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WhyWeDoNotUsePowerPoint

View the Gettysburg address as a Powerpoint presentation (really!):

JerryWeinberg

Last fall I did an invited talk at PNSQC -- something on facing up to news you'd rather not hear. I couldn't imagine a way to put the talk into powerpoint that would help it, so I didn't use slides.

Several people came up to me after the talk to express their sympathy for the unfortunate loss of my slides ("You handled it so gracefully....").

EstherDerby 042802

SteveSmith 2002.04.28

Hey, I thought that was the lowest common denominator, not the medium.

BobLee 2002.04.29

Last week Robert was following a show on cable about the search for Eden. The punchline was the the location was now a city with tall buidlings. They found paradise it was a parking lot and tall commercial buildings.

Powerpoint is the asphalt of modern communication. Clean, neat, and easy.

BeckyWinant 2002.04.30

It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone - "to relax," I told myself - but I knew it wasn't true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don't mix, but I couldn't stop myself.

I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka.

I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, "What is it exactly we are doing here?"

Things weren't going so great at home either. One evening, I turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent that night at her mother's.

I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, "Skippy, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a real problem. If you don't stop thinking on the job, you'll have to find another job." This gave me even more to think about.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. "Honey," I confessed, "I've been thinking..."

"I know you've been thinking," she said, "and I want a divorce!"

"But, Honey, surely it's not that serious."

"It is serious," she said, lower lip aquiver. "You think as much as college professors, and college professors don't make any money, so if you keep on thinking we won't have any money!"

"That's a faulty syllogism," I said impatiently, which caused her to cry.

I'd had enough. "I'm going to the library!" I snarled as I stomped out the door.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with NPR on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors... they didn't open. The library was closed.

To this day, I believe that a Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground clawing at the unfeeling glass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. "Friend, is Heavy Thinking Ruining Your Life?" it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker's Anonymous poster.

Which is why I am what I am today: a Recovering Thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video; last week it was "Porky's." Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting.

I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed... easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

KeithRay 2002.08.09

A peace activist was projecting an anti-war Power Point presentation onto an overpass, but has been asked to stop to avoid distracting drivers. Mentioned in an article about SF Bay Area peace activits. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/01/12/BA128025.DTL

KeithRay 2003.01.12

+++ The Role of Games in Teaching Systems Thinking

Because games are enjoyable, many people suspect that game-based training isn?t serious.

? the playfulness inherent in games ?makes them psychologically truer even than everyday life. Games solve major crises, train war heroes, and civilize us all. What the world needs is not less time for playing games, but more.? ? They offer the chance to make mistakes without great consequence. And they are fun.

Games can:
� Reveal an individual?s or group?s unconscious way of interacting and solving problems.
� Illustrate the power of habits, paradigms and values in identifying problems, gathering data, and making decisions.
� Replicate the structure and behavior of reoccurring patters of behavior aka, systems archetypes.
� Offer a shared experience of behavior or problem that can then form the focus of further modeling exercises.
� Help create a non-threatening environment in which participants test theories of effective social behavior and evaluate real decision options ?.
� Engage participants who have a wide range of learning styles.

Games can facilitate learning in two ways: through discovery or by confirmation. With discovery, players are given the rules of the cam and then, typically, are surprised by behaviors that emerge during the play. Under these conditions, players can learn a lot by making mistakes and failing.

When a game is played in confirmation mode, players first learn new behaviors, skills, and knowledge. Then they play the game as an opportunity to practice their new understanding and demonstrate, or confirm, its effectiveness.

Some relatively complex games may be played twice first for the purpose of discovery and then, after discussion and learning, to confirm players? new knowledge. +++

DonGray 2003.01.14

I can't blame the laser pointer on PPT, although I really wish I knew why it died when I replaced the batteries only 3 hours before.

I gave the presentation from the 2-up PDF, and it was ok. The attendees enjoyed the presentation a lot, and a bunch of people told me it was great. It would have been better without PPT. -- JohannaRothman 2002.01.15

I attended a presetation (another conference) where the PP sort of worked, but the laser clicker was't working and there was some sort of interference with the computer that caused the slides to change color.

THe presenter fussed with the clicker and computer, complained, and dissed the facilities.

After five mintues of this, I suggested that the audience could follow along with the handouts. After another 5 minutes I suggested it again, and some others joined in. The third time, she accepted the suggestion.

She had lost 15 mintues of her allotted time, her composure, and the sympathy of the audience.

