They bought PowerPoint and got the PC revolution thrown in for free.
July 11, 2017 11:25 AM   Subscribe

29 Bullets. Russell Davies argues that, maybe, PowerPoint is... good?
posted by Cash4Lead (93 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
lol "the design team went in a different direction" tweet at the bottom on the right sidebar

tfw the people tasked with creating the art for your piece hate the very thing which your piece extols

see also: any article about comic sans
posted by radicalawyer at 11:35 AM on July 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


As a long-time Powerpoint hater who has reluctantly made his peace with it, I quite liked this article!

When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent. ... That’s what people seem to hate about PowerPoint, but it's also its superpower. It forces you to put your ideas in order - that might be a constraint but it's often a good one. PowerPoint invites you to focus, to look at your story and put it in a useful and persuasive order.

When it works, that's good. But far too often it's a series of lists of bullet points that are as much of a surprise to the speaker, apparently, as they are to the audience.
posted by RedOrGreen at 11:41 AM on July 11, 2017 [8 favorites]


Ten Bullets, this is not.
posted by cyclotronboy at 11:52 AM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


RedOrGreen - or worse the speaker just copied blocks of text onto slides. Unreadable useless blocks of text, undermining the exact thing Powerpoint is good at: concision.
posted by Wretch729 at 11:54 AM on July 11, 2017 [7 favorites]


My two biggest gripes with PowerPoint are in its mis-use:

1) As a print shop operator, no, PowerPoint is not a page layout program. It is designed to produce slides for 4:3 or 16:9 screens, neither of which scale properly to US paper sizes. See also: People angry and baffled that their 2kb GIF does not scale well when enlarged from thumbnail size to poster size.

2) The vast majority of PowerPoint presentations I have been subjected to involve the "presenter" standing there and reading the slides, bullet point by bullet point, word for word, all the way through the meeting. As if the audience suddenly collectively lost the ability to read. Your slides should be simple and sparse enough that even the people in the back can read them clearly so the presenter doesn't have to, and also should be just a "these are the major take-away points" supplement to your talk, not your entire speech typed out.
posted by xedrik at 11:55 AM on July 11, 2017 [32 favorites]


Point/Counterpoint: Chicken.
posted by Mchelly at 11:56 AM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


The article hints at one of the biggest beefs I have with PowerPoint: "A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigour of actually doing the work."

Either they want the shallow, executive tweet (i.e. smaller than an executive summary) that goes on the PowerPoint (where important information is not communicated), or they want the deck to be the One Document. Each slide becomes super-dense (so a supporting document is unnecessary). The presenter chooses not to "drain the slide," and it's as though the information is not communicated.

What do I know? I'm regularly critiqued for my too-long emails. I should shift to twitter.
posted by MrGuilt at 11:56 AM on July 11, 2017 [10 favorites]


99% of the problems the audience has with powerpoint are, imo, problems with the presenter and their ability to structure information visually. We don't blame pencils or typewriters for the Bulwer-Lyttons of the world. PP isn't really to blame for flowcharts that look like a plate of noodles.

There are some things that PP doesn't do fantastically, and some poor choices that it enables too much, some regrettable templates, but most of the hate for it is in fact hate for the fact that we don't have presentation and rhetoric classes in school anymore.

I can (and do) train most anyone to do a passable presentation with a half dozen or so presentations over the course of a year or two. Every presentation needs a story, every slide, every point needs to matter, there need to be beats for the audience to follow, and so on. It's a completely trainable skillset. But no one gets the training and there's almost no one who knows how to train students either.
posted by bonehead at 12:08 PM on July 11, 2017 [36 favorites]


As a print shop operator, no, PowerPoint is not a page layout program.

True, but it's a decent tool for making academic posters. We've been using it for a decade or more for that purpose. The trick is to have a few recipes for what works and what doesn't. We've tried to get people to use both Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw, but honestly, they basically need a course to do so effectively. With PP, we can train someone to do a limited, restricted poster that will still be legible and look ok in a hour or so. And, if they follow the recipe, the end-result will print successfully.

It's all about making certain aesthetic choices first---supplied by the professional corporate design team---and having a few simple rules for things like font sizes and choices, image dpi requirements, etc... to fill in content.
posted by bonehead at 12:16 PM on July 11, 2017 [8 favorites]


At some point I was going to become a teacher but that didn't ultimately end up happening but during one of my placements, the most popular presentation tool that all of the kids were using was a program called Prezi. It was essentially a more dynamic and user-friendly version of Power Point but it was all the rage with the "youth". Not sure if its still a thing.
posted by Fizz at 12:19 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


Given that MeFi's own Cstross has made one of the definitive statements regarding PowerPoint, I'll be waiting for him to give the all-clear before I buy into this startling new concept.
posted by Ber at 12:23 PM on July 11, 2017


The problem with this piece is that it constructs an uncritical rationalization assessing a technological artifact in the exact same way that PowerPoint overwhelmingly engenders in the structuring and influencing of how the audience should think about things. This is structural blindness that the article cannot recognize, in its positivist rationalization. Notice for example that it makes argument from intent (in the design of PowerPoint) and downplays the consequences. And that's the sort of half-baked thinking that PowerPoint encourages, as a tool of social ideological reproduction.

