PowerPoint sucks

September, 2002, here on slacktivist: PowerPoint sucks.

August, 2006 on Crooked Timber: PowerPoint Corrupts the Point Absolutely, i.e., it doesn't just suck, it loses wars.

(Pleased to see that the Google search of "PowerPoint sucks" now turns up more than 1,000 hits.)

Comments

[Mark Larios]

If you haven't already, be sure to check out Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint."

[Theron]

Tufte also has a paper explaining the role Power Point played in the Columbia disaster.

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1&topic=Ask+E%2eT%2e

[LL]

It's not the program, it's the people who use it. PowerPoint is perfect for people who are too lazy or incompetent (or both) to write complete sentences. And it also allows people to fill an unlimited number of slides (I've seen 500-page PowerPoints) with pointless bullshit to try and look like they're actually saying something. They sprinkle liberally with photos and sound files and movie files and voila - the most boring presentation ever conceived by man.

Worse, people carry this style into their other writing. Their e-mails and reports and presentations are literally nonsensical. They write everything in bullet points with no punctuation and don't understand why that's a problem. Shitty writers used to have to get better, now they just put it in a PowerPoint and call it a day. I've never been in a client meeting, but if someone tried to show me a 500-page PowerPoint, I'd tell them to cut it down to 50 slides and then get back to me.

Alas, I don't have that kind of power.

[lightning]

If you haven't seen it already, check out The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation and be glad that Abe Lincoln didn't have a computer.

[Scott]

The Christian Century had an article last month on PowerPoint sucking at church.

[Constantine]

You have the 2002 piece from wired linked on your original post, but there's another piece in Wired (also by Edward Tufte, referenced above) from September 2003 entitled Why Powerpoint is Evil

[Beth]

Tufte also has a paper explaining the role Power Point played in the Columbia disaster.

Maybe PowerPoint is the Evil Bert of software.

Thanks for the link, Lightning. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

[LL]

Gettysburg link: hilarious. It's like every PowerPoint I've ever read, except, at 6 slides, way too short. Need about 50-60 more. The horror of realizing that the people in charge cannot produce anything other than absolute drivel takes a little more than 6 slides to develop.

[RALovett]

We should note, however, that Al Gore's movie (well, not really his, but you get the idea), "An Inconvenient Truth" is basically a demonstration of what one CAN do with PowerPoint. In scientific lectures, it's replaced old-fashioned slide shows and as long as people don't get too cute (purple type on black background should result in permanent banishment to the darker realms), it's actually an extremely effective way to transmit complex info. It's the silly policy lectures that get condensed to Clif notes that are the pain. In scienc,e the guts of the presentation is usually in the PowerPoint and people talk about the pictures, rather than present silly pictures of their words.

You could do all this with slides, of course, but PowerPoint is easier and allows greater complexity in the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing.

I just had to say that there's a legit use for PP!

[NancyP]

Hey, PowerPoint and similar programs (Keynote for Mac) are my life - I need to show lots of illustrations in my lectures. However, I like good old black sanserif text on white background (or white on dark blue), no fancy shit, no fades. Anatomy, Architecture, Art History, Cell Biology, Histology, Pathology - all of these subjects use very high volumes of photos, and many additional subjects use high volumes of vector graphics.

[Emma Goldman]

The worst thing? When (a) the slides themselves are bad AND (b) the presenter mostly just reads the slides to the audience. Tufte's work on Columbia got a mention in the NYTimes a few years ago--and I send the Gettysburg Address one to anyone who hasn't seen it.

[Kathryn]

As a teacher and soon-to-be grad student, I have to agree with RALovett and NancyP that PowerPoint can be very useful in the education arena. We used PowerPoint for presentations in classes in my undergrad studies and the professors never let us get away with simply reading from the slides themselves. It was expected that you would have whole paragraphs of text that you verbally presented with each bullet point, and the pictures were very rarely cutesy clip art but instead pictures that were relevant to the presentation. I did get majorly annoyed at people who overused the "effects," but that was really the only downside.

Some of the best notes I ever took in college classes were from profs who used PPT. Instead of furiously scribbling down every word that left their mouth, you could use the PPT bullet points as a guide--copy those down, then jot down a few facts/info that the professor uses to explain the bullet point. I've also seen very effective presentations by teachers in elementary and secondary levels using PPT; it helps kids learn how to take notes and it gives a cohesive way for them to present images, text, and video clips better than moving from white board to VCR to overhead and back.

My pastor uses it very minimally--a photograph here, a scripture there--just to illustrate his sermons.

I have seen it used effectively so much that it surprised me to read this post, but I guess I can imagine how it might be used very very badly in some settings.