Later she commented to me that she recieved poor evaluations becuase of the technical foul up. I suspect the low evaluations were the result of how she handled the technical foul up, not the technical foul up itself. (An instance of the general rule, "The problem isn't the problem; how we cope with the problem is the problem.")

EstherDerby 011903

Well, I sometimes use PowerPoint, for all the unintended reasons I suspect.

• I use it as an outliner for myself, not for something to show others, because putting pictures in the outline is relatively easy in powerpoint, and I think a lot in pictures.
• I use it sometimes in groups again mainly for pictures.
• I really like the "animation" features because I can add things to the picture a bit at a time.
• The infrastructure is usually present for "powerpoint", so a lot of the time I can get an artifact in front of a bunch of people this way. Getting headphones for each person is usually more work.

I've got a performance indicator about when the evil tool is helping vs. taking over. The last couple times I used powerpoint, "sleep" took over the PC and the screen went blank. Some helpful folks in the audience were concerned, stopping in mid-sentence. I ignored it. Conversation went on for another 5 minutes or so. When we were satisfied with the discussion of the moment, I asked: "So, you want to go on to something else?" They said "Yes" so I tapped on the machine, and a picture showed up. "How about this?"

I think the idicator is about whether the tool is driving the convesation or the converastion is driving the tool.

Some kinds of info - I think "briefings" - works pretty well with presentation tools or spreadsheets. It's about synching up some baseline data, not changing lives. A lot of meeting-ware, and meeting content (independent of media) deserves to just go away. But a lot of baseline data gets conveyed better if there's a person there. You can ask: "Do you mean this, or that?" for example. "Learn to write better" is an incomplete solution to this problem. Sometimes it's valuable, and even necessary, to communicate about stuff that we can't talk about well, let alone convey on a static page with black letters on white paper that shows up absent the person who wrote it. Sometimes I'd like to show up with a shared picture, and some handouts, and a table, and a story, because that's the best I can do, and the information to be conveyed is hard.

"Powerpoint is bad an evil" I think has to do with a mismatch of medium and message. Some stuff deserves static distribution (and mostly just deserves to be round filed when it arrives.) Some stuff is mostly baseline data, but still works better if it's talked through, usually because the people involved don't have a common interpretation or a shared vocabulary. Some stuff doesn't go onto a page, or a speech, at all. So the evil powerpoint often gets used for stuff that shouldn't be bothered with in the first place, or to attemt to deal with other stuff that needs bigger tools - like a human and an experience.

I have yet to try to communicate a technical topic - probably something about architecture - with an interpretive dance. My last attempt at using kinesthetics and movement in a "presentation" (about development systems) worked in part. They got that "over here" (left hand, down and over) meant one thing, and "over there" (right hand, same) meant another. And down was about places, while processes were higher. They didn't get some other kinesthetic stuff, mainly about the process we were in - a team formed for this one project, talking with this new guy, me, about a project where the rubber was just starting to hit the road. Which puts the burden on better to learn the language of motion. Communication effectiveness is measured in the receiver, which reports on what the sender did. They "didn't get it" means I've got some work to do about my intepretive dance.

My powerpoint stuff was fine in this case - wasn't any.

- JimBullock (Like who wrote this wasn't obvious.), 2003.1.19 & 20

Hmmm - Bullet points --> sloppy, incomplete thinking. Power Point --> Power sloppy, incomplete thinking?

--BobLee 2003.01.20

Enter Powerpoint on the Mac. For you history buffs, it ran on the Mac years before it ran on the PCs. I thought Powerpoint was really cool because I could build overheads quickly and make them my own. I succeeded at making them my own, but I didn't succeed at making them quickly. Making a good overhead -- I'm talking about illustrations rather than just bullets -- is time consuming. I invested more time in creation than I did on presentation design and practice, which I see now was clearly a mistake.

I used to love being "on stage" with my great Powerpoint presentation material. I enjoyed literally filling the audience with important concepts and leaving them with those nice Powerpoint handouts. Unfortunately, the concepts were only what I thought was important and the handouts were thrown or filed away. And, the viewpoint of the people as an audience rather than as participants led me in the wrong direction.

Today, I rarely use Powerpoint. My presentation material is no longer a series of trapezoidal projections. I now know that a speaker can connect with his or her audience better with stories and experiential exercises. That connection requires joining the energy of the participants. Melding with the participants requires spontaneity on my part. I must change my plan to fit the energy in the room. I believe melding is a clear differentiator between a speaker and a leader.

