“One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech (2016)

Another advantage is that when you try to jam text and figures on to the same page, you shortchange what the figure can be; keeping all the space for a diagram means it can be meaningfully complicated. I dislike almost all "architecture diagrams" anyhow because they're almost all the same [1], but if you get a full screen, you may have a chance to put something complicated enough to capture a useful slice of some system, where as by the time a figure is done being jammed on to a page with a couple of lines of text, it's been reduced to 10-20% of the useful area of the page and can't hardly have any useful information in it.

[1]: You know them, because you've seen them. There's the diagram with four or five boxes with tiny bits of text in them, randomly connected by some lines. Sometimes some of them are dashed. There's the diagrams with four or five machines randomly connected, that helpfully shows you that the API server connects to a database, and that users connect to the API server. (No shit? Wow!) Some clouds will appear. (You mean your system uses the internet? Wow!) There's the cake diagram that shows that your system has a bottom layer, a middle layer with a couple more services, and a top layer with yet more distinction. (You used layers in your system? Wow!) Basically, if you are going to show me a diagram, I want to see a diagram that I could not have drawn pretty much before even seeing your system. I've seen a diagram of an AWS deployment of a system that had a couple dozen elements... that actually said something useful about what was connected to what. When you've only got five elements, there just aren't enough possibilities to be a problem worth diagramming in the first place.

Actually there is lots of science and craft and history and plenty else in cake making, again, my mother would be able to do all that with open ended questions.

I think that if you have been working with the same clients and the same code for the last few years then you too can present without the presentation, to keep the audience captivated and learning. Vision, focus, enthusiasm all comes into it.

The other part is having presentation skills. Who really likes standing in front of a crowd? This can be learned, however some people go to posh schools that emphasise public speaking and other people go to schools where this is not something that happens. It is a lot easier to stand up and talk in front of a crowd if you have done it every week throughout your childhood than if you have not done it before.

http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/mirrors/ctan/macro...

I found that with the PowerPoints they would spend hours on designing the slides, read directly off of them, and often include way, way too much detail for business users. The new system is going great, and I wish I had done that in my college career.

And slightly off-topic: the Carl Hayden story is just so damn awesome. I think the whole story shares some lessons about building a product. I'm looking forward to the movie.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3233418/

> Lorenzo Santillan considered becoming a mechanical engineer, but instead earned a cheaper associate degree in cooking. Today he works as a line cook.

> Luis Aranda studied cooking as well but did not complete a degree and now works as a janitor.

> Cristian Arcega [...] made it to Arizona State University on a scholarship. But [..] Arizona voters passed Proposition 300, an anti-immigrant measure that prohibits undocumented students from receiving any state financial aid or qualifying for in-state tuition — more than tripling his tuition. He dropped out and is now unemployed.

> Oscar Vazquez [got] a scholarship to A.S.U. [...] He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering in 2009 and applied for legal residency [...] but he was also summarily banned from the United States for 10 years for living here without a visa. [...] After a year, his ban was reversed when Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, interceded on his behalf. Mr. Vazquez returned, enlisted in the Army, and served a tour of combat duty in Afghanistan. He is finally a citizen, and repairs trains in Montana for the railroad company BNSF.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/16/opinion/the-cruel-waste-o...

> lots of apps suck but we don't blame the platform

Actually, I see both of these things a lot.

  - Powerpoint
    - has
      - terrible
        - default
          - settings

It wasn't about making a cookie cutter corporate presentation that doesn't make you look out of touch.

  - Way too many slides for the time available
  - Numerous slides that with both paragraphs of text and elaborate diagrams
  - Slides that cannot be read at all by the audience because everything is too small
  - Reading verbatim from slides in the presentation
  - A firehouse of information that is impossible to remember or even follow
  - Zero narrative flow, no sense of what are key points

In the ideal world, there would be three separate documents for the above, but PowerPoint is good enough at all of them that we tend to just create a single document that does all three.

Pitchbooks are never meant to be shown on-screen. They are paper handouts (or on-screen on a tablet or PC). They are as much a visual aid for the meeting for charts and bullet points, than a take away to avoid people having to take notes. It de facto replaced word documents in large companies outside of a few formal documents.

So it has to be concise enough to be efficient. The rule of thumb is that you should be able to read the title and subtitle of every slide only and get the message that the pitch carries. It should have an executive summary that serves the same purpose. But it needs to be detailed enough, with an appendix and footnotes, for someone who didn't attend to get all the important details.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebottle_OS [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe0ZdzO_urU

Also a blog post about it (although broken at the moment?) https://www.joachim-breitner.de/blog/729-Compose_Conference_...

