Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory).
In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to put on a good presentation using it.
One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong. Putting exactly what you're saying into your slides verbatim is generally a mistake (although putting key points or a list, and expanding on it vocally can work well).
Generally most people put too much content into single slides as they're worried about having to advance the slideshow mid-point. This means that your point is too expansive, and you should cut your point in half and then cutting your slides in half follows naturally (e.g. instead of doing a yearly projection with summaries of each quarter, just do each quarter individually and sum the year as a whole alone at the end).
I certainly don't think I'm an expert at presentations, I just care slightly more than your average person, and have copied elements from what I consider good deliveries.
Although I agree that people are poorly educated on presentation making I think the main reason they use PP is because of the 'I have a computer' syndrome. Tufte illustrates it perfectly in with 5 colors for 2 data points example in his "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information". People would not recreate PP but abuse watever else they could find.
What is worse is that this syndrome is affecting high school students. At least here in Lima Peru, homework is demanded to be done in the computer because it is 'more professional'. So the minimum effort way copy and pasting becomes trivial. In the old way of pen a paper our inherit aversion to effort pushed the student to learn to summarize as writing more demanded more effort. I would prohibit high school homework to be done in the computer. But I digress.
I really like when people put a lot of information on the slides.
It makes going over past presentations very easy. For example, when a new ML algorithm comes out, the only way to easily grasp how it works without reading a bunch of papers is to find some Power Point slides by the author. I guarantee people wouldn't make two sets of slides either.
If the slides are dense with text and the intended audience likes it that way (learning a complex algorithm), that's just PPT acting like a landscape version of a Microsoft Word or LaTeX document.
The reverse is also true: one can use MS Word with sparse text and make it act like a PowerPoint.
In the context of the thread, it's when the wall of text on the slides is negatively affecting the delivery of important information. Dense slides when not appropriate will bore the audience (like those military presentations shown in the article.) To add insult to injury, the typical unpolished speaker will then recite. every. single. word. on the slide.
Instead of the PPT being a set of helpful diagrams or pictures that are superior to wordy descriptions, the text-heavy slide deck becomes a glorified transcript of the talk.
One of the problems with "Powerpoints" is that they serve at least two different functions--as a visual aid for the the audience during the presentation and as a leave-behind/documentation (or slideshare, etc. independent of a presenter). One presentation is very unlikely to be optimal for both. At the same time, you're right that it's unrealistic to expect multiple versions.
You can put the presentation with speaker notes (possibly curated) on the web. That may not be optimal for 'leave-behind' version, but it isn't that hard, and it would be huge improvement.
Speaker notes are one (sub-optimal) solution. I've also had years of experience trying to get people to write speaker notes for sales presentations much less for one-off conference presos. Hard to get it done. I try to do it myself but I probably do it in practice 25-50% of the time because it simply isn't a priority.
But this is not what PowerPoint was created for, it is designed to be an accompaniment to a speaker.
If a slide deck is placed online for viewing without the speaker, the speaker notes should provide the extra detail, not the slides themselves.
> It makes going over past presentations very easy
But that is not what the presentation is for. If you have a hundred words on each slide (and I've seen that), you might as well give everyone the written dialogue. A visual, in this case Powerpoint but it could be an image in a report as well, is to support your story. It is not the story itself.
Yes, I like powerpoint that is self contained and makes sense without the presenter. I'm not saying each slide should be crammed with information. I'm fine with 80 page ppt as long as it's self-contained, and narrative, with appropriate amount of information density. It should have a story.
As someone firmly in the slides-as-illustration school, I love PowerPoint for its outline and speaker's notes views. That's precisely where detailed content should go---alongside the slides or something that can be printed in handouts. Even better is how PowerPoint works with dual-monitor setups, with the speaker's view on one and the presentation on the other. I use that all the time.
Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong
I'm torn. Yes, slides are a supplement. But a purely verbal presentation on things like financials or schedule without some supporting data feels like complete fluff, and while the speaker could be spitting out data verbally, that doesn't "work" when you have more than one or two data points - the audience can't hold lots of data in their head as you recite it. That's what visuals are for.
I think that one of the points of the article is that PowerPoint presentations have taken over from technical reports and briefings. Instead of having a written report with data (with figures) and then a subsequent briefing to go over the findings, we are left with presentations that try to do both: present data and explain it.
So if the alternative to PowerPoint is better, more technical, reports -- I'm all for it.
If you're presenting raw data, sure, all of it should be on the slide. However, when you're presenting analysis of that data, explain it verbally, and summarize your explanation on the slides.
At a few dev meetups, some presenters just did markdown documents with enough new lines to be equivalent to a page. That way they just pressed pgdn on their laptop.
On another note, some lecture-style slides (where review post-presentation or without presentation) can be really helpful for understanding concepts otherwise described in math and without examples in official papers. Many CS publications seem to make this mistake in my eyes--that is, presenting something novel without bridging the gap via examples.
That seems extremely painful without explicit page break characters, because if you were to rewrite anything, you would have to adjust the corresponding whitespace or else everything would get misaligned.