So, after that ramble, what?s wrong with Powerpoint? The technology gets in the way of the connection between the leader and the participants. Study the typical presentation: The focus is on the trapezoidal projection. The projection is often bigger than the speaker. If you are giving a presentation, there is no law that says that participants can?t be given key handouts and told to refer to them. You can put a lot more information on a page using a 600dpi laser/inkjet rather than a trapezoidal projection. Powerpoint slides with bullet points seem to me as crutches for the speaker. The speaker looks at them rather than the audience. There is no law that says you can?t use note cards or an outline.

I believe that an audience only become participants when they are engaged. No one needs Powerpoint to engage the participants. Any presentation that I have given that has had experiential exercises has had more connection and feedback. Thus, learning happens for all the participants, including the leader.

SteveSmith 2003.01.22

An experience report of sorts... I've used PowerPoint at a conference recently. My slides are up on the Web, here : http://www.club-java.com/Public/slides/xp/LB-ClubJava2.ppt.

There were four slides in there. The first one was the "title" slide, with my name and email address. I had it up about five seconds.

The second has a photograph of the Challenger shuttle exploding in mid-flight in 1986, and another shuttle graphic. The human aspects of the disastrous shuttle launch were a main topic of my 30 minute talk, which discussed Extreme Programming in the context of a book by Christian Morel, "Les D�cisions Absurdes" (Absurd Decisions). I had the second slide up for a couple minutes, I think.

The third slide bears the words "Extreme Programming is not a technique", I warned my audience that I had intended this as a subliminal message, or as eye candy for the people who could not break with the habit of looking at the screen while the speaker was speaking. This stayed up for the rest of my talk.

I didn't have to display the fourth slide, which has references for the books I mentioned; I had the books themselves in my knapsack and put them into the hands of the smallish (under 50) audience during the talk.

I gave the talk mostly from an outline printed on an ordinary sheet of paper. Most of the time I was directly adressing the audience, on one occasion handing someone the microphone to solicit a comment.

Nobody walked out, at any rate. At least two people described the talk afterwards as "thought provoking".

LaurentBossavit 2003.01.22

It's not free, by the way: http://www.apple.com/

KeithRay 2003.01.23

DaveSmith 30 Jan 2003

- BeckyWinant 2-24-03

So think of the possibilities for simulations. Is smelly software in Europe perfume in the US or toejam in Asia?

- BeckyWinant 2-25-03

- BeckyWinant 2-25-03

Here is a useful comment on conference presentations and the use of "slides" called "Conference Presentation Judo" from one of the "perl-ites" and a generally smart guy. The non-presentation itself is semi-famous:

http://perl.plover.com/yak/presentation/samples/notes.html

You know, the "smart guy" thing is probably an indicator too. Lots of presenta-droids have nothing to say, nothing in their little brains but their bullet points (at 3 to 5 per slide), and make no connection with their audience or the "materials." PowerPoint seems to mask and enable the content free activity somewhat, while it's use isn't much of a hinderence to the contentful.

That's probably why I haven't noticed PowerPoint much. Under non-communication I just drift away, regardless of the medium.

- JimBullock, 2003.02.22 (Maybe I should work on that drifting part . . . )

Why Neanderthals became extinct

KenEstes 2003.04.22

Edward Tufte has a new short book about the misuse of powerpoint in corporate world.

from the fifth page of his book page http://www.edwardtufte.com/2115123989/tufte/books_pp

In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now "slideware" computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.

Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?

24 pages, full color, at the printer, please order now, will be shipped by May 12.

KenEstes 2003.05.11

Here is something I found stuck to the wall next to the coffee machine at work. It is a take off on the "This is My Rifle..." creed qouted by military recruits for many years. This is supposed to be humorous.

The Power Point Ranger Creed

This is my Power Point. There are many like it, but mine is 97.

My Power Point is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life.

My Power Point without me is useless. Without my Power Point, I am useless.

I must format my slides true. I must brief them better than the other staff sections who are trying to out brief me.

I must brief the impact on the CINC before he asks me. I will. My Power Point and myself know that what counts in this war is not the information. We know that it is the number of slides, the colors of the highlights, and the format of the bullets that counts.

My Power Point is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its fonts, its accessories, its formats, and its colors.

I will keep my Power Point slides current and ready to brief. We will become part of each other. We will...

Before God I swear this creed. My Power Point and myself are defenders of my country. We are the masters of our subject. We are the saviors of my career.

So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but peace (and the next exercise)!

