How much do you hate powerpoint?Follow

I hate powerpoint with a searing passion no earthly flame can rival.

I fired a woman last year for insisting on reporting out to me with a PP deck on every project.

http://prezi.com/

Much, much, much better alternative to PowerPoint.

After much searching of my dusky corners of my hard drive, here is the link to the other anti-powerpoint article I have:

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/04/03/1175366240499.html

Quick summary: "It is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time."

Here is the publication I think that news article is referring to:

http://hfs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/46/3/567



Edited, Apr 27th 2010 1:34pm by yossarian

If you want to use pp to place brief statements or images behind you that reinforce your key points, it can add real value to a presentation to a large group of people.

However, if you want to use it to give me a 1:1 briefing I will see how many USB thumb drives will fit in your *****

Worse still, are the morans who place their entire speech onto powerpoints and read them out. So far this year I have been driven to interrupt three speakers with a cry from the back: "Excuse me, but we can read. Would you switch off the projector, or bugger off and let us read the slide deck?"

This as well.

A good power point presentation should include bullet points about what you're going to talk about, but little if any actual information. It should serve as a combination of your own note cards, and a reference point for the audience to follow along. It should not distract from what you're saying though, or it becomes counter productive. Following this rule means that your presentations will be short in terms of pages. Each page should be a major aspect of the presentation, each bullet a point to discuss. A typical 30 minute presentation should be maybe 10-12 total pages, preferably including the title and Q&A pages. If you spent more than 30 minutes making your power point presentation, you're over thinking it and putting too much data down.

If the information you presented needs to be saved in some digital form for reference, include the supporting documentation (which has the information you actually talked about), not just the presentation. A power point presentation itself should *never* be considered documentation or used as a reference tool. It's there purely as a visual aid during the presentation itself. Which is probably what the General in the OP was talking about. I've seen people try to use them that way, and it always ends in tears...


EDIT: Oh yeah! Animations and whatnot do *not* make your presentation look sharp or professional or anything other than that say that you're a newbie who thinks people will be impressed by the equivalent of a crayon drawing on a fridge. See the point about not distracting from the presentation itself. Just pick a font and color scheme that works and move on with it.

Edited, Apr 27th 2010 2:04pm by gbaji

Pillock.

I use the smiley in a number of presentations to reinforce the irony when I'm referencing some bizarre Government policy that makes no sense.

Like I say. The slide should be a means of reinforcing the point you're making without being a distraction. Animations can make a huge impact if used sparingly and if they're apposite.

That's odd, I use the smiley in a number of posts responding to gbaji in reference to the pain I experience having read a full screen response to a 3 word post.

Powerpoint is a great tool and there is much you can do with it. Is it really so surprising that people are using it incorrectly? This is less a problem with powerpoint and more a problem with people not being able to effectively present ideas.

I'm with brownduck on this one, but it's likely due to the particular context of my PP usage. The way that I typically use PP is with zero text, and limiting the amount of images per slide to typically 1-2. I'm an architecture major though, and can thus assume that my audience is really only interested in images. Exposition through image is always preferable to text for us.

I like to keep the amount of slides to a minimum, work with a solid black background, use regular transitions, and give plenty of time to verbally elaborate on what I'm going for with each particular image. The idea is to avoid overloading the audience, and keep them focused first on my speaking, and second on my images.

To brownduck: I didn't mean to suggest that PP is bad in-and-of-itself (any issues with it are definitely due to users with poor presentation skills). I personally find Prezi to be far more versatile and dynamic, however. I definitely recommend it for any situation where you need a little more visual flair, without the tackiness of PP's effects. I use it occasionally for my studio critiques.

Edited, Apr 27th 2010 8:10pm by Eske

Not as much as I hate threads about it.

/yawn

I wish my honors Calc II professor *had* used powerpoint. As it was, he used a good old fashioned chalk board. He'd do a long function across the board, get 2/3 of the way in, and go "Oh wait a minute, that's not right." *erase erase, start over*

If he had prepared the equations in PP form, they would have been right the first time.

Okay: let's say you *are* trying to do that. What tool would you use? What if they ask detailed questions you need to generate new equations or graphs on the fly to answer?

Like anything, it depends on your purpose. If you're using PP for a general presentation, bullet points and any relevant visualized data. If you're using it for instruction, an outline format works well, also allowing for the student to fill in with particulars. It also makes organizing a written report quite easy.

PP works with other files exceptionally well making it easy to do a report/presentation incorporating and manipulating stuff from excel, word, spss, flowcharts, pictures, videos, etc, etc.