PowerPoint sucks

Fun facts on PowerPoint:

• The "criticism" section of the Wikipedia page on it is more than 30 percent of the total length. (601 words out of 1,926, not counting footnotes, infoboxes not part of the actual article, etc.)


• Former members of the Army have praised PowerPoint for its ability avoid sharing information, like in press briefings where the speaker wants to avoid tough questions.


• PowerPoint has been cited as one of the causes of the Space Shuttle explosion in 2003.

Clearly, PowerPoint is a great threat to the Republic.

OK, clearly, not really. The problem is, just like lots of other computerized things, stupid people use it thoughtlessly, freely. If someone was going to do a presentation that would be 84 slides, if he had to create all the slides using transparencies or an actual slide projector by hand, before he had even started he'd say to himself, "Wait a minute, do I really need all this? I'm not even sure we have enough transparencies in the supply closet. Most of the text will be OK, but I'd have to do some of the graphs by hand, and that would be ugly. And anyways, this is a ton of information. Maybe I should summarize and condense it better. Or take out all the parts that aren't really, really important. Or just call in sick that day."

If you have PowerPoint, though, and you want to do a presentation that's 84 slides, well, fuck it, why not? There are no office supplies to run out of. Putting pictures on slides is as easy as text and using zany formatting is even easier than those. If a slide winds up unreadable with dense text, it's actually easier to split it onto a second slide than to edit the text to be more concise. The program makes visual aids for presentations so easy that you don't even have to think about it. So some people choose not to.

The well-meaning but dumb boss, for example. Last week's presentation was available for download on the department's Web site for some strange reason, so I got it and counted the slides. 84. The meeting was only scheduled to take an hour. If the meeting ended on time and if he had actually bothered to show us all the slides, that would have been more than one a minute, so we would have been rushed indeed. Unfortunately, the meeting took an hour and a half, and after I downloaded it I found that he still didn't get through all of them.

I intend to follow this post up later, with even more problems from last week's meeting and from other meetings in general, but that right there is a big, obvious one: if you have more than, say, one slide for every minute of expected speaking time, then you're probably doing something wrong.