PowerPoint Does Rocket Science (2006) | Hacker News Reader

PowerPoint Does Rocket Science (2006)

edwardtufte.com

39 pointscogware7 comments

PowerPoint is a NASA (and bureaucratic) symptom. MS delivered what the customer wanted. They want hamburgers not Steak Tartare.

Bad powerpoint didn't stop people from failing to communicate the risks to the Challenger.

> The format reflects a common conceptual error in analytic design: information architectures mimic the hierarchical structure of large bureaucracies pitching the information.

I'd quote more Tufte here but I am too lazy to type it in, the essay is a jpeg.

> The rigid slide-by-slide hierarchies slice and dice the evidence into arbitrary compartments

Is there something like a combination of PowerPoint and Prezi? Just one continous vertical slide where you just scroll down during a presentation.

Also, using a PDF (created in InDesign for example) is a great alternative to if you don't need videos or animations. Plus compatibility is way better.

>Is there something like a combination of PowerPoint and Prezi? Just one continous vertical slide where you just scroll down during a presentation.

HTML?

You can have videos, animations, and fancy transitions in a PDF slide deck if you're willing to present with Adobe Reader, and the same file can provide graceful fallback for other readers and printing. And pretty much all PDF readers handle internal hyperlinks just fine, so you're never limited to just a static linear presentation.

Whether you should use those features is another question, but I've had a few occasions to do things like embed a 3d model in a presentation.

So what's better?

Write your talk first, then decide what graphics need to accompany it. PowerPoint tempts you to do it the other way around. Also, give the audience a short handout (eg. single page double-sided) that has a summary in prose rather than bullets and includes key graphics as needed. Never print a slide deck as a handout.

It's okay to make an outline in the early stages of preparing your talk, but you can't just paginate and decorate that outline and call it a presentation. The audience should never see that outline, since it's supposed to just be an organizational tool for you to prepare the real presentation.

Once you've got your presentation actually planned and you've collected the materials you want to project onto the big screen, then PowerPoint might be a reasonable choice for displaying them, but actually using the PowerPoint program should be one of the last and shortest steps. Or you might find that everything that needs to be explained visually can fit on your handout.

always reference a properly written report. try and make the presentation as unintelligible as possible if you are looking at it for the first time - i try and just put pictures or charts in if possible. that way you are encouraging (forcing?) people to _listen_ to what you are saying _about_ the report you have written. assume your presentation will be scatter-mailed to all sorts of people with no context. use extreme prejudice in snuffing out the powerpoint-as-document movement - not even wrong.

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