After reading Tufte’s essay on how bad PowerPoint is as a tool for communication, I am glad to see that I am not the only one. Being in a corporate environment for several years, I have seen plenty of PowerPoint presentations pass me by – ranging from presentations about how the company is doing as a whole for the whole fiscal year to a way to communicate a local fundraiser that is going on next week.
From a technical standpoint in the IT department, PowerPoint presentations are killer on the exchange server. A simple message that could be written in an email (or even a Word document) about a bake sale happening next week taking up maybe 5kb of server space could balloon into 14MB because of some unnecessary slide transitions and music. I’d be more frustrated because I didn’t get the gist of the entire message within seconds because I had to wait for the song to load.
Then if I look at it from a graphical standpoint, I can understand why PowerPoint is the tool for presenting data. One reason is because it is available. Corporations will always purchase the whole Office suite so if you have an option to be “creative,” why not? Clipart-away! PowerPoint tends to be an outlet for getting out of the norm of a routine. This I can’t really fault the application, but the content needs to be meaningful, not filled with cheesy images.
I have been in many meetings, where I have walked out and don’t remember a single thing from the presentation other than maybe the comic strip placed at the beginning to give us a chuckle before the meeting started. I have stacks and stacks of presentations that were printed out as a “reference,” but I can’t quite recalling needing to ever do them. Go figure.
Like Tufte said about lousy presentations, it is “the fault of inept PP users, not the fault of PP” and I totally believe that.
1 comment:
I completely agree with Ann. PowerPoint is used to often in a proffesional way representing important information that others need to know. Information that shouldn't be clipped nor outlined briefly. It surprised me to see how often it is used for important matters, especially when i've always thought about it as a highschool presentation tool. I stick to what I said in class, it should mostly be taught to students as an introductory or refresher of what the computer, internet, and some creative designing can get you.
I'm glad that Ann quoted Tufte in saying that it is "the fault of inept PP users, not the fault of PP". When reading the book as a whole, i got so distracted trying to counter his arguement (even though i agreed with most of what he said) that i overlooked where he stated my exact view. It is the user, not the program.
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