DwaynePhillips 12 May 2003

Have you ever played the saxaphone? I did for a while when in high school. I had a year with little to do so I learned three or four extra instruments. The thing I heard people say about the saxaphone was that it was the easiest instrument to learn how to play badly.

Maybe Power Point is like the saxaphone. It is really easy to communicate poorly with Power Point. I suppose there is something about the templates, bullets, pages, simple graphics, etc. that make it easy to just "throw something up there."

At work I have to make Power Point presentations. That is what we do. The thing I do differently from most is that I write a paper on the topic and then "summarize" it on the slides. I hand out the paper before the presentation and tell people that the slides summarize the paper. That seems to help me communicate better.

DwaynePhillips 13 May 2003

While I was at Mail.com and just beginning to read about "Change Artistry" I heard rumors of one manager in another department who was clearly a change artist. One of the interesting things about him was that he had found a way to use power point effectively. He called his power point presentations "animal pictures" as in "I am going to tell you a children story".

I understand that his presentations were very effective, but they were only part of the message. He would spend weeks before the event laying the ground work with all the executive meeting with them privately so that he could find out their concerns and be sure that the final presentation had everyones "fingerprints" on it. At the meeting, he would always announce at the meetings that this was a "joint effort" even though he knew that others contributions were small. To prepare his audiance, he would bump into executives in the hall way and announce "we (all) are working on a problem (which you probably do not know about) and will be having a meeting about our findings in a few weeks". All this pre-work prepared the minds of those attending to fully receive his presentation.

A friend of mine, who worked closely with him, once made a presentation of some research he had been doing. He was told afterwards that the presentation was too detailed. The manager only wanted "animal pictures". He wanted to receive his information in the same way as he presented it. He believed that it was a valid way to pass information to people who had little time or attention to details which were not under their immediate control.

Ken 2003.05.13

You have hit on something important here Ken. There's a sort of expected transaction in any communication, about content, about the degree of detail, about the structure, and about how the participants - er - participate. I learned about this explicitly from my boss, Larry "the wounded gorilla" when his boss was all over my stuff all the time. "What's up with that?" is the succinct translation of what I asked. "Meta-boss doesn't know yet whether you can deliver. He doesn't know how to calibrate what he hears from you. So he is trying to gather enough information to make his own engineering determination of whether this is going to work."

"Oh" says I "So, my plan here to get left alone is to ship with no surprises, and make sure he correctly understands the situation at all times." "Yep" said the gorilla. Literally, "ungh" but I had calibrated him already.

I did mess this up. See, after the delivering part, and the being right part, and some other stuff, I started reaping the rewards of success - more work. - JimBullock, 2003.05.13

At this link, Edward Tufte deconstructs one of the Power Point slides used to present an analysis of tile damage on the Columbia shuttle. This was part of the analysis that went on between the time everybody saw a big, brown piece of stuff come off the tank during launch, and the time the craft tore itself into little pieces on reentry. Clearly, the analysis wasn't effective in the sense of figuring out what was going to happen from the information at hand.

.

If you've read Tufte's Visual Explanations where he takes apart the NASA reports on O-ring behavior available prior to the Challenger exploding mid-ascent, you know how good the analysis above will be. If you haven't read Tufte's book, go read the stuff at the link, and get a taste of how beaurocratese and obscuranto obscure information. In his book Tufte provides several alternative presentations of the O ring data, that make it dead obvious that they shouldn't have flown the thing. The NASA presentations of the same data leave you (or me anyway) confused about what you just read.

Clearly, NASA wasn't paying attention to the experience of the Challenger, since their obfuscated style persists. Clearly the people running that agency aren't up to the job. There is no excuse for this level of incompetence in an organization that ought to be, could be, once was, about discovering the very best of what we humans could be and do. None.

-- JimBullock, 2003.05.15

I recommend Tufte's work. See www.edwardtufte.com

KenEstes, I appreciate you for pointing out this new product from Tufte last week, thanks.

DwaynePhillips 16 May 2003

Power Point (PP) is low resolution. Most PP presentations today are shown on a screen t

A very funny presentation in PPT, about the current state & future of Perl is here:

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2003/07/16/soto2003.html?page=11

I think it's interesting because it's use of PPT is pretty much anti the PPT organization & presentation model. Yes, it's still a brain dump, but it's more in the "one picture" kind of POV. Tufte would have a hemmorage, I suspect, about the use of ink. But I can picture the guy doing the schtick associated with the slides, and suspect that it would be very funny.

For practicing personal effectiveness, this kind of presentation would be pretty - er - ineffective.

