13 thoughts on “PowerPoint v. PowerPoint”

  1. Thank you for that pointer! I need to send it to the school we use (it’s distance ed, lots of stuff online) because they seem to think PowerPoint is wonderful, and I always wonder why.

  2. I usually agree with Tufte, but I’m skeptical of his disdain for PowerPoint slides. I don’t mind the types of slides that he dislikes so much. I think they help direct the audience’s attention to important points, and possibly help stop people’s minds from wandering.

    What’s needed here is an empirical approach.

    Experimental subjects should be divided into two groups: those who view a lecture without the slides, and those who view the identical lecture but with PowerPoint slides. Then, the two groups should be given a test to see how much of the material they remembered. My guess is that the PowerPoint group would do a little better.

  3. PowerPoint is a must-have skill in corporate world, to such an extent that one can not have a meeting without ppt files. I can not recall any meeting without at least one ppt page in the last 5 years. I am working for a big company. Nowadays, to have an international conference call with people across the world, the most effective way to do it is to simultaneously share ppt pages across the company network using Sametime software (Lotus). These technologies are wonderful …

  4. I have to agree with Tufte-via-Swartz that PowerPoint can too easily turn into a straight-jacket v. a road-map. If PP is really de rigeur in the business world, that might be more of a comment on that environment than on inherent PowerPoint virtues. As for slides being a benefit in lectures and helping audiences to retain information, I don’t doubt that — heck, I used to be an art history professor. I would prepare art history lectures thus: I’d “pull slides” related to the topic, then “edit” their sequence on a big light table in the slide library by moving them about like so many roulette gambling chips. Groups, strings, whatever. My choice. From the visual sequence I decided on, I’d create my lecture. Subsequently, during the lecture each slide would “prompt” me, but during the lecture itself, I could give as much or as little weight as I wanted to the slide. If it’s the case that PowerPoint only allows you to follow a template, then it’s a railtrack, not a road map. I hope there are alternatives for people to create slides easily, which they can then use in presentations. A computer-based (digital?) “light table” would be cool.

  5. I work for one of those hierarchical bureaucratic corporations, where Microsoft PowerPoint® is the favored all-purpose software of managers and technocrats alike. While managers tend to prefer simple bullet charts, they invariably are in master style sheets that include a proliferation of logos du jour, fancy backgrounds, and colors. Woe betide anyone who prints out these presentations with a black-and-white printer and tries to read it.

    It’s the technocrats who seem to spend most of their time devising ever fancier presentations to dazzle people with brilliance (or baffle with taurine excrement) at meetings. No simple bullet charts here! It’s obligatory to show everything in graphical charts with multi-colored geometric shapes and lines portraying the inter-relationships between the shapes. But even that isn’t good enough. It’s getting to be nearly obligatory to present a sequence of slides in which the shapes and lines glide into place (and the text changes color) while the presenter speaks the associated point. Only after the presenter has finished speaking can we see the entire chart in all its brilliance. Then it dissolves, explodes, or swirls into the next dazzling animation.

    A couple of decades ago, the experts all insisted that personal computers would free us all of the drudgery and allow us to focus on what is truly creative and productive. Microsoft PowerPoint® is proof that computers have created a colossal time-suck that encourages members of hierarchical bureaucratic corporations to demonstrate their prowess at packaging small amounts of pedestrian and mediocre content into slides full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. That may yet prove to be Bill Gates’ most lasting legacy.

  6. I think there is a confusion here between slides presentation and PowerPoint. I am not sure which is criticised:
    1. The medium?
    2. The tool?
    3. The content produced by the tool?
    4. The setting that is formed by using the medium?

    I think that slides have some great benifits:

    1. They focus the attention of the listeners towards the direction of the presenter.
    2. They save the listeners the ambarrasement of “not reading beforehand” the material.
    3. They save paper.

  7. And excellent link, Philip. Thank you. It is true that the medium (PowerPoint) is whatever we make it, but PP presentations more often than not recall those school reports little kids turn in with two pages of bad writing enclosed in an expensive glossy binder. I’ve even seen PP talks where a printed copy of the talk was provided to everyone in the audience — about 40 pages with no more than 20 words on each page!

  8. Philip, is this a presage of a commercial release of WimpyPoint? If so, may I suggest going the IPO route this time around…

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