Death by PowerPoint

[porsche4life]

I have a Bio teacher that uses PP... It sucks... They are LONG and BORING.... Doesn't help any that its a way easy class and we covered all the material in my HS.... So I sleep in class...

Originally Posted by legion

True story.

One day I was printing off an old PowerPoint presentation that a vendor had given us years before. I needed to create some training on a product we had purchased and heavily modified, so I figured I would print out the presentation, and write some thoughts/notes on what had changed and what needed to be added. From there I would create an outline, and then the real training.

While standing at the printer, someone on my project's "communication" team asked me if I was printing out a Powerpoint presentation (which was obvious). I replied "Yes."

She then said: "Those slides do not have company-approved backgrounds. You can't print them. I tried to explain that the presentation was from a vendor, it was old, and I wouldn't actually be giving it......she didn't care. She ended up getting some higher-up to tell me to destroy my printouts of the presentation and to send her the presentation to remove the non-approved backgrounds, and I could print it when she was done.

Fine.

I sent her the presentation. She simply changed the background for the presentation to plain white (which took all of three seconds, including opening and saving, when she got around to doing it) and sent it back to me. It took her two days to do this, during which I couldn't work on my training. And she sat on my aisle, and got up to browse whatever I was printing whenever I printed it. And as a member of the "communications team", she didn't have any real work to do other than policing Powerpoint backgrounds.

To make things even better, during this time period, I actually heard this lady exclaim: "I'm trying to add value, but I keep getting push-back!"

I put the phrase on a t-shirt, and I wear it to work to this day.

That's hilarious. She was adding value all right!

Originally Posted by nostatic

The reality is that most people are not particularly visually literate wrt "writing" for a screen. Some realize this, but most do not.

Creating and giving a good presentation is an art and also a skill. Most don't want to learn how to do it, and certainly don't want to work at getting better. Blaming ppt for bad presentation is like blaming someone who makes canvases for bad paintings that result.

I agree with this, to a certain extent. The problem is that PowerPoint has created the expectation that anyone, with any amount of training (or lack thereof) can make an effective presentation.

I eventually made a P-Point presentation for the people running the conference I'm speaking at next week, but will probably not use it that much.

I also like Keynote better, but my clients are all PC based, and Keynote does not seem to translate well in a lot of cases.

[JavaBrewer]

The DoD excels at generating 50+ slide briefs with overwhelming architecture diagrams. It's like they are using PPT as a design tool...

I present my fair share of PPT briefs and as others have said

1. Don't read the slide text - talk (in normal human language) to what the slide is presenting
2. Keep fonts large - no more than 3 bullet items per slide
3. Images/Graphics (screen grabs) are powerful as long as they are relevant to material
4. I avoid animation/gimic transitions whenever possible - YMMV
5. Know your audience

Otherwise PPT is a perfectly fine tool for what it is. Most lousy briefs are due to operator error.

[RWebb]

Originally Posted by legion

True story.

One day I was printing off an old PowerPoint presentation that a vendor had given us years before. I needed to create some training on a product we had purchased and heavily modified, so I figured I would print out the presentation, and write some thoughts/notes on what had changed and what needed to be added. From there I would create an outline, and then the real training.

While standing at the printer, someone on my project's "communication" team asked me if I was printing out a Powerpoint presentation (which was obvious). I replied "Yes."

She then said: "Those slides do not have company-approved backgrounds. You can't print them. I tried to explain that the presentation was from a vendor, it was old, and I wouldn't actually be giving it......she didn't care. She ended up getting some higher-up to tell me to destroy my printouts of the presentation and to send her the presentation to remove the non-approved backgrounds, and I could print it when she was done.

Fine.

I sent her the presentation. She simply changed the background for the presentation to plain white (which took all of three seconds, including opening and saving, when she got around to doing it) and sent it back to me. It took her two days to do this, during which I couldn't work on my training. And she sat on my aisle, and got up to browse whatever I was printing whenever I printed it. And as a member of the "communications team", she didn't have any real work to do other than policing Powerpoint backgrounds.

To make things even better, during this time period, I actually heard this lady exclaim: "I'm trying to add value, but I keep getting push-back!"

I put the phrase on a t-shirt, and I wear it to work to this day.

you KNOW she put that on her Resume

[Z-man]

Originally Posted by nostatic

ppt is a tool. Tools usually reflect the skill (or lack thereof) of the user.

I agree 100 percent. Start with someone who has good presentation skills, and his or her powerpoint presentation will shine. Start with someone who lacks presentation skills and it doesn't matter if he or she is using powerpoint, index cards, puppets or the latest in 3D Hologram technology -- it will still suck.

I have used Power point presentations, and have given presentations without that tool. I have sat through many PPT presentations - some good, some really ugly.

It is a good tool, if used correctly.

