Out of interest, what software or application do you use for your presentations?
It’s always seemed to me that the problem with Powerpoint is not really what it can do, but how it is used by the people who rely most heavily on it. I appreciate Edward Tufte’s critical writing about Powerpoint, for example, but i also believe that a determined user can use the program without falling into the traps that Tufte describes. The problems of Powerpoint might, in some measure, be built into the program, but they can also be avoided.
The dickishness, IME, rises with the job title. By the time a person, regardless of gender, is C-level, they are usually enormous wankers.
I gave a presentation to the annual C-level gathering for my company. It was day 2. I was last on the agenda. They skipped lunch just to get things over with. I walked into a room of glazed eyes, sweaty shirts, frayed tempers, and a deep desire to get this shit done. I had not one, but 2 presentations to make and I was all that stood between them and freedom.
I led with a joke, relevant to the topic, about how we had been doing things a certain way at our company since a certain CEO had been parking his cars in a highly public way years ago, and hadn’t been fixed then. Well, we had a fix. Here it was. I walked them through it. (It was our CEO, not who you think.) I did this on purpose to wake up the room, because I needed their buy in. I had active participation in both presentations. Later, despite feedback from the impacted departments that the solution would resolve the situation and was the best presentation on the topic yet given at the company, the COO pronounced that I had been flippant. The actual quality of the work was apparently irrelevant.
I can confirm that C-levels folks are dicks. Avoid jokes.
This lets me use whatever other tool generates the right material for each page, and then combine the pages into one presentation file. It gets around any limitations on a single tool’s capabilities. Anyone can do this, and it simply works better than using a bad tool to do a poor job.
I tend to use pro stuff to generate pages - InDesign and PS, but also Word and Excel when needed. Since everything can print to PDF, the possibilities are endless. Need heavy math pages like Hari Seldon? Use LaTEX or whatever… to PDF.
I know these arguments, but they’re kind of like an English LIt class that analyzes work depending on what brand of pen the author used. The tool is irrelevant to things like organization, flow, info choices, etc. (Or largely irrelevant.)
My contention is that PowerPoint is a horrible, horrible tool - technically. It’s garbage that produces garbage and promotes the production of garbage. And while MS has packed in the “features” over the years, they’ve never corrected the fundamentally bad design of the tool itself, which has led millions of users to produce uncountable billions of unnecessarily lousy presentations.
(When a client or a venue absolutely demands PowerPoint files, which is not uncommon, I comply… by doing all of the above, exporting to JPG, and embedding each image file in a PP page. Ta da.)
Someone really needs to build a better presentation tool from scratch. I remain boggled that MS, as slowly and awkwardly as it can progress sometimes, hasn’t stepped up to the challenge.
But anyway, we were talking about the important part, content. Tools are secondary.
Don’t do this, ignore the post and then report if it you feel something needs to be looked at, because then you risk a mod note yourself, like you’re getting now. Do not jr mod or create hijacks just based on drama. Pit the poster instead.
I disagree, although I do agree with you that Powerpoint can be misused, but so can any other powerful tool. Powerpoint has been the standard presentation tool at every institution I’ve worked in since its inception, and before that, the presentation tools we used were similar in principle.
The only issue with Powerpoint is that, if I may put it this way, it’s in a sense too powerful and people can get carried away with “creativity” – sort of in the manner of some moron whose sole experience is with point-and-click still cameras who is suddenly given complete control of a full-fledged movie studio with all of its cameras and lenses and video editing and special-effects technologies – he will have absolutely no idea what he’s doing.
My basic rules in using Powerpoint are to keep it simple and keep it to the essentials – fancy characters and needless decoration, fades and dissolves, etc. are just stupid and distracting. And I do agree that people who have ridiculously verbose slides and just read from them should either be shot on the spot or, at least, charged with a felony.
The way I approach presentations (though I’m now retired and will be happy if I never have to give another one) is to use bullet points in the same way that I would use notes to myself: these are the key points you want to remember to discuss. Each slide reminds me not to forget something and keeps the audience focused on the structure of what’s being discussed.
Powerpoint then lets me add the necessary visuals when they are, in fact, necessary and meaningful. Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.
And to answer the OP, yes, I do often have fun with it. The audience wants to be informed and even somewhat entertained. I’ve tried to accommodate them with some combination of inside-scoop information that no one would otherwise know about, even if it’s just trivia, and/or interspersing slides with off-the-wall cartoons. Gary Larson’s Far Side and the New Yorker have been a great source of humorous interludes in the midst of heavy material, and some of them have been strangely and compelling relevant to the topic at hand.
But there’s totally nothing wrong with Powerpoint as a basic slide preparation tool, nor is there anything wrong with slides (or “decks” or whatever your subculture calls them) as a means of keeping a presentation structured and presenting relevant point headers and relevant graphics. It’s unfortunate that many people don’t know how to use the tools at their disposal, but it’s not Powerpoint’s fault.
