The people who seem to rail the most against PowerPoint are the ones who cannot create meaningful and well-designed presentations. It is like any other tool, if you use it improperly, the results can be terrible. Used properly, it is an effective and efficient way to display your information and ideas.
I agree. But I think the reason is only partly due to lack of knowledge of what Powerpoint can do (and how to do it efficiently) or on how to create the presentation. I think the main reason for poor presentations (with Powerpoint or any other tool) is the approach of leaving the "preparing the presentation" as the last bullet point in the TO DO list. As if the way content is delivered does not matter. I see tons of corporate presentation that have been clearly put together one or two days before that very important meeting. People often wonder why presentations by consultants (think Mckinsey, BCG, Bain and similar) look so smooth and effective (there are always exceptions, of course), but that is because the PP presentation is for them often THE document they deliver, not the 20MB excel model behind that, not the weeks of research, etc.). They start thinking about the storyline from day one, they set up the analysis based on what they think should be on the slides and what is the best way to pass a certain message, and they spend an absurd amount of time reviewing the slides to make sure that those are the best they can be, within the time constraints they have. All this has nothing to do with fancy transitions like infinite zoom etc.
And to add one more point, one of the old school partners at a management consultancy (he started as a consultant way before computers became widely available) mentioned the clear drop in presentation quality (also by consultants) with the new tools like powerpoint compared to the old times of decals on transparent sheets for projectors, that forced you to spend hours planning how a slide should look like before even touching the sheet, because the time cost of errors was so high.
Sort of like how Dijkstra supposedly lamented that kids didn’t think about their code carefully enough when using interactive terminals as they did when they had to use punch cards.
While that's generally true PowerPoint (and other presentation software that followed in its footstep) not only makes it easy to craft terrible presentations by its default settings it almost guides you along that path the most notorious example being that the default template for any new non-cover slide is the bullet point.
Can you blame inexperienced presentation designers to then fill that blank sheet with as many bullet points as they can?
Inexperienced presentation designers become experienced presentation designers but those habits remain and can be very hard to unlearn, which is how you get expertly crafted 50+ slides monstrosities of bullet-pointy splendour.
Also the fact that if you stuff enough text into a slide it won't overflow outside the slide, but rather Powerpoint helpfully starts to shrink the font size!
The problem with PPT is that it encourages the creation of bad presentations, encourages the emphasis of style over substance. Honestly, under what circumstances can (say) a flashy transition animation ever convey useful information? 90% of PPT's features exist so you can distract the audience from the fact that the presentation has no substance with bright shiny things.
Or it's an acknowledgment of the reality that humans aren't computers just absorbing information during a presentation. They get bored, they get restless, they get distracted, etc. I'm not saying effects aren't used in the way you say, but I think they can have a place to keep a presentation from becoming dull and monotonous.
Even the most interesting content can lose the audience if the way its presented doesn't hold their attention.
If a presentation is boring and monotonous then the way to fix that is not by distracting the audience with bright shiny things. The way to fix it is to change the presentation so that the information conveyed is relevant and interesting rather than boring and monotonous. And if that's not possible then the way to fix it is to cancel the presentation and just point people to a document they can refer to.
Seriously, the whole point of giving a presentation is that sometimes watching a person tell a story about whatever the topic is is better than reading about it. If that's not the case (and often it's not), then a presentation is a waste of everyone's time.
Anything designed by engineers for engineers is probably not going to have much style. A lot of software out there works the same way it has worked since the 80s because the guys originally making it back then still make it today, same with their users. Clunky CAD software like Cadence is probably the most obvious example. I could have gone back in time to 1995 and the software wouldn't look any different. At least things like AutoCAD maintain their old school functionality but add features and UI improvements. It all depends on what kind of market the software company is looking to sell to. Autodesk wants to be on the front of innovation for their stuff so they can sell to new companies and education (i.e. young people). Cadence sells to companies that have been doing the same stuff for years and have no plans on changing.
A whiteboard. Seriously. A presentation is (or at least should be) first and foremost about a human being telling a story, which humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years. If you can't tell an effective story without a computer then no software is going to save you.
