PPT doesn't kill people, people using PPT kill people

Another shot fired in the PowerPoint war, this time from Slate. It's a balanced view of the application's weaknesses and strengths, and spends a lot of time – as it should – not blaming the app but the people using it.

Unlike masters of presentation like Jobs and Gore who simplify their slides, and use them to illustrate their thinking, most people get caught in the snare of templates. They cut down on the number of slides (too many looks like too much work) by packing maximum information into each slide, using bullets, sub-bullets and sub-sub-bullets. Each topic gets its own page, because that seems neat and clean. And if the slides seem too busy, then the presenter will often use builds, fly-ins, music and cute animations to make the thing more, um, entertaining.

(The worst, as of course you know, is when the only path open to the presenter, when sitting in a room full of people staring at these unreadable slides, seems to be to read them verbatim to the audience – boring them more deeply in multiple media. But that's not the point of this post.)

As a some-time participant is such affairs, it worries me when important information or a key point is getting missed for the sake of the template. I'll always suggest busting the template, or a single big headline on a single slide to ensure a point gets across, and sometimes I'm even listened to.

But writing in PPT is impossible for me. I have to write in Word, and actually have a flow and logical thinking, because I feel like PPT discourages that. And the Slate article points to a great example of exactly that, one I'd heard of but hadn't read before – this description of the way that NASA and Boeing engineers and managers used PowerPoint to elide the real risks that the space shuttle Columbia faced after its heat shield was damaged. It's a frightening look at some of the actual slides with a detailed critique. You look at them and can't help but think that, if someone wanted to hide the actual risks, they couldn't have done a better job.

As Edward Tufte says, when each issue conveniently takes up an equal single page, can it really be that they are all of equal concern? What is being deleted, missed or ignored in the serious issues? And how can you even differentiate the serious issues from anything else? Someone who is on autopilot while cranking out a PPT isn't going to be thinking about stuff like that.

What is incumbent on the presenter is to actually think about what you're trying to communicate, and ensure that your presentation and you combine to say what you want. Make sure you know what your big-ass fundamental point is before worrying about your sub-bullets. And remember that you get to choose the damn template you start with, and get to change it at will.

So, in the end I know it's not PowerPoint's fault... but the more I think about, writing presentations in Word (with full control over layout and fonts) then saving them as PDFs makes more and more sense.

concentrated evil

One of those late nights wrestling with PowerPoint for a presentation tomorrow, so I'm less than fully coherent. (Or let's say, normally coherent.) Now, I'm not the first one to point out that it's not very useful for thinking, or that's it's just not made for Macs, or for actually convincing people of anything if they're not engineers, but all of those things are so manifestly true to me at the moment that I must bore you by reminding you of the fact.

I know people who default to Excel when creating any document; they think in those key commands, even for lists and other "natural" word processing needs. And as I writer, I've come to a South Korea/North Korea kind of understanding with Word. (I really miss MacWrite II, which was 20 times smaller, faster and 99% of the time just as useful.)

I don't know anyone who thinks in PowerPoint. I'm not sure I'd want to.

It makes everything dull and uninspired. It takes really good ideas and turns them into bullet points with different kinds of bullets and indents. It turns people into robots at the very moment when they need to be inspired and passionate and creative. It's a straightjacket. A vise. A trap.