But this contradicts your whole emphasis on the shittiness of Powerpoint.
It is possible to make a perfectly decent presentation with Powerpoint. I’d be willing to bet that, if you sent one of your (no doubt brilliant and captivating and witty) PDF presentations to someone with similar levels of technical skill, they could basically reproduce your presentation in Powerpoint, to a point where the audience would get an essentially identical experience.
I did this in a job interview once. I was asked to come along with a PowerPoint about Change Management. I started the presentation with three quick slides about something completely off-topic, beginning to explain that I thought this would be more interesting.
The panel started glancing at each other and grumbling. My fourth slide was the start of my actual presentation - it just said “UNcontrolled change is horrible, isn’t it?”
I got the job. In retrospect though, this was a bit of a silly gamble.
{HistoryLesson}
Back in the day, when men were real men, and women were real women who weren’t in military briefings, it was common to slip in a tasteful photo of an unclad female.
{/HistoryLesson}
Ooooh, I like your list. Can I use it next time I’ve got to give a presentation on how to give presentations?
Most of my presentations are on subjects that would put a hyperactive accountant to sleep (is there such a thing as a hyperactive accountant?). Possible variants on the returns process depending on where the product was made and where it was returned to. Master data crosschecking. Defining your master data. Creating a new piece of equipment. Are y’all asleep yet? If you weren’t, congratulations to your coffee provider.
So I do things such as play with idioms, remind the guy who’s sneering at me before we even begin that “anybody who doesn’t pass the course will have to retake it, so if you think it’s boring the first time avoid doing it twice - and that goes doubly for you, Joe, since you’re the superuser and have actually already seen most of it, and didn’t your mother tell you that if you made those faces your face would stay like that?”, use examples with names like Pink Pony or Blue Unicorn… anything I can to keep the audience from falling into an open-eyed coma.
I have given presentations to multiple C-levels who weren’t anywhere near as much of a dick as their guards. Almost gave my direct manager a heart attack when I asked the CEO of Iberdrola to please wait for the next slide any time he thought of a question, since so far he’d had three and for all three the answer had been in the next slide; he snorted and agreed, and at the end said he’d had a lot more questions and they’d all been answered in the next slide. Mileage evidently varies.
Feel free. That’s my phrasing, bashed out for the purposes of the post, but it’s pretty much a four-part trope for all successful “business” communications.
Oh, yeah, burying subtle puns and twisting idioms is good for self-amusement; if no one gets it, oh well. I useta write software manuals and about halfway through my term I started putting quotes on the so-called blank pages. Then I started making up quotes and making bizarre attributions that about five people on earth would get… none of them in the small set of people who would ever open the manual.
I don’t disagree, but this largely misses the point.
Very short version: Yes, PP is the standard for presentation. Which is awful and never should have happened, because it codified a poor approach and poor implementation and a poor overall focus on what the task is all about. Imagine Word had it been built with the idea that lots of colors and fonts was the the important feature, or Excel if it was all about making the numbers look nice.
Longer version: Presentations are about four things: content, organization, layout and design. Some of those things telescope together but a case can be made that they’re separate elements. The ONLY things PP is good at is organization - the various views and slide sorting and so forth is pretty well implemented - and design, but ONLY design-for-design’s sake. It has no tools whatsoever for managing content. It has only the crudest tools for managing layout.
There’s nothing wrong with an interface that requires little or no knowledge to start with; PP lets you just drop and type and drag and push and so forth right from the first blank screen. But most tools that work that way have another layer that allows more precise control, consistent formatting, repeatable layout and so forth. You don’t have to use that layer, but it’s essential for a professional approach and useful to a serious user. More than that (or maybe Less than that), the PP interface sort of revels in that freeform approach and actively messes with things as you’re trying to get somewhere. The “helpful” resizing of text as you type is one example. That’s not really useful to anyone, especially when it results in 25 slides with widely varying font sizes for no particular reasons.
MS keeps adding “design” features and hundreds more templates, and other fancy-it-up stuff, but has never fixed the basic… writing, composition and layout flaws. You can drag and drop in almost any media you can find, but only with the crudest tools to position, size and format them… and their handling of the embedded material bloats the file size enormously.
The whole approach to presentation development promotes bloat and blather and wasted space and purty-purty over content, so, as you say, the problem is that users who assume all those features must be meant to be used… *uuuuuuuse *them.
I have lost count of how many tools in the writing-design-layout-publication-art-presentation spectrum I’ve learned and used in 30 years. I’ve used some that were terrible (Ventura Publisher) but could be beaten into submission and do a good job. But PowerPoint stands alone in being a nearly useless, frustrating, badly conceived, badly implemented tool. It has no peer among other million-copy, 20-year, desktop-standard tools.