Take a look at some of Eddie Woo's videos on YouTube. He gives some of the best presentations ever with nothing but himself and a whiteboard.
I strongly prefer technical or business presentations not to tell stories. Tell me business or technical stuff. Is shiny effect is what it takes to keep audience focus, then I don't mind it if the content is there. And if that allows to create acceptable presentations to more technical less showmany people, then all the better.
"The story" is just another shiny thing, just in different form.
No. The story is not just there to hold your attention. The story actually matters. The story provides the context, the reason you should care about the topic being presented. Boring presentations are often that way because the presenter make mistaken assumptions about shared context between themselves and the audience.
If I tell you, for example, that Cody Bellinger committed an error in the first inning of yesterday's game that fact in isolation isn't very interesting, particularly if you don't know who Cody Bellinger is. If I tell you that that error set the stage for the Astros winning their first world series in their history suddenly it becomes a lot more interesting.
A more technical example: if I tell you that Edwards curves have complete point addition and doubling formulas that fact in isolation isn't very interesting. But if you know that having such formulas enables you to build cryptographic systems that are more resistant to side-channel attacks, suddenly it's more interesting. (Assuming, of course, you know what side-channel attacks are. If you don't, then I have to be explicit about more of the story: there are attackers who want to break into your secret stuff, and one of the ways they do this is by looking at things like how long your code takes to run under different circumstances. Notice that now we have all of the elements of a good story: a protagonist, an antagonist, conflict... )
This is a fundamental feature of human psychology. Humans don't care about things for their own sake, they care about things that help them to achieve goals. Once you have a goal, you have a person who is trying to achieve that goal (i.e. a protagonist) and some reason they are at least temporarily unable to achieve that goal, and hence some agent thwarting their ambition (i.e. an antagonist). The antagonist doesn't have to be another human (c.f. Moby Dick). Often the antagonist is the laws of physics. But there is always a story behind anything that anyone cares about.
Sorry I guess. I dont know who Cody Bellinger or Astros are nor do I know what sport they compete at. So I mean, that particular story is not much interesting.
Likewise, I like math. I am one of those people who honestly like math instead of culture around math that just sounds cool. I also have interests in security. I like to read easily digestible technical blogs about it.
Stories about hackers in presentations about above are annoying to me. I came to learn and instead I am getting fairy tale. Most of them are bullshit, despite following protagonist, antagonist conflict formula that is repeated so much that anything that goes just slightly against it makes entertainment hundred times more interesting.
And that story is not helping me to achieve any goal, except of realizing that presenter is wasting my time. I heard already enough presentations with formulaic stories in them to know what is the part I usually wish presenter would skip. And I guess really good writer could create an interesting story, but I don't really expect that from technical presenter who I would prefer to focus more on whether his explanations are clear then on this.
> Sorry I guess. I dont know who Cody Bellinger or Astros are nor do I know what sport they compete at. So I mean, that particular story is not much interesting.
Yes, that was exactly my point.
Cody Bellinger is a baseball player. Baseball is a sport played mainly but not exclusively in the United States. It is a team sport. The annual championship game for baseball is called the World Series (despite the fact that the competing teams are almost exclusively from the U.S.) The world series is a best-of-seven tournament.
This year the world series was played between a team called the Houston Astros (or just "the Astros" for short) and another team called the Los Angeles Dodgers ("the Dodgers"). The Dodgers have not won a World Series since 1988. The Astros have never won one (until yesterday).
Because it is a best-of-seven series, the length of the tournament varies. It can be as short as four games (if one team wins them all) or as long as seven (if both teams wins three games apiece). Naturally, the tournament is considered most exciting in the latter circumstance, which was the case yesterday.
A game of baseball is divided into nine periods called "innings". (Additional innings can be played if there is a tie at the end of the ninth inning, but that didn't happen yesterday.) Each inning is further divided into two halves called the "top" and the "bottom".
