Our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint
bbc.com
bbc.com
Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia they were, to some extent.”
There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and only slideware).
Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on track? Probably not.
Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual work.
That way - I'm not reading the slides to the audience - and am able to create context for later readers without cluttering the slides with too much verbiage.
Most of my meaty slides have to do with process, charts of various data sets and maybe high level technical architectural concept-ware. Much of the narrative is often about context, relevance and impact: "so what?".
The issue is, most people don't use PowerPoint like that, rather than being assistive, it becomes the end result, so you end up with very complex material distilled down to a single slide, loosing much of its value and context - or worse, inscrutable diagrams and charts crammed with so much detail no one could understand them, and again, often lacking in context.
I once worked for a large telecom - everything came 'round in a slide deck;
Need an account for this service? PowerPoint
Need to understand this complex technical issue? PowerPoint
Need directions to configure some software? PowerPoint
Need some common links for services? PowerPoint
It was absurd - I joked that if PowerPoint suddenly disappeared, no one at the office would know how to get anything done.
I recently had a colleague, who fancies himself the master hacker, ask me how to edit a file on ‘this Linux thing’. I went over to his desk and he was copying shell commands from a PowerPoint presentation into PuTTY running on a Windows VM on his Mac. The mind boggles.
Surprisingly I'd love to work for a large telecom again, I enjoy the work, and surprisingly even the large corporate environment, plus, I'm in the PNW right now, and I'd like to relocate to 'not here' (Ideally DFW, but I'm not picky, just someplace warmer).
As an example the main reason the last game i worked at had screen space decals was that i randomly read Pope Kim's SSD SIGGRAPH 2012 slides [1] which had enough detail for me to create a quick prototype in the editor and toss around the artists. Considering how much the artists used SSDs all over the place, the slides being self contained certainly made a difference.
Personally, as someone who doesn't tend to visit conferences and instead prefers to read things from his computer (and watch on youtube too, but i still prefer to read than watch), i'd hate it if slides were reduced to just assistive material :-P.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/blindrenderer/screen-space-decals...
He didn't use the Notes section of PPT to print leave behinds (like my lazy own self does) - but took the time to interleave his talking points with his slides for the "leave-behind".
Karl Sims ... Same thing.
I still use some of the old SIGGRAPH material to teach/tutor my now university age kids how to create interesting projects (like the old x-springies) around numerical methods and creating little toy beginner physics engines.
[0] https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-00-winter/paper... (slides - including Witkin's are after the whitepaper-ish looking stuff at the front of the file)
There may actually be great things in this presentation, things that should be on the main website but they are not on the main website, they are only available in this proprietary presentation format.
By now the small to medium size business has a whole team of people bothering themselves with these presentations and probably working in CMYK for the graphics. This team did not think to try using HTML and the web, they got stuck in Powerpoint, Word, Excel and the 1990's way of working non-collaboratively. Information gets prepared for the boss in these slide decks rather than be widely available for logged in web users to the company website.
PDF files used for website design proposals are my pet peeve. However it is the legacy workflows and duplication of effort that bugs me, when companies aren't willing to step up and use the new tools but bumble along the 'Powerpoint way'.
Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate a case for present and future audiences.
But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some? many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in my mind - but I could be wrong)
EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the "Next!" door?
Up to you.
If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.
However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the meeting?
The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings by useless people (sadly too common).
In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get indignant responses of:
"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"
"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."
"Ummmmmmmmmm."
"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."
Also, I find the PDF format to be quite practical for real world use, just because it is easy to print them and then annotate them by hand in a meeting or while reading them.
Why not just send the email to begin with, with a full, coherent summary of the proposal, have Powerful Person email their approval or rejection, and skip the several person-days worth of meetings?
First, Presenting Person, like nearly all people, is borderline illiterate, hasn't written a report or essay since college, and probably simply couldn't do so coherently in any reasonable length of time. For them, PowerPoint is a crutch to avoid having to actually commit their proposal to writing. Instead, they put up some bullet points that are vaguely related and just talk about it.
Second, there is Powerful Person. They are again, like most people, borderline illiterate, and haven't read anything longer that a listicle since B-school, so they'd rather sit back and stroke their beard for 20 minutes than bother with possibly needing to look up a word they don't understand. More importantly, the presentation or "meeting" is an opportunity to display primate dominance. Essentially they are "holding court" to demonstrate to everyone that they are the ones in charge. The idea that Presenter Person may have stayed up late getting every slide pixel-perfect in preparation for this meeting only enhances this function.
