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Comment by spoonjim | Hacker News Reader

Almost all of the deficiencies of PowerPoint typically complained about are deficiencies of the speaker: the inability or unwillingness to make compelling slides, or, very frequently, trying to create one presentation which serves as a discussion aid and a formal document of record — about as likely to succeed as engineering a device to land on Mars and explore the Mariana Trench.

PowerPoint is just a two dimensional layout program — criticisms of the actual software would be around how easy it is to type this kind of text, or align these kinds of objects, etc. I’m sure thousands of such deficiencies exist but that’s never what you hear about.

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Your point is directly addressed in the essay:

> This makes one good point: responsibility for poor presentations rests with the presenter. But it is more complicated than that. PP has a distinctive, definite, well-enforced, and widely-practiced cognitive style that is contrary to serious thinking. PP actively facilitates the making of lightweight presentations.

> This essay reports evidence based on several thousand slides, 5 case studies, and extensive quantitative comparisons between PowerPoint and other methods of communicating information. The results are clear:* some methods of presentation are better than others. And PowerPoint is rarely a good method. […]

> In this question, the tool metaphor does not provide intellectual leverage. Some tools are better than others; some poor performances are the fault of the tool. Saying that the problem is with the user rather than the tool blames the victims of PP (audience, content, presenter).

> Nearly all the evidence of the essay suggests that there is inherent defect in PowerPoint, unless one advances the entertaining alternative hypothesis that nearly all PP users are lightweights and nearly all users of other methods are not. This is not the case; PP has inherent defect.

But, if I understand the article correctly (I only read some chapters, as the essay was dragging along in its conclusions, so I might have missed some aspects), the alternatives are not PowerPoint vs Latex Presentations (or whatever slides are used). The alternatives are technical reports and written and high density handouts (e.g., for tables or detailed pictures).

The key problem of low density is true for most presentations I considered good as well, independent of powerpoint usage. Most of the times, they are essays.

Now that I think of it, this essay would probably work well as a talk (no matter the software).

But most people who for example, give a wedding speech, also do a terrible job. Essentially, most people are uncompelling speakers.

At my grandmother's funeral, a family friend from South Africa (who I hadn't seen since I was ~5) gave a speech -- I'd forgotten that he was a retired university lecturer. It was one of the most powerful, beautiful pieces of oratory I have ever heard: he told the story of her life in South Africa (where she was born) in a way that was new to me, my mother, and utterly captivated a spellbound church.

This point -- that, by comparison at least, most people are uncompelling speakers -- is something that bears repeating.

Hmmm ... In 1982 I heard a talk by Edsger Dijkstra given at my company. As he stepped up to the overhead projector he said "I asked for 20 feet of blackboard, and I got this ..."

As a (former) presenter, I found myself constantly struggling to figure out how to get what I wanted to say onto a slide. I'm going to say, I want a projector that can project on to a wall 10 feet high (although I'd probably only use the top five feet) and 15 feet across. I personally have bad eyes, and don't want to resort to anything less than really easy to read text size. It's not just powerpoint, but the physical infrastructure that becomes standard support for powerpoint that becomes the enemy of deep, complex ideas.

>trying to create one presentation which serves as a discussion aid and a formal document of record

It can depend on the context. A presentation that I'll give at an event is mostly fairly worthless as a leave-behind. It has relatively few words and is graphically rich. On the other hand, I sit through a lot of presentations at work where the slides basically are a document (in a form that a lot of people find more digestible than a standard text document). And if the speaker is good, they'll spend their interactive time hitting what they think are some of the highlights. I don't have any real problem with that.

One of the nice side effects is that if someone skims a slide of particular interest to them and they see something confusing/interesting, they can ask the speaker about it even if the speaker didn't bring it up.

> if the speaker is good

Some do good jobs.

Others just read the bullet points.

On the other hand, the bullet points require at least a bit of organization, unlike the stream of consciousness drivel that too many "planning documents" seem to exhibit.

No. Read the article again with an eye towards enforced structure. A software package may not suitable for a task, despite the efforts of the programmer.

> I’m sure thousands of such deficiencies exist but that’s never what you hear about.

Maybe as a side-effect of telemetry, the usability of PowerPoint and Excel unceasingly improves, to the point that it's impossible to compete with the former.

I’ve just finished Robert Gaskins book on the early history of PowerPoint.

He makes this exact point however I’m inclined to disagree. Trying to convey complex information using PowerPoint is like consuming all your meals through a straw.

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