Here it is: final proof that using Powerpoint turns you stupid.
I’m a long-term anti-fan of “presentation software” — I’ve often thought that, while it’s a decent organizational tool for helping one structure a presentation, I nearly always need to present more information than can possibly be present on the slides.
For a reasonable technical presentation, a tool like Powerpoint can be useful to highlight the most important data from the technical writeup, but nothing can substitute for the actual data, information-dense charts, and good technical explanation. Not even “gee whiz” stuff like embedding video into the presentation can improve it enough to be an adequate substitute for presenting information in a well-documented, scholarly, written fashion when need requires.
Slides are useful to present dumbed-down information, but when it comes to any complex topic, I’ll take the manual, please.
Then again, they are great when you really don’t have much to work with anyway, but you want to look like you do. Like sales presentations.
my argument on PowerPoint’s ability to make things stupid
Please take a look at my blog entry: “Does PowerPoint make us stupid? — using actor-network theory”
http://www.kmentor.com/socio-tech-info/archives/000515.html
Context is most important
I appreciated reading your essay on the topic. What it seems to boil down to is that PowerPoint is a product of its audience. It is what people have asked it to be: a dumbed-down sales presentation tool.
That, ultimately, is what bugs me about using PowerPoint for technical presentations. They end up feeling like a sales presentation. The goal of a technical presentation is to familiarize one’s audience with the subject matter so that they can make intelligent choices about it, regardless of their lack of depth of knowledge. Unfortunately, it seems as if PowerPoint presentations often obscure the data you need.
So I agree, mostly 🙂 It’s not just the tool. It’s the people using it falling prey to a certain standard of excellence. I think, as long as the PowerPoint presentation is based on a well-researched and documented technical paper, and the technical paper is distributed to those who attended the presentation and desire more information, it’s really not a bad thing. But attempting to solely use a presentation management tool to get across complex information is, in my humble opinion, a big mistake.
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Matthew P. Barnson