-Z-man.

[Paul_Heery]

From today's NY Times:

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint


A PowerPoint diagram meant to portray the complexity of American strategy in Afghanistan certainly succeeded in that aim.

WASHINGTON — Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, one of his advisers recalled, as the room erupted in laughter.

The slide has since bounced around the Internet as an example of a military tool that has spun out of control. Like an insurgency, PowerPoint has crept into the daily lives of military commanders and reached the level of near obsession. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

In General McMaster’s view, PowerPoint’s worst offense is not a chart like the spaghetti graphic, which was first uncovered by NBC’s Richard Engel, but rigid lists of bullet points (in, say, a presentation on a conflict’s causes) that take no account of interconnected political, economic and ethnic forces. “If you divorce war from all of that, it becomes a targeting exercise,” General McMaster said.

Commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making. Not least, it ties up junior officers — referred to as PowerPoint Rangers — in the daily preparation of slides, be it for a Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing in a remote pocket of Afghanistan.

Last year when a military Web site, Company Command, asked an Army platoon leader in Iraq, Lt. Sam Nuxoll, how he spent most of his time, he responded, “Making PowerPoint slides.” When pressed, he said he was serious.

“I have to make a storyboard complete with digital pictures, diagrams and text summaries on just about anything that happens,” Lieutenant Nuxoll told the Web site. “Conduct a key leader engagement? Make a storyboard. Award a microgrant? Make a storyboard.”

Despite such tales, “death by PowerPoint,” the phrase used to described the numbing sensation that accompanies a 30-slide briefing, seems here to stay. The program, which first went on sale in 1987 and was acquired by Microsoft soon afterward, is deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.

“There’s a lot of PowerPoint backlash, but I don’t see it going away anytime soon,” said Capt. Crispin Burke, an Army operations officer at Fort Drum, N.Y., who under the name Starbuck wrote an essay about PowerPoint on the Web site Small Wars Journal that cited Lieutenant Nuxoll’s comment.

In a daytime telephone conversation, he estimated that he spent an hour each day making PowerPoint slides. In an initial e-mail message responding to the request for an interview, he wrote, “I would be free tonight, but unfortunately, I work kind of late (sadly enough, making PPT slides).”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates reviews printed-out PowerPoint slides at his morning staff meeting, although he insists on getting them the night before so he can read ahead and cut back the briefing time.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and says that sitting through some PowerPoint briefings is “just agony,” nonetheless likes the program for the display of maps and statistics showing trends. He has also conducted more than a few PowerPoint presentations himself.

General McChrystal gets two PowerPoint briefings in Kabul per day, plus three more during the week. General Mattis, despite his dim view of the program, said a third of his briefings are by PowerPoint.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was given PowerPoint briefings during a trip to Afghanistan last summer at each of three stops — Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif and Bagram Air Base. At a fourth stop, Herat, the Italian forces there not only provided Mr. Holbrooke with a PowerPoint briefing, but accompanied it with swelling orchestral music.

President Obama was shown PowerPoint slides, mostly maps and charts, in the White House Situation Room during the Afghan strategy review last fall.

Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.

Captain Burke’s essay in the Small Wars Journal also cited a widely read attack on PowerPoint in Armed Forces Journal last summer by Thomas X. Hammes, a retired Marine colonel, whose title, “Dumb-Dumb Bullets,” underscored criticism of fuzzy bullet points; “accelerate the introduction of new weapons,” for instance, does not actually say who should do so.

No one is suggesting that PowerPoint is to blame for mistakes in the current wars, but the program did become notorious during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. As recounted in the book “Fiasco” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin Press, 2006), Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led the allied ground forces in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, grew frustrated when he could not get Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the commander at the time of American forces in the Persian Gulf region, to issue orders that stated explicitly how he wanted the invasion conducted, and why. Instead, General Franks just passed on to General McKiernan the vague PowerPoint slides that he had already shown to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the defense secretary at the time.

Senior officers say the program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters.

The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake. Those types of PowerPoint presentations, Dr. Hammes said, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.”

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Originally Posted by masraum

Powerpoint kills brain cells. It's horrible.

I really love it when the "presenter" essentially reads the slides to you, not adding anything, just a verbatim reading.

The best is when this is in a college classroom where you're paying a few hundred dollars for the "privilege" of sitting there to be mindlessly read to.

I had a structures professor kinda' like this. Guy was older than dirt - had been around a long time and clearly knew structural engineering inside-out and backwards, but couldn't teach to save his life. He'd written a book a few years prior (thankfully with the help of someone else, so the content was organized and able to be followed). His lectures were LITERALLY just him reading out of his own book and working the example problems that were in the book, with the help of an overhead projector (worse than power point IMHO). After the first week of class I'd identified the pattern and said "screw this" and stopped going. I took the book home and worked it cover-to-cover in about two weeks, doing every practice problem and end-of-chapter exam, etc. I didn't waste my time going to his class anymore. I just had someone else who was still going tell me when I needed to show up for quizzes & exams. I was always the first or second person done and never got below a 97. I finished the course with an "A" and was told I earned the third highest average score he'd ever seen in his years of teaching.