Finally, there are the spectators. Powerful Person needs them there for the primate dominance function already discussed. The more people there are to witness Presenting Person prostrating themselves before Powerful Person, the greater utility the ceremony has in this regard. Luckily, all of these people are easily convinced to show up for the meeting, because it's a way to schedule a surreptitious break into a workday that has probably had all actual breaks like lunch breaks, coffee breaks, cigarette breaks, slowly eliminated over the course of years and decades.
In short, nobody can read, nobody can write, and showing up for meetings is easier than real work. Enter PowerPoint: the software package tool-using social primates reach for most when nominally attempting to make business decisions.
But it is!
https://talkjs-my.sharepoint.com/:p:/g/personal/egbert_talkj...
Personally, I always use the default theme (Black Calibri text on white background), with no animations or transitions. The included drawing tools are also world class, and help get your point across as long as you don't make it too complex.
That however is extra work - and a lot of extra time, and hardly anyone does it. The real culprit here is the "time saving shortcut" of simply printing out your PPT as a handout. In order to make it useful, you need the words on the slides. Now you've got slide-after-slide of bullet point lists and text, and that urges you to commit the second sin, which is turning your back to the audience and reading the slides from the stage.
To automatically to revert to good form, the trick is to realize there are three things: the words you speak, the images you project on the screen, and a handout that combines both. That allows PPT to revert to what it is truly good at, which is showing pictures on the screen.
But ... it's more work!
Only if you can refrain from the Design tab, something that MS seems to emphasize with every update.
I mean, if I'm looking at a presentation on some topic, I could't care less about what the author used as a tool, as long as it works properly.
But what some people inflict on others with their "designed" slides is just beyond cruel. And honestly: If there are people that can present complex algorithms on a black and white slideset - and there are astoundingly good presentations that do this! - you can keep it simple, too. No reason to use ugly pixelated (and stolen!) ClipArt, ugly background images that clash with the foreground etc. Yuck.
That's why I like LaTeX Beamer (at least as long as I don't need anything else in my presentation other than bullet point text and some math): in LaTeX, writing text and equations is relatively easy, but everything else (complicated animations? messing with the default style?) requires non-significant amount of work ... thus the presentations created with Beamer tend to be simple and beautiful.
To me, having a flip chart and/or whiteboard (preferably with ruled squares) is a necessity for a useful engineering presentation. I can operate in Powerpoint, but it requires a lot more effort. If I have to use Powerpoint for an engineering presentation, I'm either A) being forced by somebody in management or B) plan to give the presentation multiple times. In case B), I can amortize the time I have to waste putting the presentation into "Powerpoint Normal Form" over several iterations.
I worked for hours putting together a presentation to the VPs and owners of the company.
To make it extra special I used background water marks from rainbow infrared scans of very hot equipment. With the transparency set to around 15%, each slide made a very appealing pastel presentation.
At the start of the presentation something went wrong because the software rev of the machine to present on was lower than the one I developed on.
All my water marks came out in full intensity. My presentation looked like an Andy Warhol psychedelic acid tripping fantasy.
My boss, on seeing the first slide, said roll with it, as he motioned with his hand, moving with a circular motion, because you know, time is money, and more importantly, the big bosses have no capacity for waiting on peons.
So side 1 wasn't so bad, but as each slide progressed, each infrared back ground became more and more intense. The CFO owner on each slide would grimace, reminding me of the kid in Home Alone, looking like he was pushed back in his chair by a stiff breeze.
The topic could be interesting to a processing engineering nerd, but under ordinary circumstances it would be lost on all but 2 others in the room. This presentation, however, is burned into the memory of everyone in the room. I am certain nobody remembers a thing I said, but they remember the trippy presentation by sTevo.
It's a tool. Its only fault is that it made it easy to visualise concepts, and was used by poor presenters to visualise poor concepts.
It's like blaming fire for poorly cooked food.
Cool thing is that audience can ask 'what if' questions and you can show them in real time by changing bit of code.
Transfering information from one badly indexable, not deep-linkable and completely inappropriate documentation format to the next.
And then I was told to put the link to the OneNote document into a PowerPoint presentation, so that the PowerPoint with the link in it could be uploaded to the intranet.
Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides.
IMHO, things would go better if: * meetings had a clear objective, so you could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or discuss to achieve it. * people focused on the story, not the document. I've found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual aids. * we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting, and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's hard to do either one well.
I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry, humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more complex information.
The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2 page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story itself.
Also somebody here in the comments said this ready: slides are locked in files poorly shared across the organization. There is a huge amount of valuable information that nobody can search. It is sometimes easier to find detailed information on any random fact on the web than key information in your company.
I think banning power point might be too strong, but companies should force a "code of conduct" on this tool and should seriously figure out a better way for information to surface to employees when they need it.
http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bul...