
Our love-hate relationship with PowerPoint - sonabinu
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20180125-our-love-hate-relationship-with-powerpoint
======
peoplewindow
I think this is the key part:

 _Around the same time as PowerPoint was gaining popularity, middle management
was becoming massively criticised, says Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural
studies at Goldsmiths at the University of London. Fuller suggests there’s a
connection: because PowerPoint let more people share their ideas, it exposed
the failings of middle management and inadvertently led to an exodus of people
from these roles, he says. “Perhaps their ideas could be seen for the trivia
they were, to some extent.”_

There's lots of hate for PowerPoint out there, but it's not really PowerPoint
that people hate. PP is just a tool for arranging text and images in slide
form, it's pretty anodyne. What people hate is the low quality Twitter-scale
corporate thought that tends to find its natural home in slideware form (and
_only_ slideware).

Done well, slide decks can be awesome. They allow a quick read through of a
presentation if you weren't able to attend the speech itself, or chose to skip
it believing the additional spoken words wouldn't add much. They add colour to
otherwise boring documents. When giving talks, they act as useful prompts to
stop the speaker forgetting or accidentally skipping important points. Would
Ed Miliband have so famously forgot to mention the UK government deficit in
his key speech if he'd had a slide deck to jog his memory and keep him on
track? Probably not.

Put the blame where it lies - on the vast ranks of people doing dubious non-
jobs, people whose primary output is not well written essays arguing a
strategy point but rather ppts that regurgitate cliches and groupthink in 12pt
font, with the drawing of absurd diagrams acting as a substitute for actual
work.

~~~
sharpercoder
My experience is that the best talks have useless slidedecks. That's because
the decks support the talk and do not provide a foundation for the talk. Less
good talks often use the deck as a documentation platform; in that case decks
become much more useful for reading offline. The exception is when decks are
commented heavily for people reading it offline. But I don't see this
happening often. Usually, comments are used for the speaker to have some
information ready when needed during the talk.

~~~
ci5er
I tend to put my narrative / talking-points / take-aways in the Notes section
so that I can print them out together with the slides themselves and leave
them behind for the audience after the talk.

That way - I'm not reading the slides to the audience - and am able to create
context for later readers without cluttering the slides with too much
verbiage.

Most of my meaty slides have to do with process, charts of various data sets
and maybe high level technical architectural concept-ware. Much of the
narrative is often about context, relevance and impact: "so what?".

------
Aloha
PowerPoint is a fantastic tool when used as designed - to create slide decks
to provide assistive material for an in person presentation, or longer report.

The issue is, most people don't use PowerPoint like that, rather than being
assistive, it becomes the end result, so you end up with very complex material
distilled down to a single slide, loosing much of its value and context - or
worse, inscrutable diagrams and charts crammed with so much detail no one
could understand them, and again, often lacking in context.

I once worked for a large telecom - everything came 'round in a slide deck;

Need an account for this service? PowerPoint

Need to understand this complex technical issue? PowerPoint

Need directions to configure some software? PowerPoint

Need some common links for services? PowerPoint

It was absurd - I joked that if PowerPoint suddenly disappeared, no one at the
office would know how to get anything done.

~~~
badsectoracula
On the other hand, the slides i see from places like GDC and Siggraph are by
themselves almost always good enough to be self contained (the presentations
are certainly better but by making the slides usable by themselves you make
them useful for a lot more people).

As an example the main reason the last game i worked at had screen space
decals was that i randomly read Pope Kim's SSD SIGGRAPH 2012 slides [1] which
had enough detail for me to create a quick prototype in the editor and toss
around the artists. Considering how much the artists used SSDs all over the
place, the slides being self contained certainly made a difference.

Personally, as someone who doesn't tend to visit conferences and instead
prefers to read things from his computer (and watch on youtube too, but i
still prefer to read than watch), i'd hate it if slides were reduced to just
assistive material :-P.

[1] [https://www.slideshare.net/blindrenderer/screen-space-
decals...](https://www.slideshare.net/blindrenderer/screen-space-decals-in-
warhammer-40000-space-marine-14699854)

~~~
ci5er
Agreed. Some of the old SIGGRAPH course material like Baraff's PBM stuff[0]
was simple/clear and stood on its own legs.

He didn't use the Notes section of PPT to print leave behinds (like my lazy
own self does) - but took the time to interleave his talking points with his
slides for the "leave-behind".

Karl Sims ... Same thing.

I still use some of the old SIGGRAPH material to teach/tutor my now university
age kids how to create interesting projects (like the old x-springies) around
numerical methods and creating little toy beginner physics engines.

