Why powerpoint is evil

I have made and seen more slide shows than I can remember. In these countless presentations, PowerPoint was almost always used a supplemental part of the assignment. He attacks PowerPoint and Microsoft as if it is a ruthless totaliterian regime, whose aspire to brainwash Americas young.

He compares it to an addictive perscription drug, with frequent side effects causing stupidity and a bunch of other non-sense. His claim that Microsoft, a major corporation, is essentially getting rich by devaluing education, is certainly a rational thought. It is the metaphorical hammer for every information nail. It took me about four hours of fiddling and fighting with PowerPoint to make the picture.

Just reformatting it for this blog post took me 30 minutes. Because I knew that people would expect a graphic, I had to spend the time. Multiply that time by all the presentation graphics in the country and all the fighting with colors, line connectors, grid alignment, fonts, etc. Topic maps can be used to identify and extract snippets from one or multiple documents. For example, a topic map for desserts could be used to show where these treats are mentioned in restaurant reviews, customer comments, and menus.

But when it comes to the eventual presentation itself, the goal is to make people pay attention to the speaker, not stare at the screen. And putting every word of the oration into the slides or even the slide notes makes for a very boring lecture.

Steve Jobs knows this , and at his Apple events he uses just a few words per slide, and a minimum of graphics. When a PowerPoint presentation is reduced to just one word per slide, a la Steve Jobs, you have to have the presenter present.

This is great if you can convince your audience not to expect the deck the day before or after the meeting. He was, however, very aware of the way in which Popes had abused power. He believed that they deserved it! The remark was part of the letter.

So much for Lord Acton! Edward Tufte is a visionary statistician, who gives seminars on how to display, represent, and communicate data. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.

Tufte deplores the way that PowerPoint encourages speakers to prioritize format over content. He dislikes the way children are encouraged to reduce their ideas to bullet points and sales pitches. He argues that a PowerPoint presentation is really no help to the audience but is a crutch for the presenter.

The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? I must admit that, in the course of my career, the number of PowerPoint slides and the number of bullets I have seen have probably run into hundreds of thousands. Rarely have I laughed, been impressed, or even learned very much from a bullet. Any technology creates the opportunity to create dreadful output. The advent of desktop publishing spawned thousands of appalling newsletters in the s.