PowerPoint: Is it Evil? - Visual Thesaurus Online Edition. You've probably heard the PowerPoint jokes.
You know: "Death by PowerPoint," and "power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts absolutely. " It certainly gets a lot of stick. It also has some surprising defenders. (Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client of mine but I don't work for the PowerPoint team.) For example, Edward Tufte, author the beautifully named Beautiful Evidence , wrote a blistering article in Wired titled PowerPoint is Evil. My favorite PowerPoint parody is the Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation. What makes nation unique Conceived in LibertyMen are equal Shared vision New birth of freedomGov't of/for/by the people Garr Reynolds, author of the Presentation Zen, doesn't criticize but he does argue that PowerPoint is a blank canvas on which the presenter reveals his own personality. Where to get quotations for presentations?
In my presentations, I may have several slides which feature a quote from a famous (sometimes not so famous) individual in the field.
The quote may be a springboard into the topic or serve as support or reinforcement for the particular point I'm making. A typical Tom Peters presentation at one of his seminars, for example, may include dozens of slides with quotes. "I say that my conclusions are much more credible when I back them up with great sources," Tom says in this post from May, 2005. (I talked about using quotes a few months back here with examples.) Like everything else, quotations work best when not over done. Where to get quotes? Tom Peters' slides from his websiteAs Tom says "we post all my slide shows so attendees can go back at their leisure and recall the logic of the presentation and "steal" some cool quotes to use in their presentations! " Note: The photo of the woman making tea in the sample slide above was snapped by me about a year ago in Kobe. Where can you find good images? Presentation Zen.
Wired 11.09: Learning to Love PowerPoint. Learning to Love PowerPoint We interrupt this magazine for a PowerPoint presentation:• For artist and musician David Byrne, the medium is the message.• Infographic guru Edward Tufte wants to kill the messenger.
A while ago, I decided to base the book-tour readings from my pseudoreligious tract The New Sins on sales presentations. I was going for a fair dose of irony and satire, and what could be better than using PowerPoint and a projector, the same tools that every sales and marketing person relies on? Having never used the program before, I found it limiting, inflexible, and biased, like most software. On top of that, PowerPoint makes hilariously bad-looking visuals. I began to see PowerPoint as a metaprogram, one that organizes and presents stuff created in other applications. Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. "This is Dan Rather's profile. Previous Story: Wingman. Contrasts in presentation style: Yoda vs. Dart.
Edward Tufte says: "PowerPoint is Evil.
" This got me thinking... What if Darth Vader — my favorite fictional bad guy — gave a formal presentation? How would it look? How would it compare to the presentation style of Yoda, the wise Jedi master? In this horribly embellished image above, Darth tries to get Luke to capitulate and join forces by presenting in an "evil PowerPoint style. " Size and age matter not. Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil. PowerPoint Is Evil Power Corrupts.PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.
By Edward Tufte Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds' worth of silent reading material. Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Edward R.