[0]
[https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-00-winter/paper...](https://graphics.stanford.edu/courses/cs448b-00-winter/papers/phys_model.pdf)
(slides - including Witkin's are after the whitepaper-ish looking stuff at the
front of the file)

------
Theodores
The problem with Powerpoint is that it is 'not the web'. So a great amount of
resource goes into a deck of slides with the graphics department doing images,
someone else getting reports and someone else editing the whole thing for the
boss to present.

There may actually be great things in this presentation, things that should be
on the main website but they are not on the main website, they are only
available in this proprietary presentation format.

By now the small to medium size business has a whole team of people bothering
themselves with these presentations and probably working in CMYK for the
graphics. This team did not think to try using HTML and the web, they got
stuck in Powerpoint, Word, Excel and the 1990's way of working non-
collaboratively. Information gets prepared for the boss in these slide decks
rather than be widely available for logged in web users to the company
website.

PDF files used for website design proposals are my pet peeve. However it is
the legacy workflows and duplication of effort that bugs me, when companies
aren't willing to step up and use the new tools but bumble along the
'Powerpoint way'.

~~~
ci5er
The other problem with Powerpoint is that it enables the some of the worst
professional behavior in us individually and in groups. Some people don't like
to write. Some people don't like to read. Or read mail-outs before a meeting.
And some people like to hide in endless meetings to appear as if they are busy
(working), while they are just busy in endless meetings not working.

Many if not most 8~20 slide presentations could be more succinctly (and index-
ably / search-ably) provided to the audience in a two-three page memo with a
chart or diagram or two. Even a short white-paper might be nice to articulate
a case for present and future audiences.

But at my current company - I give "lunch seminars" with powerpoint slide
support on a repeat-cycle (periodically - because we're growing - there are
always people who haven't seen it yet), because (from what I can tell), (some?
many? most?) people can't be tossed to read a 4~5-page written summary of the
topic. (Huge waste of company resources to support some lame-o trucculance in
my mind - but I could be wrong)

EDIT: Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my
company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not (or
will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format, in an
organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting starts, by
having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's obligation to
spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move those people out the
"Next!" door?

~~~
bsder
> Please allow me to ask a question of the HN crowd. To me, if it were my
> company (and I have had a few with varied success), if an employee can not
> (or will not) read and can not (or will not) write in a structured format,
> in an organized way, and be prepared for meetings, before the meeting
> starts, by having read all of the relevant material -- is it the company's
> obligation to spoon-feed them? Or should the company get tight and move
> those people out the "Next!" door?

Up to you.

If you are running the company, you can set the expectation and punishment.

However, if I have read all the relevant material, what was the point of the
meeting?

The problem is that meetings wind up serving multiple purposes, and you don't
always know which one you are in before the meeting starts. There are meetings
to hash out a difficult problem (rare, but very important). There are meetings
to disseminate information and vision (common, and useless to a lot of people
but required because you never know when you are the person who missed the
relevant info). There are meetings to CYA (too common). There are meetings to
solve things which cross management boundaries or allocate resources (somewhat
less common, but important). Then there are simply political or show meetings
by useless people (sadly too common).

In reality, the really big problem is that people don't feel able to slag a
meeting because it looks like you are slagging the person in charge of the
meeting. I can send back "Will Not Attend" to meeting requests and will get
indignant responses of:

"What the hell do you mean you won't attend?"

"Fine, tell me what input from me that you are going to need."

"Ummmmmmmmmm."

"Exactly. When you can tell me what input I'm supposed to give other than
consumption of oxygen, I'll attend."

------
dingo_bat
I don't get it. Powerpoint is literally perfect. There are no downsides. It's
up to you to not overdo the designs and the animations.

Personally, I always use the default theme (Black Calibri text on white
background), with no animations or transitions. The included drawing tools are
also world class, and help get your point across as long as you don't make it
too complex.

~~~
arbie
> I don't get it. Powerpoint is literally perfect. There are no downsides.
> It's up to you to not overdo the designs and the animations.

Only if you can refrain from the Design tab, something that MS seems to
emphasize with every update.

~~~
btschaegg
Oh yes. This.

I mean, if I'm looking at a presentation on some topic, I could't care less
about what the author used as a tool, as long as it works properly.

But what some people inflict on others with their "designed" slides is just
beyond cruel. And honestly: If there are people that can present complex
algorithms on a black and white slideset - and there are astoundingly good
presentations that do this! - you can keep it simple, too. No reason to use
ugly pixelated (and stolen!) ClipArt, ugly background images that clash with
the foreground etc. Yuck.

------
s_T_e_v_o
I have a funny PowerPoint story.

