Presentation Text

Powerpoint has not changed much since it was first introduced as Aldus Persuasion. The idea was to replace the overhead projector and lugging around copious numbers of overhead transparencies. Artisits were using Aldus Freehand to produce transparency artwork making Persuasion a logical step for the executives making the presentations. Persuasion was bought by Adobe as Photoshop became more popular with digital artists, then Microsoft grabbed it up renamed it PowerPoint, packaged it with Office, and added a clip art library making it the default for business. The popularity as a business tool moved the creation of presentations from the artist to the presenter. Again, Powerpoint itself still hasn't really changed much.

PowerPoint's interface and editing capabilities are very outdated, and cumbersome.

A hammer does not a carpenter make.


Presentation Slides

The first slide would be up as everyone entered the room with a powerpoint logo and a picture of an overhead projector.
The second slide would have the timeline shown with Aldus, Adobe, and Microsoft.
The third slide would be a stone hammer and a square wheel.

End of Presentation

It looks to me like they do have something to do with one another, hence the little lines connecting everything.

It depends on the intent of that slide. While that slide is horrible for imparting any detailed information, it is an outstanding visual representation of how complex the operating enviornment is in Afghanistan.

I'm sure the situation in Afghanistan is quite complex. But making a disastrous slide and then blaming the tool in which the slide was made is really weak.

A bunch of arrows pointing from one thing to another doesn't explain anything.

We have that slide printed and hanging on the walls at work as a "how not to" example. Military decks are notoriously dense and almost always useless. Has nothing to do with Powerpoint and everything to do with reporting structures, visual literacy, and cya.

People often confuse/conflate data visualization and presentation. They are not the same thing.

Rule #1: Stand Up; Speak Up; Shut Up

Fair enough. The focus should not be PowerPoint per se, but how it is used. What bugs me, though, is the attitude in some business circles that if you don't use it, you are somehow not communicating and being lazy.

Some really great work on using graphics effectively in presentations has been done by Edward Tufte. I highly recommend his book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. His argument on how poor graphics contributed to the Challenger space shuttle disaster is really fascinating.