-- some privileged LaTeX user
posted by polymodus at 12:33 PM on July 11, 2017 [11 favorites]



Interesting that Davies employs Edward Tufte's stylesheet while not heeding him on the topic at hand.
 
posted by Herodios at 12:36 PM on July 11, 2017 [7 favorites]


Prezi is still a thing and it's like powerpoint with motion sickness added in.
posted by tofu_crouton at 12:46 PM on July 11, 2017 [30 favorites]


xedrik gets it right. The problem is not PowerPoint. The problem is bad presentations. I've not read it, largely because I haven't had to give a presentation since before it came out, but the book Beyond Bullet Points is (I'm told) a great guide to how to do presentations properly. What you use to make the slides is immaterial.
posted by SansPoint at 12:47 PM on July 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


I design presentations for Mezzanine in PowerPoint... Hmm
posted by KateViolet at 12:48 PM on July 11, 2017


"If you're a presentation nerd like I am you will have found your way to the archives of www.robertgaskins.com..."

clicks link; it's broken
posted by randomkeystrike at 12:50 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


SansPoint: The problem is not PowerPoint. The problem is bad presentations.

"every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"
posted by MrGuilt at 12:52 PM on July 11, 2017 [9 favorites]


I remember my son when he was in college a couple of years ago telling me that most of his professor's had banned Prezi.
posted by COD at 12:53 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


The problem is not PowerPoint. The problem is bad presentations.

Correct. Because PPT itself contributes NOTHING.

It does however, license and facilitate the creation of bad presentations. It's a force multiplier for bad communication.
"When properly employed, PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent.”
--Steven Pinker
You insult me, sir.

I make the logical structure of my arguments transparent. If I think bullets will help, I use 'em, but they're hardly PPT's gift to me as writer.
 
posted by Herodios at 1:02 PM on July 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


I've heard it said (I could have sworn this was in Tufte, but I can't find it) that Powerpoint raises the floor - that is, makes it harder to give a truly execrable presentation - but lowers the ceiling.

And from #11 in the article, which goes back to Gaskins, PP's inventor: "A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigour of actually doing the work."

Lately I've been trying to write the documents. People really appreciate it, I find, when I send them the document. I come from academic mathematics (can I still say that if I've been out of academia for almost as long as I was in?) where the seminar presentation is, basically, a summary of the paper or set of papers - but you can still read the paper.
posted by madcaptenor at 1:03 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Interesting that Davies employs Edward Tufte's stylesheet while not heeding him on the topic at hand.

Based on the URL I totally expected this to be a take down of Tufte's work on this.
posted by HumanComplex at 1:05 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


I'd settle for people knowing how to use the slideshow function consistently, rather than forcing everyone on a conference call to look at their slides made obnoxiously tiny because they're paging through them in edit mode.

Though it's easier to tell how long you're going to wait until the torment's over when you can see the upcoming slides on the side of the screen. I guess that's something.
posted by asperity at 1:06 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


maybe, PowerPoint is... good?

As others have said above, it could be, but almost never is, because hardly anyone pays attention to the most basic PowerPoint design rules. (As Don McMillan has been showing for almost a decade now, these even can be entertaining to learn.)

In the old days, people would have their notes on little index cards, and talk to the audience. Now they put what would have been on the index cards up on the screen, and turn their backs to the crowd while they read them. The audience isn't sure whether to listen or read along – which humans do at different speeds – so much of what the speaker is saying gets lost in the confusion.

[the slides do not] scale properly to US paper sizes...


I think another problem is that people design them sitting a few feet away from their computer screens, forgetting that, in a talk, the same details will not be clear from 50+ feet back in an auditorium.
posted by LeLiLo at 1:09 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


IIRC, Prezi basically requires you to load an external website rather than hand in a document. It's just begging for arcane technical issues that bog down a whole class, not to mention all kinds of "the website ate my homework" evasions.

I'm personally inclined to the view expressed by polymodus and Herodios. It's true that a good presenter can make excellent presentations via PowerPoint. But, nonetheless, the design of PowerPoint actually encourages bad presentations.

The basic problem with PP is that it makes no attempt to actually render slides as they'll be seen in the intended viewing environment -- namely, a big screen in front of an audience. It does nothing to enforce basic standards of legibility, either. Worse, it will automatically shrink your font size as you put more and more text on a slide. Reads fine on your screen, of course it's going to look good blown up, right?

A good tool helps you achieve your goal either by enforcing standards or aiding your visualisation. You know, like a good table saw lets you use guides and fences and stuff to achieve more accurate cuts than they could by hand. Can an expert woodworker make an accurate cut without the bells and whistles? Sure, of course. But they prevent beginner and intermediate woodworkers from fucking up as badly as they would otherwise.
posted by tobascodagama at 1:20 PM on July 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


"A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigour of actually doing the work."

Right, and when you ask for the notes from the presentation, all you get is the slides:

==============================
|XXXXX XXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX  |
| o Xxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxx     |
| o Xxx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx     |
| o X Xxxxx xxxxxxxxx        |
|                            |
 ============================

What we would have called before 1980 or so, the outline.

Almost completely useless immediately, and worse than useless later because it's all but un-actionable. Often even the author is later unable to tell you what thought and analysis was behind it.

PPT itself doesn't cause this behaviour but it licenses it. Makes it easy to accept. The work of understanding and the pain of failure is outsourced to the audience. (How very -- corporate.)

You can still do better even if you insist on using PPT. There's a place to write your speech, a text block not displayed with the slideshow provided for each image. Good presenters use this. Good writers use it well.

BUT!