Yesterday, during the top of the first inning (i.e. near the start of the game) in the seventh game of the world series (i.e. the crucial game which would decide the championship) a player on the Dodgers named Cody Bellinger made a mistake. He was attempting to throw the ball to another player on his team, but the throw was off-target and the other player was not able to catch the ball. As a result, the Astros scored two points in quick succession, which they would not have done had the throw been on-target. Baseball tends to be a low-scoring game. Double-digit scores are rare. So a two point lead is significant.
That one mistake seemed to set the tone for the rest of the game, where the Astros, who up to that point had been fairly evenly matched with the Dodgers, took a commanding lead and ultimately won 5-1. So that mistake turned out to be a big deal.
> I like math.
Did you watch the video I pointed to above?
> Stories about hackers in presentations about above are annoying to me.
Not all stories are good stories. The story has to be relevant to the point being made. Telling a good story is not easy. That's one of the reasons that I find PPT to be so annoying, because it lets you cover up the fact that you're telling a bad story.
BTW, your view of story is too narrow. Fiction is a proper subset of stories.
I skipped through video, got bored at the beginning, jumped to middle etc. I found noisy students annoying - seriously, "I draw rectangle" and they go emotional ooooh? It is disruptive. On one hand he went slowly, on the other it felt like a rush where you have no space to think for yourself.
Sorry to be negative. It was just really not my thing.
Maybe PPT tells bad story, but it still can tell the information you came to tell and give people insight into what you came to give them insight into. It allows to do that to people who are good at their jobs, but not entertainers. That is great in my opinion.
Or worse, the practical alternative in a business setting then becomes a "no powerpoint" culture where you're lectured for an hour.
I'm not a robot, I can't just digest an 1 hours worth of spoken data easily or efficiently. We have visual aids and such because of limitations with human attention, how we remember things, etc.
Amazon is famous for its no powerpoint culture, but meetings there start with everyone being handed a 2 page memo, and everyone spends the next 10 minutes reading it and making notes on it. That has practical limitations as 2 pages only covers so much and you are not allowed to ask questions during the read. You can only read silently and hopefully you remember your questions for when Q&A is allowed.
Visual presentations are more fluid, allow for slower intake of longer sets of information, and make an effort to keep the attention of the listener. Not sure why that's so awful. I suspect most people have PP as a placeholder for things they don't like about working a job in general.
I certainly won't say that there's no place for PowerPoint or similar slide-style presentation tools, but I think that they are greatly abused. In many cases, a point paper would be a more effective way to communicate information. Unfortunately, point papers generally require the recipients to actually think, and PowerPoints generally don't. I don't actually mean that snarkily — in a lot of cases it doesn't actually immediately matter if those receiving information via PowerPoint actually understand it. It's more of a business ritual than an actual value-creating activity.
In my opinion, I feel the most negative about PowerPoint when I'm forced (due to being in some kind of obligatory meeting) to sit through a badly done presentation. That's way more annoying than making presentations of my own, but that's so rare as to be almost incomparable.
It's possible to dislike PowerPoint due to how others use it, since in corporate/work environments you're often exposed to that bad usage. And it can be quite annoying.
I hope you are joking. The way to enforce such constraints is definitely not by disabling them in software. Imagine trying to just fix some outside presentation, and wondering why it doesn't work. Just teach people the basics, it's not that hard.
One of the most powerful features of Presenter-became-PowerPoint was to change the font. Ironically, these days there are still problems when trying to share slides between computers if you used a custom font (or even a default font for another language e.g. Chinese).
I get around that problem by exporting my slides to JPG, then creating a new slideshow with the photos. The file size is larger, but the layout is guaranteed to work.
I used the same trick to put a slideshow on my old digital camera, and connected it using composite video to give a presentation in school (about 2006). I didn't want to carry a heavy laptop just to show slides.
I wish a simple WiFi-VGA gadget could be built to let smartphones show presentations too. There are some HDMI dongles (Chromecast) but not all projector stations have HDMI available.
