In Praise of PowerPoint (sort of)
If all goes well, I’ll post the first eight episodes of the Software Carpentry lecture on the Unix shell later today. That will make this the most productive week I’ve had in the four months I’ve been working on the project full-time. I’ve learned a lot, which I’ll distill into a post some time soon, but right now, I’d like to ask you all a favor.
Please stop pissing on PowerPoint.
Or rather, please stop saying that point-form text is an abomination and everyone should be using zizzy graphics instead. I like an image-laden presentation as much as the next person, and like you, I experience dread and loathing when I see tombstone blocks of text on the screen, but there’s more than a little willful blindness and hipster hypocrisy in saying that everything should be punchy informative pictures instead.
Going heavy on the clip art doesn’t magically make your thinking or your message any better: it’s just as easy to make a banal, uninspired presentation with pictures as with text.
In fact, I think you’re more likely to create a bad presentation if you emphasize visuals over text. You’re probably not a trained or talented graphic designer, and the richer the medium, the more potential there is for using it badly. As someone (John Ousterhout?) said about C++, it’s an amplifier: it allows the good to be better, but the bad to be worse, and most of us aren’t as good as we think we are.
So the next time someone tells you to ditch your bullet points because a few carefully-chosen images will convey your ideas more effectively, please say, “Yes, but carefully chosen words will be more effective still, and more accessible to the visually disabled, and there will be less fluff for me to hide behind if the ideas I’m trying to convey are shallow or contradictory.”
Now, back to recording…
And to take it all, at least in Powerpoint 2010, you can use latex to typeset math formulas!
I never hear anyone complaining about Powerpoint because it’s too word-based. On the contrary, the problem with Powerpoint, and the primary complaint I hear about it, is that it encourages a style in which sound-bites or brief summaries stand in for actual data and reasoned argument.
See for example Edward Tufte’s famous assertion that Powerpoint was a cause of the destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia (http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB.
@Jacob I believe people are just as likely to make those mistakes using anything else as PowerPoint. I’ve read Tufte’s rant; I defy him to show that the engineers and managers involved in the Columbia disaster wouldn’t have thought just as sloppily if they’d been sharing their some other way.
Agreed, mostly (I think).
It’s not a text versus images thing that’s the problem with bad or boring presentations, it’s a failure to recognize the nature of the visual medium and what it’s good at and bad at… slides need to compliment a presentation, and that can be done with pictures or with words. But too many words (or too much visual data) distracts from a presentation thing.
So, if your point is that good vs bad presentations are about more than pictures vs words… point well-taken.
(I’m still not convinced that software like PowerPoint lends itself towards creating good presentations by default, but that’s a user problem as well.)
Too much point form text is an abomination. Slides are to complement the presentation, not /be/ the presentation.
My decks these days are small and all images. But you can be sure that I’ve thought about the content behind them. It also means they are almost useless without me talking along side them. When doing corporate training (vs ‘The Adam Show’), the deck will also be accompanied by pretty rigorous supporting text which can be referenced at a later date.
http://www.slideshare.net/agoucher/presentations
See also the post I did on a webinar from the Slide:ology lady – http://adam.goucher.ca/?p=1258
-adam
I agree that bullet points aren’t necessarily bad. Some of the best talks I’ve seen just used plain and simple bullet points.
I don’t have a particular preference for visual or textual slides – different styles work for different people. I think the main point is that slides should support the speakers’ story and not distract the audience.
Putting a lot of text on a slide is a good way of getting people to read what is on the slide instead of paying attention to what the speaker is saying. This is just as well possible with visual help, e.g. by putting up a too large and complex flowchart.