If no one at your shop insists upon a higher standard, passing out the outline of your talk becomes the standard. And we all end up understanding less than we could.
 
posted by Herodios at 1:25 PM on July 11, 2017 [9 favorites]


I have 29 Bullets, but I don't have a gun.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:27 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Addendum: When I do see that a shop has PPT standards, they nearly always deal with branding issues and poorly informed rules like how many bullets or how many words to allow on each slide.
 
posted by Herodios at 1:29 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


I hated PowerPoint until I got into the academic art history game; within that sphere, it's very useful and pleasant. At least in my grad program, slideshows are almost universally just images of art or artists, or mmmmmaybe a bit of quoted text. We're leaned on pretty hard to use PPT for visuals that complement the text we're delivering as a presentation/lecture. It works really well, and has changed the way I thought of the program.

And then I come back to work at my day job and sit through hour-long blocks of read-the-bullets-in-a-monotone and find myself wishing they were actual bullets.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 1:36 PM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


It's true that a good presenter can make excellent presentations via PowerPoint. But, nonetheless, the design of PowerPoint actually encourages bad presentations.

This is of course also the argument of the Tufte tract which Davies obviously either didn't read or didn't understand. But then on the evidence of this piece Davies wouldn't know a coherent argument if it were presented to him Clockwork Orange-style, so it's not a terrible shock to find he thinks it a plausible claim that presenting in Powerpoint, of all things, imposes coherence.
posted by RogerB at 1:51 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


As someone who uses PowerPoint almost everyday that I am at work (I am a secondary school teacher) I feel that I can say that PowerPoint is not perfect.

Yes, the defaults are ugly and crap.

Yes, I get frustrated at colleagues who have no visual literacy.

But ctrl+a, backspace gives you a clean, quick blank canvas to work on. If you don't know that then...

There is a lot of talk of 'the bullets'. If you want bullets, they are there. Also, ctrl+a, backspace. If you don't know that then...

If you want to produce small cards with limited information to print out and for students to sort, then do one per ppt slide and print 16 to a page. If you don't know that then...

If you want to do some quick and dirty picture editing then use PowerPoint. If you want something better, use something better. If you don't know that then...

If you want to extract all the words you have actually used in a course then PowerPoint is integrated with VBA. Write a script. If you don't know that then....

If you want a non-linear progression through your presentation, then use the functions built into PowerPoint. If you don't know that then...

If you want to do some desktop publishing, it's not the best but it functions. Change the slide size, or the print or export resolution. If you don't know that then...

Crap presentations are the result of under-skilled and/or under-experienced presenters.

That there is no option to flow text between boxes is a criminal oversight.
posted by stanf at 1:57 PM on July 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


Correct. Because PPT itself contributes NOTHING.

Zude, slide transitions are not nothing. /sparkles into the next comment...
posted by Ogre Lawless at 1:59 PM on July 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


Like any other tool, PPT can be used creatively and well, or not. PPT doesn't make me a great presenter and doesn't make my ideas any better or worse than when they emerged from my brain. My Blackwing pencil doesn't make me John Steinbeck but neither does it make me an idiot full of sound and fury. Stop hating on the tool. The fact is that the vast majority of us have very little experience in creating visual communication and we tend to do it badly.

I use PPT frequently and while I'm by no means an exemplary user, one of my key sources of inspiration is Tom Kulhmann's community.
posted by angiep at 2:00 PM on July 11, 2017


For the past year or two, I've been giving a five-minute talk on "presentation best practices" during our monthly staff meetings. Topics have ranged from "for the love of god do not read your slides aloud, and here's the research explaining why" to "use fewer words, although there's no hard-and-fast rule for how many to use" to "hit B to black out your screen when you're taking questions so the audience aren't distracted by the slide you were previously discussing". Next month will be "don't put the Q&A last, because you lose control of the structure of your presentation when you do."

At first I wasn't sure whether it was having any effect, but the slides my coworkers create have slowly and steadily been improving. I was tickled the first time my boss texted me from a presentation she was attending: "you would HATE these slides! thank you for making mine look better than theirs. 😉 "
posted by Lexica at 2:00 PM on July 11, 2017 [18 favorites]


on the evidence of this piece Davies wouldn't know a coherent argument if it were presented to him Clockwork Orange-style . . .

I was originally going to point out that there was no argument in the piece; then I realized that despite the OP's introduction, Davies never lays claim to an argument here -- just points.
 
posted by Herodios at 2:00 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


A good tool helps you achieve your goal either by enforcing standards or aiding your visualisation.

I'm not clear why the expectation is that better defaults or affordances will allow Powerpoint to cause speakers to make better presentations. We don't expect Word to make people better writers. There's no document template that could prompt you well enough to write a passable term paper or a newspaper article. That takes teaching, practice, research, in other words, an education in learning to write well.

But somehow the impression remains that if PP had just the right set of defaults and font choices, presenters would somehow give un-horrible talks.

Designing a visual presentation for public speaking is a skill on par with learning to write well enough to publish. I'm always a little mystified that we understand one so well, but just assume the speaking part is best taught by intuition and a set of program defaults.
posted by bonehead at 2:13 PM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


Davies never lays claim to an argument here

He quotes Pinker saying "PowerPoint makes the logical structure of an argument more transparent" and offers as his own paraphrase that "PowerPoint […] forces you to put your ideas in order"; is the inference really unjustified that he believes this PowerPoint-style presentation of ordered "ideas" to be a logically structured one? I mean, sure, I guess it's always possible that it could be a satiric meta-joke relying on the appearance of stupidity; but then, what couldn't?
posted by RogerB at 2:14 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


For some context, here are Davies' recommendations for good presentations:

Doing the hard work to make it big
Doing the hard work to make it clear
Doing the hard work to make it bearable
One more thing
posted by tomp at 2:17 PM on July 11, 2017 [9 favorites]


That there is no option to flow text between boxes is a criminal oversight.