> Ironically, these days there are still problems when trying to share slides between computers if you used a custom font
I've not had any problems with the Embed Font options in Office (including PowerPoint) other than it is weirdly hard to find. (File > Options > Save > the last section that is only document-specific section, named "Fidelity" in PowerPoint; or in the Save As dialog box there is a tiny Tools drop down and you can select Save Options there and look for that same section.)
Embedding fonts certainly bloats the saved file considerable so often something to do as a last step. (Although possibly not as bloated as full fidelity JPGs of every slide.)
The only remaining consideration is copyright as most font licenses forbid embedding, not that everyone reads or follows their font licenses. (Use something like Google Fonts to find embeddable fonts that you won't have copyright issues with.)
It's not pocket-sized though. My old iPod Video can plug in with just a wire - there's a composite video signal coming out of the headphone jack.
Imagine sitting around in a living room, hanging out with friends. Someone grabs a guitar and starts singing. I want to show the lyrics. If I have a laptop, I just pop open the lid and we read them from there.
If I don't have a laptop, I won't have my bag. So I won't have my HDMI-VGA adaptors either. I wish I could just plug my phone into the TV, search for the lyrics online, and start singing. My Bluetooth headset (Sony MW600) is very small and easy to use for audio, and it takes only a few seconds to set up. Why can't the same be done for video?
> "These days, the business software market is shifting again, and Microsoft Office must now compete with similar bundles that are entirely free, from the likes of Google, LibreOffice, and others. Productivity software resides more often than not in the cloud, rather than on the user’s device. Meanwhile, the dominant mode of personal computing globally has firmly shifted from the desktop and laptop to the smartphone. As yet, no new vision of personal computing like the one that came from Xerox PARC in the 1970s has emerged. And so for the moment, it appears that PowerPoint, as we know it, is here to stay."
Whilst I'm sure PowerPoint will stick around for quite a bit longer, I'd suggest Microsoft is already working on the spiritual successor to PowerPoint, which is called Sway. Can think of Sway as web-based presentation software. It's already part of the Office suite.
Although I prefer to lug around my laptop.. I know of people that do almost entire days of work on a phone. Remote desktops, coding, massive amounts of email, etc etc. I sat next to it many times and it continues to baffle me. Datacenter automation/orchestration from a 5 inch screen. #Masochism. But I must admit it's nice to travel light sometimes.
Yes, traveling light is good. But as I say in the other subthread, I find it hard to imagine how one works efficiently without a real keyboard. At one point, long ago, I was carrying a folding keyboard. But, unless I was sitting at a table or equivalent, there wasn't anywhere to put it. And it was rather floppy. Also the screen. How do you keep it in front of your face, while typing with both hands? Maybe adapt one of those harmonica holders ;)
Yes! Sit on any cramped commuter train and you'll see people reading and writing long form documents on their phones.
Take a look in your favourite app store and you'll see millions of downloads of office editing apps.
For coding, I usually SSH into something from my phone and make edits that way. But I've certainly edited HTML and then pushed it via sFTP from my phone.
I don't commute anymore, so mostly what I see are people everywhere, walking around, and looking at their phones.
I get that modern phones are more powerful than old laptops. And I get that there are many ways to use remote servers. But, even with the larger phones, the screen is smaller than typical editing windows. Except, I realize, the one I'm typing in now :)
But it's the limitation in keyboard size that puzzles me. I know that there are portable keyboards. And devices that project virtual keyboards on surfaces. But I'm guessing that most people are typing on screens, and using voice input. So how can that actually work? That is, be efficient enough to bother with?
Sway is aimed at web publishing no? So it doesn’t really compete against PowerPoint. I also don’t think Sway adds much value to web presentation, but that is an argument for another time.
There are many activities that PowerPoint is used for beyond real life presentations (wife framing, brain storming), those have been moving to better suited tools.
> "I also don’t think Sway adds much value to web presentation, but that is an argument for another time."
The main benefits are in embeddable content (including content produced by Office suite), ease-of-use for non-technical users and reduced friction (Design tools already bundled with the Office suite that many businesses already have installed. Multiple ways to share content).
