Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports. For nearly all engineering and scientific communication, instead of PowerPoint, the presentation and reporting software should be a word-processing program capable of capturing, editing and publishing text, tables, data graphics, images and scientific notation. Replacing PowerPoint with Microsoft Word (or, better, a tool with non-proprietary universal formats) will make presentations and their audiences smarter.
That’s our old friend Edward Tufte again, in PowerPoint Does Rocket Science–and Better Techniques for Technical Reports. I know that I’m beating up PowerPoint this week, but I wanted that quote because mentions “non-proprietary universal formats” – and that means open source, badda-bing.
This all started because NATO use PowerPoint far too much. Ironically they then post all the PowerPoint slides on a super-duper high-security intranet, the sort of place where information goes to die, although at least they’re thorough and consistent about it. However it just doesn’t seem to meet the needs of decision-making, particularly in complex situations. David Byrne notwithstanding, most people realise that PowerPoint doesn’t help them much, and in some cases hinders them.1
PowerPoint has its place, but it’s become like a weed that stifles the growth of other presentation tools. I was only partly joking when I talked about a PowerPoint vaccine to inoculate organisations against its further spread – perhaps organisations could declare a “No PowerPoint Day” (week? month? year?) and ask employees to come up with alternative ways of delivering their message?
- I once had to develop a slide show 30 minutes before giving a speech because the conference organizers simply couldn’t conceive of a presentation without PowerPoint and refused to let me take the podium without a slide show. Needless to say, the slide show ended halfway through the actual talk, and thus I maintained the delicate balance between the principled and the practical. [↩]
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Perhaps organizations could come up with a PowerPoint training day instead. All those people who create ugly PowerPoint slides, and people like Tufte who bash them, probably haven’t spent a minute learning how to use PowerPoint. Read Jim Tracey’s Sequential Thematic Organization of Publications as a starting point.
That’s a fair comment – I’m not blaming PowerPoint (or even Microsoft) for this state of affairs – and basic training in how to use PowerPoint would certainly help. However it wouldn’t change the basic problem that PowerPoint simply isn’t suitable for communicating complex information – full stop.
In addition – as you probably know – the technologies that we use shape the way that we think. What does the ubiquity of PowerPoint say about the direction in which we are going, cognitively speaking? And what effect will that have on our organisations?
Hi;
Please take a look at http://www.windwardreports.com/ as I think it will address the complaints you have with other programs. Yes I’m biased (I wrote the first version) but I think it’s a superb approach to report design.
thanks – dave
Another PPT issue – nothing, but nothing, is as incompatible and almost as a PowerPoint file. You can depend upon ppt/97/2000/XP and pptx files rendering strangely in any other program, and forget about editing them with – say – OpenOffice Impress if you don’t want weird artefacts showing up when you look at it in MS PPT. It is literally the only application for which I ever run Windows. Of course, PPT simply refuses to even open ODPs.