-- JimBullock, 2003.07.17

Actually, Jim, if we had a PP presentation that was as good as that one, I'd put it in AYE. This one had both Dani and me rolling on the floor laughing. That's always a good session at AYE, if it does that. I think perhaps the reason PP presentations are not more effective at other conferences is that everyone is too polite to laugh out loud at what's funny. If they weren't, most conferences would be a riot of fun. - JerryWeinberg 2003.07.19

I'm delighted you both found that presentation funny. There's a lot to be said for humor in doing real work. A lot to be said for getting serious when you're serious as well. So much work stuff is neither free and fun, nor serious and sincere. That's probably a good indicator of a waste of time.

There's some kind of tacit agreement at most conferences (and businesses) that you won't admit certain kinds of funny things are funny. Agreements like that make a culture, sometimes a dysfunctional one. --- JimBullock 2003.07.20 (Am I joking? How would I know?)

Interesting article here in the NY times (free registration required.) I think this is part of why PPT free, and experiential delivery work differently than PPT and non-experiential. But only part.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24mess.html

-- JimBullock, 2003.07.25 (Article, (registration), Why experiential is different. Link.)

Go to http://www.dc.com/bullfighter

DwaynePhillips 15 August 2003

I've taken a fair number of seminars and seen talks on good presenting. They're not that common (and mostly not that good), and it seems that companies only occasionally stick their heads up, briefly, and see that presentation skills are not so good. But such indulgent "personal development" programs are usually seen, in fairly short order, not to contribute to quarterly profits and get axed. Unfortunate, because things like this are where improvements could be made. Bashing Power Point because of bad presentations is about as productive as bashing paper because of bad books. If someone wants to do something constructive, they might instead lead a session on do's and don'ts for presentations with Power Point (I seriously doubt that it, or someting like it (see http://www.OpenOffice.org) will ever go away, so you might as well accept it and learn the best way to work with it.

BruceEckel September 6 2003

PP is a shorthand for us, a code word for any device you use to "protect" yourself from your audience rather than be involved with them. At AYE, we choose presenters based on their ability to facilitate learning - their personal effectiveness is one of the models we try to offer at Amplifying Your Effectiveness. Some of us use handouts that people can look at if their learning style works that way, but we don't favor having a bunch of peple sitting in the dark listening to another person read lists to them off a screen.

If you or someone else would like to offer a session on how to make good use of PP or any other tool, we'd love to have such a contributed session. I think you'll see that we have several sessions that involve using tools well (which would include PP) and/or making good presentations (in person, in writing, or whatever). That's part of effectiveness. - JerryWeinberg 2003.00.06

Were it not for the Powerpoint wizards and default presentations, I'd be inclined to agree. The "fairway" in PP--and, to be fair, in many of the other presentation tools--is to think in terms of a title with 3-5 bullet points, with lots of shiney toys (backgrounds, visual effects, audio effects, clip-art) are within easy reach to spruce things up. The last time I looked, the out-of-the-box experience with PP didn't include any guidance on giving effective presentations. Many of the books on PP deal strictly with mechanics (including lots of info on how to use all of those bright and shiny toys).

Sure, you can blame the presenters, but lacking training in presentation, many people will take their guidance from the tool.

--DaveSmith 2003.09.06

In Sept 2003 Busniess 2.0 magazine is an article

"Kung Fu Secrets of the PowerPoint Masters"

Here are the major sections:

1) Stun them with Wordplay.

2) Beware the fonts of Fury.

3) Plot your moves Craftily.

4) Illuminate your Words.

5) Make brevity a Virtue.

6) Control your implus to go Hollywood

7) Be at peace.

KenEstes 2003.09.10

One good use of Power Point is a medium to connect things together. For example, at the Agile Development Conference JerryWeinberg had an excellent presentation where he showed several short video clips to help illustrate his points. I think he put them together as a DVD? Another way to group the videos would have been with Power Point. You can attached each video clip to pages in Power Point. Click forward to the next page and show the next video. I think that would take less knowledge of software packages and video production than the way Jerry did it. Hence, Power Point can be a convenient way to package a presentation.

DwaynePhillips 11 September 2003

I have put up a contributed session for this: PowerPointIsNotEvil

BruceEckel 31 October 2003

A quote: "Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you're saying is true, not just accurate. Talking about pollution...? Show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog..."

KeithRay 2004.06.28

AlanFrancis 2004.06.29

This may be of interest...