It may be the sort of feature that gets left out on purpose to prevent PowerPoint from turning into something it's not (like, say, PageMaker although I'm sort of dating myself comparing it to that)
posted by GuyZero at 2:19 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


If this were a good argument for PowerPoint it would have been a slide deck.
posted by graymouser at 2:21 PM on July 11, 2017 [6 favorites]


People are acting as if there were no bad presentations before Power Point. I remember one art history class, where the teacher's lecture simply consisted of flashing slides of paintings and the artists name without context: "Memorize all these." And all the lectures with a person just rushing through his points too fast to take notes.

People forget GIGO: Powerpoint is merely a tool, like Wordperfect or Excel. A good word processing program won't turn 50 pages of incoherent drivel into Hugo-worthy prose, nor is it possible to prevent an idiot from using Excel as a database. And Power Point, to it's credit, is not actively painful to use, like Access.

Train your people better, and stop blaming the damn program.
posted by happyroach at 2:28 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


I had to make a video in powerpoint recently because Windows Movie Maker is no more and my choice of tools was extremely constrained by stupid policies.

I was (in this case pleasantly) shocked that it had the capability to time me flipping between slides, load/record concurrent audio, and export all that as a movie file, but I was even more shocked that microsoft would let such a buggy version of those features ever leave the gate.

I'm pretty sure if there's one thing worse than letting powerpoint influence the flow of your presentation, it's letting powerpoint influence the flow of your video. I don't recommend anyone ever try it, but it is a nifty thing in a pinch.
posted by R a c h e l at 2:51 PM on July 11, 2017


We don't expect Word to make people better writers.

Word will do a good job of emulating what your document looks like on different formats of printed pages, even scaling the size of the document on your display to ensure that what you see on screen is as close as possible to what it looks like printed.

PowerPoint will let you set the aspect ratio of your workspace, but that's it. It doesn't let you specify any more detailed parameters like the screen size and display distance to check if your slides are actually reasonable at that distance. This seems like a really important feature for slide-designing software.
posted by tobascodagama at 2:58 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


I hated PPT at the start of my doc program, but now feel pretty similar to the FPP having recently defended. Getting past the idea that Powerpoint is inherently bad helped me to stop making shitty presentations.
posted by codacorolla at 3:30 PM on July 11, 2017


PowerPoint, for all its flaws, is only the second least qualified part of Office to be used for page layout, with Word coming in a resounding first on that front. As I’ve heard the phenomenon described (here, I think), “There is a hammer in every tool.”

Poor Publisher. Office offers actual page layout software but nobody has heard of it, possibly because it’s only available in bigger, more expensive Office packages.

Of course, I also feel like it’s not a controversial statement to suggest that Excel is the only part of Office that even stands a chance of being considered the best out there at what it does.
posted by DoctorFedora at 3:42 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]



I had to make a video in powerpoint recently because Windows Movie Maker is no more

Well whatever you do, don't include one of those stupid "speeded up hand, drawing a crude illustration that wasn't helpful in the first place" or "speeded up group of people, assembling something that we could simply assume had in fact been assembled."

Because, now that everyone's done it -- everyone's seen it.
 
posted by Herodios at 3:43 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


PowerPoint, for all its flaws, is only the second least qualified part of Office to be used for page layout, with Word coming in a resounding first on that front.

PowerPoint is third least qualified. Word is second. Excel is first.
posted by madcaptenor at 3:51 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


"like, say, PageMaker although I'm sort of dating myself comparing it to that"

I miss PageMaker. What happened to real page layout apps? Word is a crappy page layout tool. And DoctorFedora is right -- I've not seen publisher. What's the deal with Adobe switching from PM to InDesign? Is it because PM wasn't home-grown? I do recall making some effort to use InDesign, but after all the time I'd spent being adept with PM, InDesign felt like starting all over.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:03 PM on July 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


PowerPoint is third least qualified. Word is second. Excel is first.

Heh. When I first started being unable to avoid using computers at work, I used my word processor (pre-MSW) as a spreadsheet (I now realize), and my boss used his spreadsheet (1-2-3?) for word processing.
 
posted by Herodios at 4:09 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


GuyZero: I'm sort of dating myself comparing it to that

Hey don't feel too bad. I'm juuuust old enough to remember PageMaker being an Aldus product...
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 4:31 PM on July 11, 2017 [7 favorites]


For mathematics, PowerPoint is rubbish. There is nothing like seeing a 6 board chalk and talk where you can see a large complex proof constructed over 45 minutes. The ability to be able to repeatedly look back at earlier steps and literally see the global structure of the proof adds immeasurably to the comprehension of the proof. I am sure there are many proofs I would have never understood if I had only seen a PowerPoint version. I am glad I got most of my mathematics education before PowerPoint was widely used.
posted by drnick at 4:44 PM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


I'm juuuust old enough to remember PageMaker being an Aldus product...

