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Comment by foolfoolz | Hacker News Reader

I don't buy the PowerPoint hate at all.

we are in a time where you plug your computer into a projector. your computer can display anything you want, but I believe most people would still show PowerPoint for a presentation. yes there's a lot of bad presentations out there, there's patterns that make your ppt bad. but that doesn't mean PowerPoint is a bad tool, I think that really just highlights giving a presentation is difficult. PowerPoint may make it seem easy because you can make them fast but making a good one is still difficult

lots of websites suck but we don't blame the web

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

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> lots of websites suck but we don't blame the web

> 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

On the other hand, powerpoint has good font size defaults. I haaaaate when people use one of those javascript presentation things (or, shudder, something home grown), because their fonts are ALWAYS[1] too small for me to read (I don't have great eyesight, even with glasses, I can't always read everything at a distance), while powerpoint is typically pretty readable (as long as you have no more than 5 points on a slide... after that, it gets too small)

[1] in my experience thus far

Yeah, this; if you really are going to show code, make it huge. No such thing as too big when it comes to that. Stick to 40 character lines tops and make them fill the whole screen. Prefer to use the full slide for a code example, and put the most important thing at the top of the screen (usually the bottom half of a presentation / beamer screen is unreadable)

The default presentation structure of PowerPoint makes it very easy to build bad bullet point presentations. One could argue that means PowerPoint has bad default settings and thus is not a very good tool.

At least with Powerpoint you can also do it right.

I wonder what all those "programmer-friendly presentations" creators are thinking who are proud to use Markdown. In Markdown you are forced to do bullet points.

> In Markdown you are forced to do bullet points.

Uhm, no, you are not.

Anecdotally, I would say that non-ppt presentations are of higher quality. Obviously, it's possible to do a bad presentation regardless of the tool, but the really bad ones are always done with PowerPoint. I'm honestly not sure whether it's because of the program or the type of people who use it. Probably a bit of both.

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