I worked for hours putting together a presentation to the VPs and owners of
the company.

To make it extra special I used background water marks from rainbow infrared
scans of very hot equipment. With the transparency set to around 15%, each
slide made a very appealing pastel presentation.

At the start of the presentation something went wrong because the software rev
of the machine to present on was lower than the one I developed on.

All my water marks came out in full intensity. My presentation looked like an
Andy Warhol psychedelic acid tripping fantasy.

My boss, on seeing the first slide, said roll with it, as he motioned with his
hand, moving with a circular motion, because you know, time is money, and more
importantly, the big bosses have no capacity for waiting on peons.

So side 1 wasn't so bad, but as each slide progressed, each infrared back
ground became more and more intense. The CFO owner on each slide would
grimace, reminding me of the kid in Home Alone, looking like he was pushed
back in his chair by a stiff breeze.

The topic could be interesting to a processing engineering nerd, but under
ordinary circumstances it would be lost on all but 2 others in the room. This
presentation, however, is burned into the memory of everyone in the room. I am
certain nobody remembers a thing I said, but they remember the trippy
presentation by sTevo.

------
vadimberman
I'll join the chorus.

It's a tool. Its only fault is that it made it easy to visualise concepts, and
was used by poor presenters to visualise poor concepts.

It's like blaming fire for poorly cooked food.

------
monkeydust
I have started to use Juypter notebook instead of ppt where I am presenting
something that is heavily using datasets.

Cool thing is that audience can ask 'what if' questions and you can show them
in real time by changing bit of code.

------
477353468463695
Over the past two months at my job, I had the task to sift through our
intranet, finding as it turns out mostly PowerPoint presentations and then
sticking all of that information into a OneNote document.

Transfering information from one badly indexable, not deep-linkable and
completely inappropriate documentation format to the next.

And then I was told to put the link to the OneNote document into a PowerPoint
presentation, so that the PowerPoint with the link in it could be uploaded to
the intranet.

~~~
mpfundstein
what is your job?

~~~
hahamrfunnyguy
PowerPoint Documentation Coordinator

------
reubenswartz
I hate "PowerPoint", but what I really hate is bad meetings with the veneer of
professionalism from having a presentation. I've wasted plenty of my life in
such meetings (sometimes giving the presentation).

Of course, there were boring meetings and boring slides before PowerPoint. I'm
old enough to remember professors using those transparent slides.

IMHO, things would go better if: * meetings had a clear objective, so you
could tell what kind of information you might need to gather, share, or
discuss to achieve it. * people focused on the story, not the document. I've
found that most people seem to think that "writing presentation" == "preparing
for the meeting", rather than being able to discuss the story without a
presentation, and having it there to jog your memory and provide some visual
aids. * we didn't ask presentations to work for both people in the meeting,
and those who weren't there, but want to "see the presentation". These are
totally different requirements to put on a document, and as a result, it's
hard to do either one well.

I've given a ton of "read slide title and bullet point" presentations (sorry,
humanity), and I wouldn't say I'm a master or anything now, but I know I can
do the whole presentation without slides, and I might blow through 5 or more
slides in a minute, just using each as a beat to make a specific point
visually, and then I might spend 5 minutes on one slide, digging into more
complex information.

The slide deck will not make sense to people who weren't there. ;-) But a 1-2
page set of notes can summarize it, which comes from preparing the story
itself.

------
kfk
Somebody said power point is a crime against humanity. I don't agree fully as
it is a great tool if used in the right way. Unfortunately it is almost always
overused and crammed with too much information. I have seen decks of 90+
slides full of charts and tables made in various excel files and all numbers
had to tie. Such presentations cost organization millions of wasted labor and
don't even get to the point. They give a false sense of "knowing what is going
on" while in reality nobody analyses the problems well enough. In fact
everyone is too busy preparing and tidying off slides.

Also somebody here in the comments said this ready: slides are locked in files
poorly shared across the organization. There is a huge amount of valuable
information that nobody can search. It is sometimes easier to find detailed
information on any random fact on the web than key information in your
company.

I think banning power point might be too strong, but companies should force a
"code of conduct" on this tool and should seriously figure out a better way
for information to surface to employees when they need it.

------
Simulacra
Even though my primary working computer is a PC, I always default to Apple
keynote for presentation slides. I feel it just works better for me. At my
work, we make presentations all the time, and our presentations are generally
more detailed because we want people to be able to review them later.

------
peterburkimsher
One of the original authors of PowerPoint wrote a fascinating story about the
history of its development.

[http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-
bul...](http://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-
bullets/gaskins-sweating-bullets-webpdf-isbn-9780985142414.pdf)