Heck, I'm plenty old enough to remember that. We had a copy at my first Real Job™ at Corel when I ported Draw code from Windows 2 to Windows 3. It was a good product.

Regardless, where have the mid-tier page layout apps gone indeed. Pages is more PageMaker than Word I feel and I guess MS Publisher is still around but I'm not sure anyone uses it really.
posted by GuyZero at 4:49 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


2) The vast majority of PowerPoint presentations I have been subjected to involve the "presenter" standing there and reading the slides, bullet point by bullet point, word for word, all the way through the meeting. As if the audience suddenly collectively lost the ability to read. Your slides should be simple and sparse enough that even the people in the back can read them clearly so the presenter doesn't have to, and also should be just a "these are the major take-away points" supplement to your talk, not your entire speech typed out.

This. This. So much this.

I now work at a job which entails no PowerPoint, and it is glorious. At my previous job, I worked with many people who did not grasp that PowerPoint was not a transcription program or cue cards. I once counted 181 words pasted into a single wall o' text paragraph which the presenter dutifully stood staring at the screen and read out for everyone's hamburger edification.

I tried to inject some innovation into my presentations when obliged to use PPT, even within the narrow confines of the organization. Bilingual organization; so slides in one language, spoken presentation in the other. Salient points on the slide; speech built around these to amplify these points, returning to them at crucial points.

This won me few fans among the brass, who eventually began insisting that I submit my PowerPoint presentations ahead of time for review, and the feedback from this review was inevitably that it was not merely a transcript of everything I was going to say.

I left a couple of years ago and my former colleagues tell me that they are back to listening to presenters read 181-word paragraphs to a bored audience.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:56 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


I use Powerpoint as a page layout program. As part of my job, I publish a daily note every day with lots of text, tables, and charts in it. I use Powerpoint for the formatting as it's quite easy to put text boxes and charts however I want to arrange them. I then print it to PDF. Printed to paper, it looks great!

I have the slides set up to match the standard 8.5 x 11 paper size, and I paste all my charts as vector graphics, so everything is nice and sharp in PDF and in paper format.

Using Word for that would be exceedingly painful.
posted by pravit at 4:58 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


People are acting as if there were no bad presentations before Power Point. I remember one art history class, where the teacher's lecture simply consisted of flashing slides of paintings and the artists name without context: "Memorize all these.

I believe the criticism of PowerPoint is that it makes the style of those bad presentations the default.
posted by wotsac at 5:20 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


I guess no one really does remember the bad old days of hand written acetates. Not only were they the same notes, but written in a barely legible scrawl at an angle in all *five* marker colours, then all slightly smeared and faded from being repeatedly stacked with out tissue paper between slides.

And still we argue that PowerPoint is the cause of bad presentations.
posted by bonehead at 5:35 PM on July 11, 2017 [9 favorites]


What's the deal with Adobe switching from PM to InDesign?

Well, the switch happened 17 years ago now. PM had reached a place where implementing new features and improving existing ones was increasingly difficult because of the age, complexity, and general squirreliness of the codebase. PM was also getting its lunch eaten by Quark. InDesign was something like the third or fourth attempt at a from-scratch rewrite.

full disclosure, I was on the QA team for later versions of PM and for InDesign 1.0
posted by kokaku at 5:41 PM on July 11, 2017 [4 favorites]


I had to make a video in powerpoint recently ...

Ha! Me too, for our local cat shelter. I volunteered to make a video slide show and, after fumbling around with a variety of commercial and FOSS options, ended up with a workflow using PowerPoint, Audacity and ffmpeg.

You can view te result here.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:49 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


Powerpoint and Excel graphs use an algorithm to automatically resize components. This can result in weird and inconsistent results, like being genuinely unable to make a bit of text actually project on a screen even though it is Right.There.On.The.Page. Or if you fat-finger the mouse and accidentally resize a minor screen component, you can't get it back, because you don't know its name or where to grab it. I have taken more than a few .ppt's and applied obsessive-compulsive diligence to force the layout to be uniform and to display. This, of course, happens well after the point where having a proper template would have helped. It's a fairly clumsy tool that seems like it could be better.

As a person who has had to sit through powerpoint presentations: If the presenter is dynamic, knows the subject, maybe even has a sense of humor, swell. But having a powerpoint presentation does not make you a trainer or speaker.
posted by theora55 at 5:50 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


And I would pay money to not ever have to see a screen bean ever again. Not very much money; I'm unemployed. Is there a rule 34 for screen beans? I looked, not very hard, for screen bean porn. Didn't find any. Found this New Yorker article.
posted by theora55 at 5:58 PM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


I love stories recounting early developments in computers so I will be digging into this heartily - Sweating Bullets: Notes about Inventing PowerPoint. Robert Gaskins, Vinland Books, 2012. [34.6MB PDF]
posted by unliteral at 6:07 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Years ago I saw a presentation by John Warnock complete with "speaker support" and since then I have attempted to keep clients' PP presentation simple and supportive.

No animated text. Not many bullet points with minimal text, and appropriate animations, video, audio, or images backed by clean elegant branding (though some brands don't do clean and certainly not elegant). Emphasis on the PP as a tool, like the microphone you may use to speak into.

Some clients listen and like the results. Others don't. They insist on using what seems 1000 words per slide with 100s of logos, text flying about, etc. I actually make more money on the terrible presentations but I still hate doing them.

