Problems With Powerpoint

GIST: Powerpoint is a poor alternative to a technical report

Sources: Tufte’s Cognitive-Style-of-Powerpoint-by-Edward-Tufte-Copyright-6dihaw.pdf

https://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen

PowerPoint is presenter-oriented, not content-oriented, not audience-oriented.

PowerPoint’s convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent designs for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers. This cognitive style harms the quality of thought for the producers and the consumers of presentations.

Paper handouts for talks will help provide a permanent record for review—again unlike projected images and talk. Another way to break free of low-resolution temporal comparisons is to show multiple slides, several images at once within the common view. Spatial parallelism takes advantage of our notable capacity to reason about multiple images that appear simultaneously within our eyespan. We are able to select, sort, edit, reconnoiter, review—ways of seeing quickened and sharpened by direct spatial adjacency of evidence.

For scientists and engineers, a good way to help raise the quality of an analysis is to ask “What would Richard Feynman do?” The Feynman Principle can help with the presentation of scientific and engineering results. Feynman experienced the intense bullet outline style in his work on the first shuttle accident, the Challenger in 1986. He expressed his views clearly: Then we learned about “bullets”—little black circles in front of phrases that were supposed to summarize things. There was one after another of these little goddamn bullets in our briefing books and on slides.

The PP slide format has the worst signal/noise ratio of any known method of communication on paper or computer screen. Extending PowerPoint to embrace paper and internet screens pollutes those display methods.

At a talk, paper handouts of a technical report effectively show text, data graphics, images. Printed materials bring information transfer rates in presentations up to that of everyday material in newspaper sports and financial pages, books, and internet news sites. An excellent paper size for presentation handouts is A3, 30 by 42 cm or about 11 by 17 inches, folded in half to make 4 pages. That one piece of paper, the 4-pager, can show images with 1,200 dpi resolution, up to 60,000 characters of words and numbers, detailed tables worthy of the sports pages, or 1,000 sparkline statistical graphics showing 500,000 numbers. That one piece of paper shows the content-equivalent of 50 to 250 typical PP slides. Thoughtful handouts at your talk demonstrate to the audience that you are responsible and seek to leave permanent traces and have consequences. Preparing a technical report requires deeper intellectual work than simply compiling a list of bullets on slides. Writing sentences forces presenters to be smarter. And presentations based on sentences make consumers smarter as well. Serious presentations might well begin with a concise briefing paper or technical report (the 4-pager) that everyone reads (people can read 3 times faster than presenters can talk). Following the reading period, the presenter might provide a guided analysis of the briefing paper and then encourage and perhaps lead a discussion of the material at hand.