Lousy PowerPoint presentations: The fault of PP users?
August 21, 2006 | Edward Tufte
3 Comment(s)
The common defense of bad PowerPoint presentations is that they are the “fault of the user, not the tool.”
This point raised by PP advocates in fact provokes a rich and complex question about nearly any type of expressive performance: What are the causes of presentations?
Here are excerpts on these matters from my essay on PowerPoint:
Topics: 3-Star Threads, E.T., Science
Donald Norman’s comments on technology in general, though not PowerPoint specifically, is dead on:
After attending Mr. Tufte’s Portland seminar, I gave a presentation on the content to my colleagues at work. I focused on how what I learned could be used to improve the design of our own software. Naturally, I couldn’t in good conscience use a PowerPoint for this.
Instead I wrote a one-page, double-sided report highlighting the seminar’s scope and detailing various salient points. I then created a number of design ideas using what I learned. PowerPoint was employed as a blank delivery mechanism for the new designs. I simply copied and pasted items from various Visio storyboards, Word tables, and PaintShop mocks onto completely blank slides to use as visual aids for my talk. There was no text and only five slides were needed. This allowed me to use presentation mode to easily flip through the designs without having to change applications or filter out irrelevant elements on the fly. And because I didn’t waste time distilling my report into little text bullets, I could focus on creating good design ideas to share.
I was amazed at how smoothly the presentation went. The group read through the report while I elaborated on the details and the projected designs gave them a focal point as well as needed context for the theory. There was a high level of understanding and feedback was pointed and content rich. Time of the meeting was reduced by 50% compared to my initial expectations.
I also had a number of compliments on my designs (thank you Mr. Tufte) as well as on the presentation itself. The best part is that, for those who missed it, I can simply hand them a copy of the report and point them to the designs.
Another example of how it may be more effective to distribute handouts/reading material before a presentation versus enslaving a meeting to a deck of slides comes from Steve Ballmer From “Meetings, Version 2.0, at Microsoft”, in the New York Times’ Corner Office column (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/business/17corner.html):