The science of learning still hasn’t quite grasped that the audience is heteregenous. Some people learn best by seeing pictures, some by hearing words, some by reading, and some by touching things and fiddling with them. If they would first before the lesson even starts establish the learning orientation of the students then all this hit and miss education would be history. But eventually it will be history, the more intensively they inspect the learning process with the help of digital technology and as more esoteric ideas filter through to the mainstream.

Also, we knew some military guys who were proud of their proficiency with Powerpoint. They called themselves “PowerPoint Rangers”. They also revered the military guys they called, “PowerPoint Jedi”, who could use all kinds of pointless animations and sound effects.

Not that anybody in the military has ever paid attention to Col John Boyd.

Seriously – one of those tests was a great illustration of the need to absorb and retain information under pressure. That’s what should be the focus – how to communicate information THAT CAN BE UNDERSTOOD AND RETAINED. And most slides fail.

It’s an odd sort of day for me…

Underlying this problem appears to be a deep fear of being taken out of context. The boss always wants the text on every slide to say everything about the topic, lest the slide be pulled from the deck and use separately. This thinking is where four-box and six-box slides come from: if you have a slide that has to say something risky, make sure that its context is attached.

And yes, I know what I’m doing. I’ve at least once done a well-received half hour talk, without once needing to look at my notes, and using a slide deck that had a grand total of twelve words in it (and five of those were on the title slide).
Of course, in that presentation, the pictures told half the story.

[Boss]: “I edited your document for clarity and sent it out.”
[Dilbert]: “Wow. It’s amazing how clear it is when you take out all of the accuracy and relevance.”
[Boss]: “I stopped listening after ‘Wow.’”
[Dilbert]: “I’ll get busy spending the rest of my career fixing this.”

Also known as “some facts are simply too long to fit on the seven words per five bullets allowed on a management slide”.

Perhaps the best article on this subject is that written by Edward Tufte after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster (and later revised after the publication of the CAIB report and the Return to Flight report):

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

The Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the Return to Flight Task Group both went even further, saying that powerpoint was so pervasive that “it appears that many young engineers do not understand the need for, or know how to prepare, formal engineering documents such as reports, white papers, or analysis”

Perhaps the real shame is that there is a master of the effective use of powerpoint-style presentation in our midst, and although everyone has seen his presentations, few outside the marking world try to emulate him. That master is: Steve Jobs. Apple’s product presentations are a PERFECT example of how to effectively use a slide deck to enhance, not replace, a presentation.

I spent the last year on a huge supply chain software consulting project for a non-U.S. manufacturer. 100-200 people involved and MS Office (PPT and XLS) are the standard. Obviously, the incompatibility of color palettes between Excel 2003 and 2007 is criminal. I need to say that badly. And, it is really hard to show all the data you need to with PPT or especially Excel (which gets very overworked in this environment – even huge diagrams, and big XML mapping activities.) Always zooming, scrolling back and forth, hiding columns, squinting at tiny letters, etc.

But there are other problems if you think about it. The image projected by standard office projectors is TOO SMALL. And, today’s laptops can handle high resolution and advanced graphics with on-the fly calculations, both of which are very useful in explaining things but are not used at all in MS Office.

So the cure I think is to build new software, not try to use Powerpoint for everything.

The problem with hardware solutions is, nobody buys the stuff and it costs money. You need a common platform. So I think a double-width projector image would be an excellent start, and a cheap way to link two or three projectors together maybe by USB would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath.

Now how about some new data visualization software, maybe open source, would be a good idea.
And it would be very cool if someone could come up with an animation toolbox that could provide new tools for presentation and be easy to use. Maybe the military presentation of the anecdote would probably be much more intelligible as an animated cartoon with sound track, or with maybe a real time pivotable 3D data cube that shows patterns in the data. Or a timeline concept you can animate and see different tasks on different time lines, like a moving Gantt chart. There must be tons of things that can be done but they aren’t, because of the momentum of MS bloatware. I think we have run the course of that (symbolized I must say again, by MS’ lack of interest in making color compatibility possible between Office versions.)

Let’s let the next generation of presentation software be created by people who know something about information design. I vote the business community, or the open source business software community, raise money to hire the tops in the field, people like Edward R. Tufte and maybe the guys at processing.org for example, and think about what we need.

Check out this link to get the juices flowing (just the first two pictures):
http://flowingdata.com/2009/07/03/realtime-information-graphics-show-international-data-interchange/
And look here, this is very complex *click the left side blocks.
http://coast.ocean.washington.edu/~neil/NPZvisualizer/
Powerpoint is just a quaint laughable thing when you start explaining complex things. A partially automatic design tool with a bit of AI about how to make useful presentations might be a really excellent thing to have.

http://www.jonathanboutelle.com/mt/archives/2007/07/a_failure_to_di.html

Dan

So try rockets or grenades instead.

Although, admittedly, a poor messenger amplifies the problem greatly. And this does not preclude using PP without the bullets.

(Did no-one else raise a smile at the idea of the military eschewing the “bullet format”? Perhaps they will switch to using lasers…)

The cognitive dissonance formulating this must have been amazing.

Unfortunately, having a PPT presentation does not automatically transform you into a competent public speaker.

I agree with Nosehat (11.41pm) that PPT is an excellent aid – but you need to learn to be a good presenter BEFORE learning how to use PPT.

It’s the structure of the program that’s pernicious – it positively encourages shallow (rather than concise) thinking/expression and enables far too much useless stuff to be thrown in.

Microsoft’s panapoly of gimmicky and ugly effects just get in the way, encouraging dullards to think they’re being creative and producing presentations that fail miserably as crisp, effective aids to communication.

Key points:
- Don’t try to explain anything too subtle and complex.

I think that this is exactly the problem that the military (and NASA) are trying to address: the attitude that nothing too subtle or complex should be presented at a presentation.

That’s exactly why PP is bad in these situations. It encourages people to think in terms of simple bullets. If an idea is too complex for one slide, just don’t include it at all.

But when working out whether to go with the hawks pushing to carpet bomb Fallujah or with those suggesting that electricity and water should be provided is a hard, nuanced decision, and the presentations given by the generals’ advisors should not take the attitude of dumbing it down and of not explaining “anything too subtle and complex.”

I guess one shouldn’t expect innovation from a company that lives off of dinosaur juice.

There’s a strong underlying belief in corporate office that, if you don’t use Powerpoint, you won’t be take seriously. Additionally, Powerpoint tends to BE the report. How many meeting have you sat in, staring at slide after slide of bullet-points, following-along with a paper copy of the slides…and that’s the report!