Can you blame inexperienced presentation designers to then fill that blank sheet with as many bullet points as they can?
Inexperienced presentation designers become experienced presentation designers but those habits remain and can be very hard to unlearn, which is how you get expertly crafted 50+ slides monstrosities of bullet-pointy splendour.
Even the most interesting content can lose the audience if the way its presented doesn't hold their attention.
Seriously, the whole point of giving a presentation is that sometimes watching a person tell a story about whatever the topic is is better than reading about it. If that's not the case (and often it's not), then a presentation is a waste of everyone's time.
Take a look at some of Eddie Woo's videos on YouTube. He gives some of the best presentations ever with nothing but himself and a whiteboard.
[EDIT] Start here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McDdEw_Fb5E
It's three minutes long. Notice the audience reaction and total absence of bright shiny things.
"The story" is just another shiny thing, just in different form.
If I tell you, for example, that Cody Bellinger committed an error in the first inning of yesterday's game that fact in isolation isn't very interesting, particularly if you don't know who Cody Bellinger is. If I tell you that that error set the stage for the Astros winning their first world series in their history suddenly it becomes a lot more interesting.
A more technical example: if I tell you that Edwards curves have complete point addition and doubling formulas that fact in isolation isn't very interesting. But if you know that having such formulas enables you to build cryptographic systems that are more resistant to side-channel attacks, suddenly it's more interesting. (Assuming, of course, you know what side-channel attacks are. If you don't, then I have to be explicit about more of the story: there are attackers who want to break into your secret stuff, and one of the ways they do this is by looking at things like how long your code takes to run under different circumstances. Notice that now we have all of the elements of a good story: a protagonist, an antagonist, conflict... )
This is a fundamental feature of human psychology. Humans don't care about things for their own sake, they care about things that help them to achieve goals. Once you have a goal, you have a person who is trying to achieve that goal (i.e. a protagonist) and some reason they are at least temporarily unable to achieve that goal, and hence some agent thwarting their ambition (i.e. an antagonist). The antagonist doesn't have to be another human (c.f. Moby Dick). Often the antagonist is the laws of physics. But there is always a story behind anything that anyone cares about.
Likewise, I like math. I am one of those people who honestly like math instead of culture around math that just sounds cool. I also have interests in security. I like to read easily digestible technical blogs about it.
Stories about hackers in presentations about above are annoying to me. I came to learn and instead I am getting fairy tale. Most of them are bullshit, despite following protagonist, antagonist conflict formula that is repeated so much that anything that goes just slightly against it makes entertainment hundred times more interesting.
And that story is not helping me to achieve any goal, except of realizing that presenter is wasting my time. I heard already enough presentations with formulaic stories in them to know what is the part I usually wish presenter would skip. And I guess really good writer could create an interesting story, but I don't really expect that from technical presenter who I would prefer to focus more on whether his explanations are clear then on this.
Yes, that was exactly my point.
Cody Bellinger is a baseball player. Baseball is a sport played mainly but not exclusively in the United States. It is a team sport. The annual championship game for baseball is called the World Series (despite the fact that the competing teams are almost exclusively from the U.S.) The world series is a best-of-seven tournament.
This year the world series was played between a team called the Houston Astros (or just "the Astros" for short) and another team called the Los Angeles Dodgers ("the Dodgers"). The Dodgers have not won a World Series since 1988. The Astros have never won one (until yesterday).
Because it is a best-of-seven series, the length of the tournament varies. It can be as short as four games (if one team wins them all) or as long as seven (if both teams wins three games apiece). Naturally, the tournament is considered most exciting in the latter circumstance, which was the case yesterday.
A game of baseball is divided into nine periods called "innings". (Additional innings can be played if there is a tie at the end of the ninth inning, but that didn't happen yesterday.) Each inning is further divided into two halves called the "top" and the "bottom".
Yesterday, during the top of the first inning (i.e. near the start of the game) in the seventh game of the world series (i.e. the crucial game which would decide the championship) a player on the Dodgers named Cody Bellinger made a mistake. He was attempting to throw the ball to another player on his team, but the throw was off-target and the other player was not able to catch the ball. As a result, the Astros scored two points in quick succession, which they would not have done had the throw been on-target. Baseball tends to be a low-scoring game. Double-digit scores are rare. So a two point lead is significant.
That one mistake seemed to set the tone for the rest of the game, where the Astros, who up to that point had been fairly evenly matched with the Dodgers, took a commanding lead and ultimately won 5-1. So that mistake turned out to be a big deal.
> I like math.
Did you watch the video I pointed to above?
> Stories about hackers in presentations about above are annoying to me.
Not all stories are good stories. The story has to be relevant to the point being made. Telling a good story is not easy. That's one of the reasons that I find PPT to be so annoying, because it lets you cover up the fact that you're telling a bad story.
BTW, your view of story is too narrow. Fiction is a proper subset of stories.
Sorry to be negative. It was just really not my thing.
Maybe PPT tells bad story, but it still can tell the information you came to tell and give people insight into what you came to give them insight into. It allows to do that to people who are good at their jobs, but not entertainers. That is great in my opinion.
I'm not a robot, I can't just digest an 1 hours worth of spoken data easily or efficiently. We have visual aids and such because of limitations with human attention, how we remember things, etc.
Amazon is famous for its no powerpoint culture, but meetings there start with everyone being handed a 2 page memo, and everyone spends the next 10 minutes reading it and making notes on it. That has practical limitations as 2 pages only covers so much and you are not allowed to ask questions during the read. You can only read silently and hopefully you remember your questions for when Q&A is allowed.
Visual presentations are more fluid, allow for slower intake of longer sets of information, and make an effort to keep the attention of the listener. Not sure why that's so awful. I suspect most people have PP as a placeholder for things they don't like about working a job in general.
It's possible to dislike PowerPoint due to how others use it, since in corporate/work environments you're often exposed to that bad usage. And it can be quite annoying.