PP exists to replace the bulleted memo or prop stand poster, which have existed for god knows how long in corporate culture. Most PP complaints seem to be about broken meeting "culture" than PP itself. Most meetings are about self-promotion, bureaucracy, etc than productivity. Changing the tools won't matter. If the boss expects a weekly meeting from your department, then it will continue to happen and will probably happen with PP, especially if the boss uses PP.
There are to very specific versions of how a presentation should be made: As a supplement to a live presentation or a replacement of it.
If you're using it as a supplement to something you're saying live, the slides should be simple, limited, and support the big points which you should be making verbally.
If you're using it as a handout (or essentially in lieu of a live presentation), it should be much more information-dense.
> One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said.
Agreed. In my opinion, the slides should supplement the presentation and sum it up in as few words as possible. Having concise slides that sum up a presentation makes it so much easier to go over the presentation and learn the subject more thoroughly (edit: assuming you have access to the slides).
> In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to put on a good presentation using it.
I agree. You cannot make the tool as an excuse of not giving a good presentation. PP is there to help you do things, like any other tools. You need to know how to use it properly and wisely.
I think, the widespread use of PP is because of its capability to present ideas concisely, especially to the management level where they won't spend their time reading a long document. This is especially prominent in the area of Strategy Consulting, where they can just arrange picture and text to be presented to the board of directors.
I have not been educated in presentation making. My experience comes entirely from watching others. I had my first presentation today, used slides.com. What makes a presentation good, or more importantly, not bad? I had no notes and tried to expound on the things in the slides, but definitely read them verbatim first. Here's mine from today for reference: http://slides.com/michaelelliott/art-music-webapps-clojure
I agree with you but there is another thing people sometimes forget. If the material is for a training course or similar people wants something to take home afterwards but that should probably be some kind of documentation instead of a Powerpoint presentation. When it is the same document one might get tempted to write too many slides with too much text on them.
Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?
Plus, PDFs can be generated from Powerpoint.
The real key would be for some App to codify good presentation rules and target OOXML output. I'm not talking Keynote - It needs to be more focused and opinionated, and make that part easier.
Is that even possible? Would Microsoft permit it to exist?
> Except it's difficult/impossible to edit a PDF file. How would you handle the use-case where multiple authors are collaborating on a single powerpoint file?
You generate your PDF presentation from LaTeX, which is stored in git! Multiple simultaneous editors with sane merging, unlike a group of people editing a PPT file on the network drive.
But those are probably not the PDF presenters you're talking about.
Sure. But if we're talking about using a PDF as "slides" like bhartzer mentioned, it's always going to be made somewhere else and published. Unless they draw the entire thing out of annotations in Acrobat.
Google Slides program does a good job at multi-user support. I usually export it to PDF on a thumbdrive just in case I don't have internet where I'm at and can't hook up my own computer.
Agreed the talk should work without slides. Another way of putting it is that the deck shouldn't really work on its own. You can't just read the slides after without explanation.
While this is great for making a presentation, it makes it Really Hard to learn anything at all from a presentation for which you do not have a video recording.
I've frequently seen Slideshare (or similar) presentations that look like a disjoint selection of code examples and meme images, with a narrative that is only barely hinted at.
agree, same thing with Infographics. Infographics can be a really useful tool but too many people simply make a huge wall of text instead of creating a graphical representation of the topic at hand.
the way I like to think about presentation slides is they should almost be talking point cues or reminders for the speaker. they should compliment the talk, not dominate it.
I remember in college I was marked off for not putting everything I said in my presentation into the powerpoint verbatim. I knew the professor was being dumb, but I just took the grade and moved on. I wonder how many kids in the class actually took her advice.
I think one of the most corrosive lessons learnt from schooling is that accomplishment & success is based on following certain rigidly established guidelines created by some shadowy cabal of forces for essentially arbitrary reasons. You are judged by how well you conform to those standards and anything that does or does not happen as a result of your actions is out of your hands.
It's an incredibly efficient way to scale your education system to the masses but it's producing broken people at the end of it who end up believing math is just about following the correct steps, history is about memorizing facts and english is about putting enough words on the page to hit a word count.
Instead, we should be training students to take an outcome focused approach. Define what is the ultimate goal they want to accomplish, establish how to measure their impact towards the goal and suggest previously established strategies that have historically helped but then only evaluate them on whether they successfully achieved their outcome.
Sports is actually a great example of this system working in practice. Your goal is extremely clear, there's clear feedback on your performance and tactics are widely available to learn. Nobody will penalize you in sports if you choose to kick with your left foot when "everyone knows" only right footed kickers succeed in life.
More education should be structured around such a philosophy.
You make a great point. Although I think that the line about producing broken people is overwrought. I manage a number of college grads who have achieved a lot under this system and I actually think, as a manager, it is quite helpful to have them "broken in" and follow what may seem like arbitrary rules - oftentimes seemingly arbitrary rules are actually quite rational and it may just take too long to explain to a new employee (which is what our education system is aimed at creating) exactly why a problem should be approached in a certain (again seemingly arbitrary) manner.