> "There are many activities that PowerPoint is used for beyond real life presentations"
Note that I said "spiritual successor", not "direct replacement".
There is way too many walls of text on some of those to be real presentations. Otherwise, the over emphasis on photography makes it more of a professional tool, and even then you could arguably for a better job with PowerPoint without the annoying transitions.
> "There is way too many walls of text on some of those to be real presentations."
Are you joking? Let me spell it out for you in simple terms... the amount of content in each slide is customisable by the user. It's up to the user how busy or sparse a slide is. The idea that something isn't a real presentation tool just because the examples you've seen have been too busy for your taste is, how can I put it nicely, a little shortsighted.
I think you’ve forgotten about the bit where you had to prepare acetate slides, carry a huge box around with you, clean all dirt off the top, get it into focus, etc. Digital brings costs and benefits.
I’m reminded of the wonderful things Guy Steele did with crayon on layered foils in his growing a language talk. It was more impressive since it was analog and not PowerPoint.
The best ever presentation that I remember was by Edward De Bono. Some of these are on the net. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5DK8XPUEaU He was really a gifted presenter and the man that invented "lateral thinking".
PowerPoint, Keynote and their ilk are largely skeuomorphic in that they mimic actual slides on actual overhead projectors, which probably no one below the age of 30 has ever encountered in real life.
Tools like Prezi on the other hand often focus too much on impressive animations and transitions that carry little to no information. Presentations created with Prezi often appear as all fluff and flim-flam. Besides, that constant zooming in and out makes me sick when watching it on a large screen at least.
There has to be a better way to communicate. I'm not exactly sure how it looks like but to achieve it we probably have to forego metaphors from the 1970s as well as superficial animations that carry no meaning.
A while back, I gave a conference presentation, but instead of using Powerpoint, I just had a directory with a load of mp4 videos. It turns out that if you run xine with all of them on the command line, you can use the right arrow to skip to the next one. Put a long-lived static image at the end of each video, and you have a completely custom-built set of slides with whatever transitions you want.
In my case, I used the videos to illustrate mathematical models and results. It was a marginally more powerful method than using Powerpoint.
I'm sure there are older presentations, this is just the oldest one I can think of looking for. Humans have had thousands of years to perfect giving presentations. Coming up with something better is something we are unlikely to do because many things have been tried, and the worst have been discarded.
You might argue that Socrates didn't have any presentation, but I would argue right back that if you presentation cannot stand without the visual aids that is a problem you should fix. Once your presentation without aids is good the visual aids can help.
Note, the above is the ideal. I do not claim to be good at giving presentations.
No doubt, the content is the essence of all presentations. All tools are just aids.
As you suggest, we have been perfecting presentation for thousands of years. To an extent, powerpoint has captured some of the best ways of communication in my opinion. In particular, the ability to annotate a picture is one of those. After all, a picture is worth more than thousand words.
Having said that, there are many ways of communication. Our existing presentation tools have only captured a few of them. We need more.
Of course that requires providing the spectators with the capacity to interact with the content at their own pace.
If you want to use the lecture format, there's no alternative to crafting a well-structured presentation a la PowerPoint. There could be better tools that could help more in finding the right structure, but the end result will look largely the same - a sequence of images and text that convey the main ideas in an easy-to-grasp format.
I disagree with the point that "there's no alternative to crafting a well-structured presentation". I'd argue that a jupyter notebook or equivalent (e.g. pweave) is 1000X better than powerpoint.
That sentence was qualified by "in lecture format", i.e. with a teacher exposing words and images with a projector, like you do with PowerPoint.
Jupyter notebooks, like explorable explanations, require the audience to interact with the tools and not merely be passive watchers, which was the context for that sentence.
Well I once had a 2 day formation about how to use mind map for presentation...
This heavily convinced me that slides are the best paradigm so far. Because mind map is far too subjective and can be easily misinterpreted if not totally misunderstood. But it’s unfair to say nobody’s trying.
It is the default presentation format for Investment Banks. How else are you going to show the CEO of soon to IPO company how much his shares will be worth?
