PowerPoint is evil

Luiza writes “Check out this article from Wired’s September issue, if you haven’t already. It states that Power Point has robbed many meetings of time well spent waiting for slides to load, and children of the ability to think in any format other than bullet points.”

October 22, 2003 by Blake Uncategorized 5

mcbride says:

October 22, 2003 at 6:07 am

Slides before PowerPoint
How many people remember how fun it was to try to make a decent set of slides for a meeting before PowerPoint? Granted, it’s overused, especially those hideous templates with the strange color sets. Who dreamt those up?

But I’d rather go without 90% of the extra features in Word and Excel than lose PowerPoint.

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John says:

October 22, 2003 at 6:29 am

Two more links
- Gettysburg Cemetery Dedication
- Scott McNealy chimes in
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Aaron says:

October 22, 2003 at 9:04 am

Re:Two more links
I really liked that second link, thanks. I too get strange looks when I don’t have a PP presentation on hand when I talk. I’m all about handout passing around rought outlines in which people can actively write notes, should they desire.

I loathed a prof who handed out printed slides and then proceeded to show them “live” and read them word for word. Also, I wish having a PP present be all plain white slides with black text would become the cool thing to do.

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djfiander says:

October 22, 2003 at 4:45 pm

Re:Two more links

To quote a former coworker, “Notice my effective use of colour: black and white!”

It’s the only way I work. Except, of course, when my powerpoint is 5 megabytes of screen captures because the classroom is unwired and they want me to demonstrate searching a databases.

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Karl says:

October 22, 2003 at 11:06 pm

Re:Two more links
I was just about to remark along those lines. In two years of doing library presentations, I’ve only created two PowerPoint shows. In both cases, it was a series of screenshots to make up for the fact that the remote location didn’t have the IP to get to the library-only resource. I find that PowerPoint is excellent for this.

I also teach PP classes, and I’m constantly amazed at the broad cross-section of people, of all ages and backgrounds, who are interested in learning about the software. I try very hard to make them understand that it’s intended as a visual aid or outline, not an entire presentation of it’s own.

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