Considering that the teaching method of a lot of faculty has become doing nothing more than reading the slides to the class, I can't say I find that surprising. Some of the best PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen have nothing more than a single word or compound word as a slide. Regardless of what anyone thinks of him, watching Steve Jobs deliver a keynote can give you a lot of good material to imitate. Your slide deck should be there to support your presentation, not be your presentation.
Kind of off topic - but I happened to be sitting next to Steve when he created a couple of those conference talks. He literally started preparing months before the talk. He would work on his wording over and over and over. Since I happened to be there, he would often try out his "lines" on me and ask me what I thought (I had to correct him a lot. He really wasn't technical all.) He practiced over and over. And for the diagrams he had good help from people who understood that simple diagrams are always better (avoid cognitive overload). And don't buy the book "Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs" - I looked though it and that author has no clue about how those presentations were really created.
It's so that you can send the slide deck out and people have the actual presentation when they see the slides.
I hate when I go somewhere and they provided just the slides of a previous talk and the slides have no real information on them, there is no context or explanation as to what the bulleted points are talking about.
Not to say that the talk verbatim in the presentation is a good idea either, but people seem to like giving out what amount to useless slides most of the time in place of a recording of the presentations.
If you were to use something like Presentious (https://presentio.us/) to give your talk, you can capture all of the information presented without reading from your slides. And at the end of your talk, everything can be shared with your audience. For example: https://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs
Thanks for sharing Presentious. It sounds trivial, but producing lightweight presentations synced with audio is quite hard. I like how you can go ahead on audio or slides and then sync them back together.
And very few people watch full-length 45 min. videos of presentations even when they're made. Views drop off after 3-5 mins.
At the risk of being obnoxious, the slide deck should be whatever the presenter feels best supports their presentation in front of the audience. At a conference, that should be the overriding goal of the slides. They shouldn't be designed to provide background/context/explanation for someone who didn't see the presentation or didn't take notes.
It's certainly possible to provide a link to a transcript/speaker notes/etc. and I sometimes do. But it's extra work and expense and, frankly, it's not at the top of my list of things to spend a day post-conference putting together.
I think some slide notes could be created even if it takes some extra time. Some viewers might be there to learn and wants some notes/references while others are there for entertainment. If everyone is forced to take their own notes it might take attention away from the presentation itself.
I find that notes are a natural result of preparing a talk. I write the notes to work out what I plan to say while designing the slides to support the script. The notes are the main way to communicate with people who weren't there or who need a reminder of what was said or to follow up references.
This being good advice depends on the audience and desired outcome of the presentation.
Say you are working with a technical crowd, who may well be taking the presentation back with them for further study. In this case, having some depth in the slides might make a lot of sense, as would adding notes and links to information they will need or want. For that scenario, some careful use of bold, color, size will provide talking points useful for interactive discussion. No need to just read the slide.
(I hate it when people just read the slides)
Other times, it might make sense to have very brief bits of info. Often sales presentations go this route, but technical ones can too. People may take the presentation for reference later, but they came for the dialog and or what you are presenting more than they did attend to get all the info in text form.
IMHO, my experience so far has been to know your audience long before you build anything. It's very helpful to get a review from a peer too. If it's important, it's also worth a half hour to talk through with somebody who can provide some insight.
I've also found there is a very significant difference between selling ideas, things and people, and more detailed education type tasks. It's extremely efficient to pack presentations full of info for classroom settings. Depending on what one is teaching, and if it needs some interactive exercises or not, one document may make optimal sense. The people teaching for a living may well be demonstrating a strong bias here, well intended, that just might not be appropriate in a business setting.
At my school we were marked down if we put more than X words on a slide (The rule was if you can't read the entire slide on a projector across the room, you have too much text), everything else should be in the slide notes.
> Even if you did ban PowerPoint, people would just find a way to do PP-like things with something else. For example, MS Word, with the page down key (although then the transition animations go away, so that is a minor victory).
This is exactly what is to be banned. PowerPoint, Word, Impress, old school slides, blah, blah, blah.
You aren't getting around a PowerPoint ban, you are defying it. Which is part of the point, it better be dam good if you are defying the rule.
It's interesting that they give the thumbs up to Prezi though.
I tend to think good talkers do things well, crap talkers do things badly. Banning their boring slides won't stop their boring talk.
At least slides can be designed and checked by someone good with a lot of time before the talk. Correlation, not causation.
In my opinion, people are just poorly educated (or not educated) in presentation making. Or to phase it another way, a school may teach them to use PP the software but doesn't teach them how to put on a good presentation using it.
One key thing people need to learn is: Slides exist to supplement what is being said. If your presentation doesn't work without the slides then you're doing it wrong. Putting exactly what you're saying into your slides verbatim is generally a mistake (although putting key points or a list, and expanding on it vocally can work well).
Generally most people put too much content into single slides as they're worried about having to advance the slideshow mid-point. This means that your point is too expansive, and you should cut your point in half and then cutting your slides in half follows naturally (e.g. instead of doing a yearly projection with summaries of each quarter, just do each quarter individually and sum the year as a whole alone at the end).
I certainly don't think I'm an expert at presentations, I just care slightly more than your average person, and have copied elements from what I consider good deliveries.