Edit - nevermind, I guess I'm the only one in the dark [1][2].

[1] https://medium.com/unqut-inc/ui-design-rapid-prototyping-in-...

[2] http://keynotopia.com/guides-ppt/

You know, when you just want to annotate a photo or a map, or superimpose a few images on each other (like for quick workplace jokes)

It is the fastest tool I found to do these sorts of quick and dirty jobs. I call it "PowerShoping" =)

That font, though, is inexcusable.

The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF as a kind of indicator that the material is printworthy and serious; the obsessive numbering of pictures as "figures"; the use of academic shibboleths like contextualize, performative, forms of sociality, critique, etc; the refusal to summarize an argument; the namedropping of historical studies to give an impression of endless scholarly depth; the vaguely critical attitude that carefully avoids explicit moral judgments; the long-winded "narrative" form like a New Yorker reportage mixed with excerpts from monographs and textbooks.

McLuhan once said that when reading texts for research, he skips the odd pages and only reads the even ones, because he had observed "a huge amount of redundancy in texts" and that having to fill out the remaining pages with his imagination kept him alert and wakeful...

This article, which I enjoyed skimming, if you think about in terms of "the medium being the message", seems like a piece of advocacy for literate print culture. The authors mention designing and inventing new and interesting forms of communication and persuasion beyond PowerPoint—but their own choice of form is highly conservative.

I agree with you whole-heartedly. The criticism of powerpoint is not so much it's broader context. There are plenty of ways to present structured data with computers promoting good-practices. The criticism is that Powerpoint doesn't encourage people to show the data in the first place.

TL;DR: This issue isn't what Powerpoint can do, it is what it nudges people to do.

It was sad to see that most of the kids had PowerPoint decks full of words that they just stood and read.

Of the class of about 25 kids only a very few did something different.

A couple didn't use the screen at all, choosing to do a "show and tell" style of presentation showing relevant objects. The "My favourite Band" girl, talked about her band whilst playing a recording, and a couple gave their talk unassisted (well maybe palm cards) whilst referring to well selected pictures on the screen.

I can still remember the talk about the impact of tropical storms (not my daughters) because of the well selected dramatic images that were used to emphasise the points made in the talk.

PowerPoint presentations are not necessary bad, but use the tool for what it's best at, that is displaying information that cannot be displayed either in a written report or verbally. Use it to support what you are saying, not be what you are saying. If you do this the people in the room actually have to listen to you, not sit there reading the screen, and let's face it, in most cases you want them concentrating on you, otherwise what are you their for?

Also, practice will improve your ability to give those presentations, so it's worth practicing on low profile meetings before doing it in front of the CEO.

I quite like Ed Kmett's talks that often consist of him typing into his editor at an incredible rate while talking about everything. It works because he's an uncommonly swift typist and can write it all off the top of his head.

You are answering the question for us. If it's well-presented, of course we will think it's well-presented.

The thing is, a well-presented talk is usually always well-prepared. Very few people can present well without preparation.

The thing is, PowerPoint gets a bad rap because their are a lot of ill-prepared speakers out there. And the reason there is a lot of ill-prepared speakers is because preparing a good presentation is hard and time consuming. Just practicing the talk takes as long as the talk. And then reviewing the talk takes an equal amount of time. So, for you to practice one 30 minute talk, you have multiple 1-hour sessions at a minimum (assuming you can stick that 30 minute limit the first time, which rarely happens).

How many people do you know spend that much time just practicing and reviewing their talks?

The other thing is, tech talks are usually talking about something specific involving code or architecture, and while a talk doesn't always need slides, in the tech world, it usually does. This is because without slides, you need to rely on the concept that you are trying to get across, and you can't focus on specifics. Sure, you can provide a reference slide at the end, but it's hard. And it's hard on the audience as well. And chances are, you aren't good enough to pull it off.

So slides are there to help the audience as well. Not everyone learns the same way (Side note: this is why people who complain about video-based tutorials being worse than pure text piss me off, people learn better in different ways, and the reason text was used for so long was because creating video was much more costly), so using pictures and images can really help hammer the point home.

But it's hard. And a lot of speakers don't speak frequently enough to get good at it, because like anything, it takes practice.

In the end, if someone thinks not using slides will make them a better speaker, they probably aren't good enough to not use slides.