"The Breakup Style of PowerPoint", or the art of the Dear-Jane presentation:

LaurentBossavit 2004.07.30

When I originally sent my slides in, the conference organizer emailed me, concerned I didn't have enough material for the full hour. I replied that I had plenty of stories, and was practicing so I wouldn't run out of time. He was suspicious, but didn't say any more.

When I arrived at the conference, I saw why he'd been so concerned. One of the other keynoters had sent in about 100 slides. I don't quite see how a person can get through 100 slides in an hour (some of them were background), and because of my flights, I didn't get a chance to hear that presenter speak.

At the end of the conference, I was talking with the organizer, who was relieved -- and happy -- with my keynote. He was happily surprised that the attendees wanted practice, and that the attendees felt (via their feedback forms) that I had given them enough written information. -- JohannaRothman 2005.04.11

An Ironic Twist.

I am working on a presentation on CMMI, using, of course, ppt slides ... trying to at LEAST add more white space and pictures. I did a search for the word "software" in the powerpoint photograph collection.

Surprise. The second picture in the set was a PICTURE OF JERRY.

Hey, even Watts doesn't have his picture in powerpoint... at least that I have found. So, is that a new meter for Famous??

Diane 4-19-2005

ThomRossi 2005.4.20

The worst thing, I think, about PP is the lists of bullet points. You had a great idea to just hand those out, if you feel you need them. Then each student gets to choose, and no PP is needed just for that. - JerryWeinberg 2005.04.20

Don Norman has a very thoughtful response to Tufte here: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/in_defense_of_powerp.html

quotes:

"Talks should be limited to getting across just a few critical points ... This is one of the points Tufte has continually failed to grasp, not only in his diatribe against PowerPoint, but in almost all of his publications and talks... Tufte is a statistician and I suspect that for him, nothing could be more delightful than a graph or chart which can capture the interest for hours, where each new perusal yields even more information. I agree that this is a marvelous outcome, but primarily for readers, for people sitting in comfortable chairs, with good light and perhaps a writing pad. For people with a lot of time to spend, to think, to ponder. This is not what happens within a talk. Present a rich and complex slide and the viewer is lost. By the time they have figured out the slide, the speaker is off on some other topic...

"... let me review Tufte's complaint about the presentation of data during the NASA Columbia incident. Here, Tufte points to a complex slide with 19 lines of text, with six different levels of hierarchy, displaying eleven sentences. The complaint, of course, is that the analyses failed to predict the actual damage that had occurred to the wing tiles when they had been struck by foam. Tufte goes on at excessive length to indicate why the slide is so poor and why it obscures information that might have led to a different conclusion. PowerPoint is bad, he concludes.

"I differ most strongly with this assessment. Yes, the slide is very bad. Yes, it is almost incomprehensible. But in my opinion, the slide should have had less information on it�Tufte wants more information. He demonstrates this by showing how many words are on a page of a textbook. "So what?" I say. We read textbooks very differently than we listen to talks.

"Look, it was a bad slide, but that isn't where the error lay. The error was in the conclusion reached by the experts. They did the analysis, and they decided that it was unlikely that significant damage had been done. Then they gave a PowerPoint presentation to others to announce their findings. The fault is with the findings, not with the slides...."

"... Remember: this slide presentation was meant to present the conclusion of their report. Therefore, they highlighted the information they thought important and minimized the parts they thought not important..."

-- KeithRay 2005.07.31

I note that beyond that point, Don Norman seems to be in agreement with Tufte. His article switches over about midway to agreeing with Tufte's arguments as I remember (I need to reread) even if he often doesn't acknowledge the agreement.

MikeMelendez 2005.08.01

"To Ron's credit, it was one helluva way to go out," human resources manager Gail Everts said. "Ron clearly spent a lot of time on that presentation. If the subject matter weren't so heavy, we'd probably use it to train his replacement."

--DaveSmith 2005.10.09

Copywriter Gita Pruriyaran said the presentation "had room for improvement."

"I felt some of the later transitions were weak," Pruriyaran said. "The point of a transition is to maintain audience interest and lighten the mood. To me, the door-closing sound effects in Will & Funeral were repetitive and heavy-handed. But Ron's choice to end with that Hamlet quote and then fade to black was really powerful. There wasn't a dry eye in the room when Hector flipped off the projector and brought up the lights."

If it's real, this Gita person needs some serious psychiatric work. - JerryWeinberg 2005.10.09

It's an article in "The Onion", Jerry, so it's fiction. Some argue that all the jokes in that mag are bad jokes. I rather like it. - jb