I say blame the workman, not the tool. I know someone whose PPT presentations are awesome. They have very little text, and lots of animated diagrams where the animation is vital for understanding the technique.
I’m graphically challenged, so I could never do presentations like his. Mine are more bullet points - but short, and meant to keep people anchored as I talk about the topic of the slide.
The worst are the people who feel they have to write their entire presentations on their slides, including diagrams too small to see.
When I first got involved in the conference I help run, PPT didn’t exist and presentations were done with 35mm slides. They were mostly awful. Though the program committee could recommend changes to the first draft, we couldn’t enforce them, so bad slides were our number one audience complaint. After we switched to PPT we could at least fix really bad formatting (like hard to see color choices) for them, and we did. The complaints mostly went away.
I’d agree, but then, my experience spans doing presentations with hand-drawn graphs and illustrations on acetate through some beta tools that haven’t hit the market yet. There is no tool that can make someone who has no idea how to construct a good presentation an “expert,” any more than Word makes everyone a novelist. That’s part of PP’s problem - it has such a low starting bar and a flat learning curve that goes nowhere, so it’s easy to imagine mastery and expertise.
The best tool in the world can be used to do shitty work. And some really weak tools can be used to do acceptable to excellent work… if the user is capable of it.
I’ve done my share of projects in PP. It can’t really be quantified, but I’d say that any given project in PP involves twice as much work, or more, than is absolutely necessary to get to a desired result. It’s not just that it’s manual or un-automated, but that it actively works against the careful user, requiring many things to be fixed after the software screws it up. And unlike Word, there’s no way to turn off all this “help.”
That the body of familiarity lies largely with this one tool, meaning there are lots of users who can do great things with it, doesn’t rescue it from the software shitheap or change my decades-long, frequently-reinforced opinion of it. I don’t think anyone who’s ever used a better tool or process can continue to think well of it - it’s simply herd approval of the only option they know. And that’s what’s so frustrating. Twenty years ago, there were a lot of really shitty software tools, and natural selection weeded them out… in all but one category.
I recently saw a presentation done by a guy who gives presentations all the time and he just had a series of .pdf’s as AB said. My first 1/100th of a second reaction was “how primitive”. But as soon as I thought about it, I realised that almost all powerpoint slides are just static documents, which may just as well be a .pdf, most of the rest use some sort of active content (like a fancy transition) that is unnecessary and distracting. And only a tiny percentage use a feature for which PP may be useful.
I still see a lot of file bloat in Word - I see far more Word docs that clients and collaborators put together with a lot of formatting and embedded images. It might be a little better than the old format, but not a lot. Since PP is heavy on graphics and imports, I’d expect even pptx files to get pretty fat, pretty fast. Maybe not. Not the worst or only sin, anyway.
*Ding ding ding ding ding ding… *exactly. That’s so obvious to me that I didn’t think to include it above - maybe because this wasn’t supposed to be a thread about the tools - but kudos for noticing and bringing it up.
I think that even sophisticated users lose track of what’s “real” in informational display - like the fact that 99% of web pages, being displayed by your browser, are dead-as-a-doornail static documents that might as well have rolled out of your printer. The web is an ask-and-answer model in which each click forces the far server to generate and send new data, and then forget about you until the next click. It’s not a truly interactive system except in a small (but continually growing) number of cases. The apparent interactivity and intelligent response is your browser’s doing. Details like setting it to open in full-screen mode, and perhaps at a page other than the first one (for some cases) are just glosses.
With PowerPoint, I think there’s a bit of mystique about the system that makes users think the slides are something more complex than a static page - just as you thought showing PDFs was “primitive” by comparison. There is zero difference between a PP presentation someone slaves over for a week, and one I build in other tools and convert to static JPEG images to comply with a demand for PP compatibility. There’s only a tad more difference between that and PDF presentations.
For those who don’t know (and it’s understandable), Acrobat has a number of presentation functions built in. It will work with any PDF document, but a few simple steps can get the most from the process. First, you do your layout in either 4:3 or 16:9 screen size, not standard page size; second, you export to PDF/interactive and not PDF/print; third, you go through and assign slide timings (if you use them) and transitions (yes, Acrobat supports all standard transitions, including the goopy ones no one should ever use). I find a fade between slides more visually pleasant than a hard cut, but it’s a matter of taste.
And, of course, with PDF you can use almost any tool at hand to create content, and not be limited to PP’s Fisher-Price graphics and layout set.
And when, at the last minute, some conference wank says, “Oh, but it has to be in PP format [because we’re too stupid to handle anything else]”… you export the whole set to JPEGs and import them to PP pages. Win/win, even in a loser format.
