9 thoughts on “Powerpoint”

  1. One of my biggest complaints is that PowerPoint allows any fool to make a presentation that appears organized and informed but actually has zero value. Right along with that goes the presenter who reads the slides and does not get into the background information.

    PowerPoint presentations should set up the high level structure of a lecture and support the lecture with useful graphics. It should not “be” the lecture.

  2. PowerPoint has made it easier for people with poor technical communication abilities to reach a wide audience. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard the line “I know this is an eye-chart, but…” I wouldn’t be looking for a job right now. If a slide contains a diagram that is difficult to deciper, it is useless, period.

    Slides can be effective if they enhance a lecture. Too often the presenter is merely reading statements off a PowerPoint slide that the audience could be reading themselves. When I’m teaching students I absolutely refuse to use PowerPoint for anything besides review games.

  3. There is no doubt that PowerPoint has allowed information to be filtered and dumbed down. I have had managers in the past who would edit the slides I had prepared for meetings etc and who would deliberately use the slide technique to hide information.

    Now I am a boss I do NOT ALLOW PowerPoint to be used in place of well written, closely argued pieces of work. We do use PowerPoint, but only as an aide memoire at lectures and meetings so that key points are not overlooked. Most of all I want people to listen to what I’m saying at meetings and conferences so I do not always use the visual aids. I do not distribute Papers just before the meeting either for the same reason. I have no problem distributing Papers a day or so before the event but then people read them and their questions are often not only pertinent but probing. We learn a lot from good questions.

  4. What’s needed is a lighter weight, faster rep rate and more aggressive power point.

    Then they could make “assault charts”.

  5. Most PowerPoint charts should be considered an assault on the senses as well as the intellect!

  6. Machine Gun PowerPoint; now what would Microsoft do with that I wonder?

    That reminds me of a geology professor (who I never had, thankfully) and the mineralogy course he taught. Back in the days of overheads, he had the habit of throwing up dozens of phase diagrams (for mineral formation) during the course of a class and was quite impossible to keep up with. This sort of thing sounds like a huge data dump. Maybe for legal reasons you need to present something, but you don’t need anyone to understand what you made. In that case, might as well save time and do the presentation in five seconds.

  7. o Without PowerPoint, there would be no U.S. aerospace industry
    – After all, how do you keep the money flowing without results?
    o There’s an old adage dating from the days of viewfoils:
    – “When the weight of the paper equals the weight of the vehicle,
    the vehicle is ready to fly”
    o PowerPoint allows us to generate paper briefing charts at a rate
    equivalent to fielding several new missiles a year!
    o Ergo, we are making fantastic progress, without the bother of actually
    building any new hardware!

  8. Maybe we really have degenerated into making heavy paper aeroplanes! Is that what I see flying around the halls of congress?

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