As for inappropriate use of software, we once had an entire novel sent to us in Excel. I shit you not. We moved it to InDesign if I recall correctly having dropped Quark (and before that PageMaker for Quark) at about InDesign 2. I actually felt, at the time that InDesign took the best from Quark and PageMaker and still use it, and FrameMaker for technical manuals, today.
posted by juiceCake at 6:23 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


true fact: Harvard Graphics still exists
posted by thelonius at 6:42 PM on July 11, 2017 [5 favorites]


I guess no one really does remember the bad old days of hand written acetates.

From Sweating Bullets:
Hope Report
Of the 600 million original slides made in 1985, only 12% were produced using any kind of computer.
Of the 500 million original transparencies, only 1/2 of 1% were produced using any kind of computer in 1985.
So Tom Hope’s numbers leave us with the realization that 88% of 35mm slides—and 99% of overhead transparencies are still being produced manually, by people typing, or drawing, or using rub-down lettering or Kroy machines, or using photographic processes.
posted by unliteral at 6:43 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


Aldus Freehand was a vastly more intuitive product than fucking Illustrator, in my opinion.
posted by maxwelton at 7:02 PM on July 11, 2017


JUST SAYIN' PREZI CAN DIE IN A FIRE
posted by lalochezia at 7:30 PM on July 11, 2017 [3 favorites]


One day you think PowerPoint is bad, and the next day you're being asked what cartoon character you'd describe yourself as and apparently the presentation your team is creating to introduce what your team does to the other teams in your new department is being made with PowToon.

PowerPoint, I'm sorry. Come back. I miss you.
posted by Sequence at 7:57 PM on July 11, 2017


"Well, the switch happened 17 years ago now."

So what you're saying is that I'm really, really old?

I used PageMaker when it was Aldus and ran on Windows/386. I am pretty old.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:53 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


I use Powerpoint as a page layout program.

[...]

Using Word for that would be exceedingly painful.


I work with a group of people who think Powerpoint is the right tool for producing a scientific poster in A0 size. At some point I realized the reason was that both Powerpoint and Word pretend you can do this by dragging boxes of text and images around with your mouse, but PP has less functionality so the failure is not as glaringly obvious.
posted by Dr Dracator at 9:07 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


This is a bad article. Powerpoint is a bad program for making presentations. Point 7, 9, 19, and 27 are the only ones that matter. And if your argument boils down to "Microsoft had a monopoly in the 90s so we should just keep doing that"; diaf.

People deserve better tools to work with, rather than be condescended to that they're using the tool (that blew up one, if not two space shuttles) wrong.

Also, fucking WIRED, man
posted by ethansr at 9:08 PM on July 11, 2017 [2 favorites]


No one blamed PowerPoint for the Challemger disaster. It was Columbia.
posted by borborygmi at 10:18 PM on July 11, 2017 [1 favorite]


I guess no one really does remember the bad old days of hand written acetates.

I do! I miss them, but there's a reason people don't use them as much anymore.

I've taken - and taught - classes with and without powerpoint, and in general I think that the classes with powerpoint have been generally more effective.* Yes, people do make bad powerpoint presentations, but these are probably people who would be making bad presentations anyway. Yes, it could be improved, but it is already very useful.

It is dreadfully uncool to say that you like powerpoint. But here I am.

* Some subjects this isn't true for, like math.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:04 AM on July 12, 2017


Wow, an amazing number of people in this thread are employing the "guns don't kill people" argument to defend PowerPoint. No, it doesn't force people to make crappy presentations. What it does do is allow people to easily put together presentations that are superficially slick, but don't really work as a method of conveying knowledge. Nearly twenty years ago, I was in a class with some people who were relatively new to computers, and one guy put together a presentation in PowerPoint and apparently used a computer which either didn't have a sound card or had the sound muted. He liked PPT's groovy slide transitions and sliding bullets and used a different transition on every slide. When he ran it in class, though, there was a different goofy sound effect for every transition, which was news to him, and terribly distracting to the class.

Fast forward to this year, and I'm participating in a group orientation, watching with dismay as the presenters ahead of me had slides with a wall-o-text that the presenter was reading in a monotone. (To make it worse, at least for that presenter, her co-presenter actually spoke directly to the group, engaging them with eye-to-eye contact and occasionally referring to--yes!--handheld index cards.) As much as I hate unsolicited automatic prompts in programs--Clippy, never forget--I wonder if there couldn't have been some prompt for the first presenter when the amount of text on each slide was shrinking the font size smaller and smaller, to the effect of, "Hey, are you sure your audience can still read this? Maybe bump some of this ahead to the next slide?"

Me, I tend to use PPT as a creator of an outline for notes, both for myself and for handouts for the class, because most of my presentations are for teaching people how to use various online resources, and I can just show the resources themselves rather than screenshots of same.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:57 AM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


We don't expect Word to make people better writers.

No, but among teachers, profs, and tech-support people, I believe you'll find ample representation for the idea that word processors (Oh, who are we kidding? We mean MS Word) introduce undesirable distractions and assumptions into the process of writing. That users spend too much time prettying up and too little time writing.

When you open Word or a Word wannabe, you see, primarily, formatting and appearance options. Your text is flowed onto virtual pages with headers and footers, regardless of whether you're planning to ever print it or not. The affordances embody a point of view, they build a frame of reference, they shape de-facto practices.

The average user of an Office suite is far less computer-literate and frankly far less literate than we might like to believe. The defaults, the affordances, the point of view built in to a piece of software turn out to have more influence than they should.
posted by Western Infidels at 7:04 AM on July 12, 2017 [6 favorites]


"Well, the switch happened 17 years ago now."