Moral: Motivate yourself - don't look to power point or other stupid "spoon-fed" information to try and plant knowledge/information into your head. It doesn't work that way, much as Bill Gates will claim (for $400 a seat) that it does.

Power point and overhead projectors should be banned from college classrooms entirely, IMHO.

[porsche4life]

Originally Posted by Porsche-O-Phile

Power point and overhead projectors should be banned from college classrooms entirely, IMHO.

PLEASE! It would make it so much more interesting....

[legion]

As a counter-point to Jeff's story:

First semester, freshmen year of college, I had Econ 101 with Tony Ostrosky at 8:00 a.m. in Capen Hall. (Capen seats about 400 people, and the room was full.)

Dr. Ostrosky was animated. He gave his lectures from memory. He threw in stories from his own life that illustrated basic economic theories. He drew on the overhead to make his point. Almost every graph was price versus quantity, but he used his hand-drawn graphs to tell a story and reinforce what he was saying. His lectures really illuminated the reading material.

Rather than being a crutch, he used the overhead effectively. While rare, these professors do exist.

[billybek]

My name is Bill and I am a power point abuser......
Seriously, the first powerpoint presentation I gave to the apprentices was too long and far too many slides. The next three were limited to less than 15 slides and printing the presentation with 3 slides per page and area next to the slides for notes seem to work pretty well.
I have used the slides instead of making (bad) drawings on the white board. I do my line diagrams on Visio and create slides from the drawings.
I guess I will see when the student survey comes back how well the powerpoints went over.

I used to do lectures by drawing on the board ( we still used chalk!), then posting PowerPoint slides of the material on my website. That seemed to work pretty well.

[David]

All operators and engineers had to take a heat rate course at work. The instuctor said he had to show us this hundred plus page PP presentation. He showed it to us in about 30 seconds so we could say we'd seen it Then he spent the next two days explaining what we really needed to know.

[TechnoViking]

Originally Posted by nostatic

ppt is a tool. Tools usually reflect the skill (or lack thereof) of the user.

+1

I've seen atrocious things done with spreadsheets in meetings, but that doesn't mean Excel is somehow now a worthless program.

[TechnoViking]

And the slide in question used to explain military strategy is a complete joke. Whoever made that thing is an idiot. Multiple items that have nothing to do with one another should not be jumbled together like that.

The slide, IMO, was put together by someone trying to show how hard their job is or perhaps by someone who is completely in over his head.

But yea, blame Powerpoint. That'll fix everything.

[M.D. Holloway]

Please don't confuse Powerpoint with presentation format or skills. I actually do all my reports and memos and presentations in Powerpoint. AFWIW my presentations look nothing like your standard fair.

Bulleted slides are for talking points only. Slides can have interesting graphics, Representative graphs and charts as well as schematics and animation.

I defy anyone to attend a seminar I give and tell me that my presentation is weak. It is all in the way in which the slides are built and how the speaker works the crowd.

[smokintr6]

My father's company does computer training and consulting. The one "IT" pearl of wisdom that I have taken from him is as follows; The problem most users have with excel (or powerpoint what have you) is that the only tool they have is a hammer, thus everything looks like a nail. I would wager that the Microsoft Office package is the most commonly abused software package on the market!

[Jagshund]

PowerPoint pays for people who know how to use it. $3k for a 20 slide presentation? Takes about 3 hours and your clients provide the research.

Points on-screen should be highlights of talking points, simple illustrations to provide a focal point or added info not included in speech but provided in accompanying handouts (if any).

They can also be useful in providing speaking points for people with poor social/public speaking skills. I prefer to use my own backgrounds and graphics, though. The stock pieces are waaaaaay overused.

[juanbenae]

then they still print em out three images a page with some lines for notes. every one i have is stained with free danish from the continental breakfast...

[1967 R50/2]

When I got my MBA, years and years ago, we took two years of public speaking and writing. Including how to make a killer presentation, sales pitch, whatever.

Most valuable thing I learned and critical in any trade.

Rule #1: Keep it under 15 minutes, preferably under 7. After 15 minutes you will not keep anyone's attention.

Rule #2: 3 points and 3 points only

Rule #3: Tell them what you will tell them, Tell them, and then tell them again what they were told.

I'll add one more rule: Presentation should be at least 20% entertainment.

Still works. You can give me the crappiest Powerpoint, but I'm pretty confident I can make it interesting if I can apply those rules.