent visual information fit well on a powerpoint slide.

You must work in a very different field that I work in. Take for example, the tabular output for a two-way ANOVA. This is the minimally compact representation of relationships between sets of data that allows one to see the whole picture of those relationships. They look like crap crammed into the bottom two-thirds of a PowerPoint presentation.

Another form of data that does not project well as an 800x600 screen of pixels are geographic maps. Whenever maps are projected, you end up loosing either context, detail, or (worse) both.

Actually one of the things I'm experimenting with to get around one of the worst things I hate about presentation slides is to use pdf maps. Using acrobat, I can selectively zoom out to show context, and then zoom in on a group of 3-6 elements.

What powerpoint does is to make textual communication so easy.

I think there is the problem. Good textual communication is never easy. Copy editors don't just slap together headlines. Summarizing a story into a handful of characters is work. The fewer words you have to express yourself, the more time you have to spend choosing those words carefully. But because "PowerPoint makes textual communication easy," people don't take the time needed to craft PowerPoint presentations.

If people realized that putting together a presentation worth showing required as much care, work, and revision as their other written documentation, then we would probably be seeing fewer and better AV presentations.

donovan: I've seen PPT used (across multiple tech companies) as an inadequate replacement for what used to be called "the memo."

Bingo!
posted by KirkJobSluder at 2:13 PM on October 21, 2004

1.) I can't believe nobody has yet mentioned the "break up with your girlfriend" by powerpoint story.

2.) Dagny's post blew me away, but google straightened me out real quick. That is some scary shit.

scary_shit
posted by bukvich at 2:34 PM on October 21, 2004

I've seen PPT used (across multiple tech companies) as an inadequate replacement for what used to be called "the memo." ... I'd argue that PPT almost always fails at this.

I have yet to encounter this. You're right; it's the wrong tool for that job.

Kirk: I think we actually agree, but you seem to have misunderstood me.

Um, no. Have you seen kids, (or even adults) devour Harry Potter? Reasonably good narrative can scaffold a person through the presentation of entire chapters of text. PowerPoint pretty much limits you to one title, and 7 short lines of text.

I guess I need to clarify. By "at once" I meant "in a reasonably short period of time, similar to the period of time that a piece of visual information is displayed during a presentation." Clearly, if the best way to communicate a given point is by writing a novel, write a novel. Powerpoint is a tool best used for displaying visual annotations to a spoken presentation, which some of us sometimes have to do, even if we'd prefer to communicate by writing.

See below about the "seven short lines of text".

Certainly, but is that sequence best presented in chunks of about 50 words, further chopped up into chunks of 7 words?

Was I not clear, or did you just start responding before you had read the entire comment? To reiterate, displaying textual information during a verbal presentation is usually detrimental to communication; powerpoint is bad to the extent that it encourages this behavior.

Take for example, the tabular output for a two-way ANOVA. This is the minimally compact representation of relationships between sets of data that allows one to see the whole picture of those relationships. They look like crap crammed into the bottom two-thirds of a PowerPoint presentation.

If you're going to project that table onto a screen, though, your limitation isn't the presentation program you're using, it's the size of the screen and the resolution of the projector. Why not the entire space afforded you, instead of the bottom two-thirds? Maybe some data presentation formats are just too difficult to project?

For some of the research I'm involved in, coding schemes that might include as many as 20 different codes might be useful. Chunking these up onto separate slides can be tedious, and a handout might be better.

Then by all means use a handout. As was my original point, powerpoint is bad for displaying textual information. I think projecting large chunks of text behind you as you talk is always a mistake.

Another form of data that does not project well as an 800x600 screen of pixels are geographic maps. Whenever maps are projected, you end up loosing either context, detail, or (worse) both.

Actually one of the things I'm experimenting with to get around one of the worst things I hate about presentation slides is to use pdf maps. Using acrobat, I can selectively zoom out to show context, and then zoom in on a group of 3-6 elements.

Now that's a good idea! A presentation tool that handles zooming would be very nice, so long as it always preserved the context for the audience (i.e. there must be simple visual cues indicating when zooming is occurring and which section of the display we're zooming into.)

Portable? Not really.

Are you kidding? Everyone has powerpoint. It's become a standard.

But because "PowerPoint makes textual communication easy," people don't take the time needed to craft PowerPoint presentations.

Again, I don't think this is the core of the problem. The problem is that powerpoint pushes users towards text. Instead of attempting to communicate verbally, they then rely on the textual bulletpoints in their powerpoint presentation. The core of the presentation becomes the content of the powerpoint slides, whereas these slides should be used merely as accessories to illustrate points and display data, etc.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:23 PM on October 21, 2004

Actually, there is one situation in which I think extensive text on powerpoint slides can be a good thing: the case of a speaker who is weak in the language of the audience. It still might not be a great presentation, but it'll at least allow for a degree of communication that would otherwise be impossible.
posted by mr_roboto at 3:43 PM on October 21, 2004

mr_roboto: Are you kidding? Everyone has powerpoint. It's become a standard.

No, not everyone has powerpoint. People who have bought a version of Microsoft Office have PowerPoint.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 5:46 PM on October 21, 2004

My timezone had me sleeping through most of these comments, but I wanted to say the KJS had it right, in that I was looking for "alternatives to slide-based presentations."

I don't think there is really any good shortcut to a decent presentation, though - so maybe I should be looking at tools that just help with the organization and expression of ideas, rather than their display.
posted by bashos_frog at 8:59 PM on October 21, 2004

> Freedom Rings
- De-Bathification (mos. 1-6)
- New Marshall plan seeds infrastructure (mos. 4-12)
- Islamists
--- the carrot
--- the stick
- Elections (month 12)

bendybendy: if only. In reality, there were PowerPoint presentations, but the critical one for this step read simply, To Be Provided.

Near the end of his presentation, an Army lieutenant colonel who was giving a briefing showed a slide describing the Pentagon's plans for rebuilding Iraq after the war, known in the planners' parlance as Phase 4-C. He was uncomfortable with his material - and for good reason.

The slide said: "To Be Provided."
posted by dhartung at 11:34 PM on October 21, 2004

Powerpoint is a tool best used for displaying visual annotations to a spoken presentation, which some of us sometimes have to do

One of the problems with how PowerPoint is used is that the slides are usually the entire presentation not annotations to it. Presentations where someone's just reading the slides to you are boring. I can read the slides to myself much faster than they can read them out loud.

I used to work for a satellite communications company, and the engineers loved to make PowerPoint slides that had 2-3 dense paragraphs of all caps Courier text because they wanted to include a lot of information.

Apple's Keynote is supposed to be a nice replacement for PowerPoint, but they haven't updated it in a year.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:54 AM on October 22, 2004