So what you're saying is that I'm really, really old?
I used PageMaker when it was Aldus and ran on Windows/386. I am pretty old.


Me too brother....me too. In Internet years, I'm already dead.
posted by kokaku at 7:33 AM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


Roughly ten years ago I read a story, possibly on MetaFilter, about a Japanese guy who received a new laptop as he was headed out the door on a business trip. He arrived at his hotel and fired up the computer to prepare the presentation he planned to deliver the following day. To his horror, no one in the IT department had loaded any software on to the laptop. He was left with only whatever basic text program came with the OS. So he cranked up the font size and made a simple presentation: black and white, one or two characters per slide.

Afterward he completed the presentation, audience members clustered around the podium: success! But most of them wanted to talk about his slide design choice, not his content. And that's how he became an evangelical for minimalist slide design.

I followed suit. My presentations now tend to be dominated by slides with a single, perfect image accompanied by one or two words, accompanied by a handout that I provide before or after, depending on circumstances. The benefits include that I can:
  • adapt my presentation, seamlessly and invisibly, so it doesn't duplicate what others before me already said or so I can address an issue that came up previously;
  • make the presentation longer or shorter mindfully. I hate presenters who flip through many slides while saying "we don't have time for getting into this."
  • invite people to interject questions and requests for clarification and then provide an appropriate response, instead of doing that "I have a slide on that later" schtick.

    I get a lot of positive feedback and people pay attention because the images are compelling. In buiding the presentation, the process means I devote a lot of time to thinking about how to tell the story, where to have callbacks and foreshadowing, and how to express that visually in ways that aren't cliche. By the way, if you know the number of your last (or any other) slide you can skip to it by typing the number and pressing enter.

  • posted by carmicha at 7:53 AM on July 12, 2017 [5 favorites]


    We don't expect Word to make people better writers.

    I think I am a better writer thanks to word processing software, at least relative to the time I put into any given document. It's the free edit that enables me to fix typos, change tenses, buff a sentence, place an idea where it belongs, and rearrange whole chunks of text, all with relatively little effort. Back in the day I know I settled just because I didn't want to retype something. That said, I've definitely engaged in over-editing and over-formatting as a form of procrastination.
    posted by carmicha at 8:00 AM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    if your argument boils down to "Microsoft had a monopoly in the 90s so we should just keep doing that"; diaf.

    Die in a fire, really? Maybe "sit through a DoD powerpoint talk and think about what you've done" is a more fitting punishment for the 'crime'?
    posted by thedaniel at 8:01 AM on July 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


    At my new job, we do everything in Dropbox Paper. It's a Word or Docs-like program for writing linear documents, but it also has a presentation mode that flips the colors to white-on-black and maps the arrow keys to paging from header to header, similar to the text example above. As a presentation tool, it works surprisingly well!
    posted by migurski at 8:04 AM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    I think I am a better writer thanks to word processing ... the free edit that enables me to fix typos, change tenses, buff a sentence, place an idea where it belongs, and rearrange whole chunks of text...

    Yes, certainly, yes, of course. That's all valuable and worthwhile and important.

    The thing is, Notepad can do all of that.

    In days of old, 8-bit era word processors and their immediate decendants made the text editing the most obvious and fun thing, and hid the formatting stuff in boring control codes and obscure keyboard commands. The focus was on writing, formatting was a finishing chore.

    I wouldn't suggest going back to those times, but I think users would benefit if modern systems had some way of designing in that set of priorities. If the writing and perhaps even the outlining stuff was the obvious and fun part, and the cosmetics were available but deemphasized. There are some niche word processors that take that approach, but Hal from accounting isn't going to use one.

    I think the general point may be applied to more than just word processors and presentation packages. Commercial software tends to favor the production of something immediately rather than helping users to produce the right thing. Even software development systems are designed and marketed this way. Our organizations are more fragile than we realize, more reliant on the glue of ritual more than we care to imagine.
    posted by Western Infidels at 9:05 AM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    The thing is, Notepad can do all of that.
    Ugh. Legibility and line spacing and all these other things are so important to me getting the job done right the first time. The reason we wind up putting all these things into documents eventually is because they do all, in the final analysis, matter. I write and edit for a living, and working like a pseudo-Kerouac, with a giant wall of undifferentiated text with no meaningful spacing or document structure is such a massive cognitive drain it takes me five or ten times as long to get any work done. I leave that stuff for amateur-hour where it belongs. (I desperately miss WordPerfect circa 1999, to be honest. It was so superior to Word; it just didn't have the install base.)
    "A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigour of actually doing the work."
    This was a huge problem for me when I was doing infrastructure project management stuff. Most of the time it wasn't me doing the presenting, I was building presentations for other people who didn't actually have a handle on the material (but who were supposedly the "leads" on our projects--mostly they were people who after three and a half years on the project I'd still never met or even heard of). I'd write reports and try to distill a few sound-bytey facts into a deck and hope the presenter wasn't an idiot. I would also write reports, often many thousands of words long and full of evidence that nobody would ever read, and that despite being able to save my client millions if they *had* been read in full, wound up never being used because they couldn't be effectively distilled into a deck and still carry the same "dynamic" impact. So instead of using my recommendations to save $75 million, they used the deck version and saved $5.3 million and unnecessarily paid out the rest.

