Next slide, please: A brief history of the corporate presentation
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Still seems terrible to me, but not everybody is the same. Thanks!
But at another place a dept head started to go blind and could no longer easily read slides. So we were all encouraged to make verbal presentations of key points. It was actually really educational, and a really powerful learning experience.
I'm not a fan of powerpoint presentations in any form; I find the medium uninteresting and more of a progress meter for the current meeting than anything else, but even that hasn't been reliable for a long time to know how long a presentation will go, but I don't think using powerpoint in one of the many ways it can be used is anything bad; I'd rather that such hypothetical execs have someone put the notes into powerpoint than write it down on a paper notepad. At the end of the day, all I really care about is that I can read the notes if required and I can quickly access the data without having to bug someone after the initial permissions are set.
(all this being said, I cannot express how frustrating Microsoft Office and Google Office are to me; barring powerpoints where I have no choice but to build it in one of these office suites, I usually just write plain text with markdown formatting and only use office suites to apply the necessary formatting, using the markdown as a reference; I would enjoy word/docs a lot more if there was button to "convert markdown to word formatting", and vice versa)
For a few schedule things that needed more management than just a shared calendar, I wrote a script to pull the schedule out of Outlook and convert it to an HTML schedule sheet which I can just copy/paste right into Teams with perfect formatting (I send it via a bot, but it works for users to just paste into the doc also)
As a note taking tool it offers alignment and other things that OneNote doesn't. In exchange, OneNote offers a lot of things I don't give a damn about.
They always have a browser and being able to make requests by default with your credentials is very helpful.
(1): Taking notes in PowerPoint is sensible if you want an entire conference room to be able to read the notes, as they are being taken, from their seats, and without any fuss about font sizes and so on.
(2): Additionally, since the final "product" will be a PPT, having the notes already in a PPT file means you get to skip some copy/paste steps.
It's still a bit silly and a bit of a cargo cult in the online-first world, but I get how it happens.
> Not OneNote, not Word, not even freakin' Notepad.
Hey, I'll take PPT brain damage over the even worse brain damage that causes some orgs to do everything in a buggy ass Salesforce version of google docs... give me MBA brain-rot bullet points over MBA brain-rot fancy versions of five paragraph essays any god damn day...
PowerPoint is a fairly decent mainstream app for taking notes. It lets you draw diagrams, which for the right class is indispensable. Visio is great at diagramming, but less good for taking notes. Docs/Word, to draw new diagrams around text that often gains new content as the lecture goes on, is terrible for this. If the professor shows a picture, and then just talks about it, that would be fine, but usually, the professor draws a few shapes, then talks some, then draws in arrows and more text. Having to got in and out of drawing mode, is so much worse.
They're both awesome apps(Although PowerPoint is easy to misuse for extreme time wasting watching someone just literally read slides), so they might have a reason.
I use Keep, but generally when someone has a nonsensical seeming process involving commercial GUI software it usually works fine. Kinda clunky but easier than no tech, more reliable than any custom made solution, and sometimes the other off the shelf alternatives have downsides.
Maybe the meeting is being structured by a PowerPoint, and they want to take notes in the same format so that each slide in the notes corresponds to a slide in the meeting presentation or something.
This middle period was filled by the creation of LCD panels that fit on top of an overhead projector and acted as a rudimentary video projector. The earliest ones were black and white and CGA only. I recall my dad using the early version of MS Paint to make images that he'd throw up on the screen with an Eastman Kodak LCD unit. Here's an example made by 3M:
https://scientific-solutions.com/ebay/lcdpanel/lcdpanel.html
Later on, IBM actually had a specific model of ThinkPad, the 755CDV, that had a detachable backlight panel on the display. You would strap the entire laptop to an overhead projector to do your presentation.
http://archive.irixnet.org/siliconsurf/products/Indy/present...
“When combined with an Indy workstation--a nifty shoulder bag handles both--you have most of the tools you need for a first rate show on the road.”
I had an Indy workstation, the Presenter display, and the shoulder bag — but I never lugged the thing to a presentation.
So for the national contests we'd send digital artwork off to be printed as actual slides and run two synchronized projectors which would crossfade. It was tricky to set up and order the slides because they alternated across the two machines, and of course edits were impossible. We also had an entirely separate film projector for the commercials we'd made.
As analog as the tech was, it was almost indistinguishable from a modern presentation in experience. Just a whole lot more gear to lug around.
By switching slides on a "rolling" schedule, the slide projectors could achieve very smooth fades and transitions. Combined with the accompanying audio, it made for an effect that was almost movie-like, showing characters moving and speaking more smoothly than you would expect a slideshow to be capable of.
The humble slide projector is far more capable than one might guess, and has played a central role in all manner of visual presentation: the infamous "Big Board" from the gameshow Press Your Luck, for instance, consisted of slide projectors showing the various cash amounts, prizes, Whammies, etc. onto screens around the perimeter of the board, while border lights around each screen turned on to highlight which one the player would win if they hit the stop button. Famously, this arrangement was not random and super exploitable.
Now of course, the slide projector has joined the rotary phone and the floppy disk on the scrap heap of once-ubiquitous technologies that vanished after their moment passed.
With very few exceptions, a slide deck should not be wholly comprehensible by itself. But too often, people put multiple paragraphs on a slide like they attached the script.
Maybe there's a point to be made that PowerPoint should be more strict in what it accepts, and that current trends in boring you to death are a result of that. But I don't think PowerPoint is bad idea per se.