    That so much of the "business" world continues to think this nonsense is somehow effective because it's "more dynamic" or some other buzzword is so enormously stupid and wasteful it boggles the mind.

    And don't get me started on the people who use Excel as a word processor or design tool. The processes and projects that have fallen apart and been dumped in my lap because of that...
    posted by Fish Sauce at 9:44 AM on July 12, 2017 [6 favorites]


    When did it become common practice for people to refer to a PP presentation or slideshow as a "deck?" We already have a word for that. In fact, we have two. I may never understand the business world, but the weird language tics drive me crazy. "Deck" is right up there with "utilize" and "can I pick your brain" as far as I'm concerned.
    posted by zeusianfog at 10:29 AM on July 12, 2017 [4 favorites]


    The "presentation" is the whole thing, including slides and the presenter's delivery. The "slideshow" is what happens when you hit F5.

    "Deck" refers to the slides, only. (Plus the info in the Notes section too, I guess.) It's more precise than using either of the other terms.

    If my boss said "I want to see that slideshow you're working on" I'd figure I needed to bring a laptop to demonstrate how the transitions, videos, etc. will look. If she said "I want to see that deck you're working on" I'd print two copies, doublesided, 2 slides to a page, and take them into her office to discuss it.
    posted by Lexica at 10:52 AM on July 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


    Whenever my boss asks to pick my brain, I carefully unzip my scalp, unhinge the top of my skull, and hand him a fresh pick.
    posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 11:12 AM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


    Translator here. People ask me to translate decks. I charge $50 an hour on top of the per word rate to make it pretty. No one ever accepts...and I'm OK with that.
    posted by saysthis at 11:56 AM on July 12, 2017 [3 favorites]


    Z-fog: It's 'deck' as in a deck of cards, by analogy on the stack of transparency slides one had to bring to the show in the before-time.

    I don't like it either, but it's no worse a language fossil than 'to drive a car'.
     
    posted by Herodios at 11:58 AM on July 12, 2017 [2 favorites]


    My understanding "deck" dates from a time when you would prepare a deck of paper cards for someone to read their presentation, usually one card to go along with each slide.
    posted by fimbulvetr at 12:05 PM on July 12, 2017


    Decks referred to the (photographic) slides themselves, I've always thought. They used to come in linear holders.
    posted by bonehead at 12:40 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    *waves tiny late-80s/early-90s Interleaf flag*
    posted by current resident at 3:01 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    "I believe the criticism of PowerPoint is that it makes the style of those bad presentations the default."

    Yeah, a big part of the problem is PowerPoint allows people who give TERRIBLE PUBLIC SPEECHES to give those speeches with much more confidence and without having to improve their structure or delivery one little bit.

    When I was teaching at a local CC, I generally preferred to chalk-and-talk (whiteboard-and-record?), but I used powerpoint for art lectures (in world religions), partly because you can't really put any words on the art so you can't be lured into reading the slides verbatim.
    posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:07 PM on July 12, 2017 [1 favorite]


    And don't get me started on the people who use Excel as a word processor or design tool

    Give people an application that opens a blank sheet of resizeable graph paper, and surprise, they want to use it to layout grid designs.
    posted by thelonius at 11:29 AM on July 13, 2017 [1 favorite]


    I think it's like a lot of high performance tools. In the hands of someone who knows what they're doing, it's a good tool. If you don't know what you're doing you may well have problems getting anything at all.

    Precious few people are capable of wringing every last drop of performance out of an F1 car. People who have driven other race cars can usually get the hang of it and get the car around the track. I, generally a gear head with a lot of experience driving many different kinds of regular car (including some VERY fast ones), would be lucky to limit myself to a minor crash.


    "Deck" refers to the slides, only. (Plus the info in the Notes section too, I guess.) It's more precise than using either of the other terms.

    My feeling about PowerPoint are irrelevant because it's just tool that's used. I just made my peace with that and generally try to use PowerPoint well. I like to have transition slides by having my content fade out and the next in on the fastest setting. It looks a little more polished and makes it easier to see what has changed if two slides look similar. I try to pay attention to colors and use my company's professionally assembled color pallets and just generally try to make examples of "good" PowerPoint slideshows.

    I learned the importance of the distinction between "slideshow" and "deck" when my boss told me, "Oh, don't worry about that stuff too much, they all just print everything out and look at it that way. Just save it as a PDF." Now, I avoid paper because I find it hard to find what I'm looking for and if I don't have it with me, I'm screwed. I keep everything I can secure on the network where I know how to get to it from any company computer. I kind of assumed that would be even MORE important to the kind of people that report to the CEO but that's who this "deck" was going to.

    Ever since then there has been a weird, forehead shaped, dent on my desk and I don't remember how it got there. I wonder if they're connected.
    posted by VTX at 2:20 PM on July 14, 2017


    Oh and I almost forgot this tip from Mrs. VTX.

    When you're working with someone on a presentation who tends to get hung up on formatting, color, etc. start building your content first with a plain black and white theme and tell them, "We just want to stay focused on the content right now. Once we have all that, we'll know what color and backgrounds to use."

    You can sometimes then get away with using the theme you want and make it all look good before you show it to them again and they'll just agree that it looks good or maybe find some nits to pick and then be done.

    And if not at least you have all your content put together on time and they'll be forced to settle for "good enough" when time runs out.
    posted by VTX at 2:26 PM on July 14, 2017 [3 favorites]


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