PowerPoint

Who will stick up for PowerPoint? It's always been the subject of low-level grumblings, and Lance Knobel points out that the World Economic Forum, in Davos (usually), has long had a "deep-rooted aversion" to allowing it into presentations. But ever since Edward Tufte came out with his 24-page jeremiad on the subject of slideware generally and PowerPoint specifically, it's got even worse press than usual.

The New York Times chimes in today, with an article centered on Tufte's criticism of the use of PowerPoint within NASA. Tufte points to a PowerPoint presentation which was given to senior managers while the Columbia was still orbiting, on the subject of whether or not the famous piece of foam had caused serious damage.

Among other problems, Mr. Tufte said, a crucial piece of information — that the chunk of foam was hundreds of times larger than anything that had ever been tested — was relegated to the last point on the slide, squeezed into insignificance on a frame that suggested damage to the wing was minor.
The independent board that investigated the Columbia disaster devoted an entire page of its final report last month to Mr. Tufte's analysis. The board wrote that "it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation."
In fact, the board said: "During its investigation, the board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA."

In a recent issue of Wired Magazine, Tufte recapitulated his message in a short article, but the editors had a harder time finding anybody who would stand up for the accursed software. They ended up alighting on David Byrne, who's been playing around with PowerPoint for a while now, and who has just released a book and DVD called Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information. The title, of course, is direct nod of the head to Tufte, whose second book is entitled simply Envisioning Information. Byrne's Wired article is whimsical, showing a few slides from PowerPoint presentations he's put together, with sardonic commentary on each:

I began this project making fun of the iconography of PowerPoint, which wasn't hard to do, but soon realized that the pieces were taking on lives of their own. This whirlwind of arrows, pointing everywhere and nowhere -each one color-coded to represent God knows what aspects of growth, market share, or regional trends -ends up capturing the excitement and pleasant confusion of the marketplace, the everyday street, personal relationships, and the simultaneity of multitasking. Does it really do all that? If you imagine you are inside there it does.

Wired magazine, which is now part of the Condé Nast empire, went crazy over Byrne's PowerPoint pieces. They put up huge flat-screen multimedia presentations in the lobby of their magnificent office building in Times Square, and then sponsored a talk between Byrne and Lawrence Weschler at the 92nd Street Y. (They also had a dinner at Lever House and a big after-party in Byrne's honour, but I wasn't invited to those.)

The effect of all this attention was to make Byrne's work seem very important – a groundbreaking new direction in visual art, perhaps, or maybe even an effective counterpoint to Tufte's grumblings. The headline on the article, after all, is "Learning to Love PowerPoint".

But at the 92nd Street Y, it rapidly became apparent that Byrne basically agrees wholeheartedly with everything Tufte is saying. He started off with a series of PowerPoint slides designed expressly to make us laugh at the medium and its limitations, and then went on to explain how it was those very limitations which attracted him to PowerPoint as an artform.

At the unveiling of the pieces in the Condé Nast building, he said, one of the building's tech-support types went up to him and asked why he hadn't created his pieces in Flash rather than PowerPoint, since using Flash would have been so much easier. The answer, Byrne said, was precisely that using PowerPoint was hard and that the software was decidedly buggy: when you run a series of slides together with music in a slideshow, as Byrne does, you can't be entirely sure how the slides are going to morph into each other, or exactly at what point in the show the music is going to kick in. There's an element of chance there: the same presentation, run on a slightly different computer, can create a significantly different result.

I can see the attraction of that kind of thing to an artist, and in fact the best bits of Byrne's slide presentations are precisely the bits where PowerPoint proves buggiest: the jerky dissolves from one frame into another, say, or the bizarre points at which the presentation freezes for no obvious reason. But even Byrne admits that the whole thing is a bit of a con, really: the main reason that some people find the presentations artistically interesting is that moving images combined with music are nearly always compelling enough to hold attention. That's why music videos are so successful. We can't watch one on mute for very long, and much of the music might not be to our taste, but put the two together, and we'll happily watch.

Byrne once described his music as a way of forcing people to listen to his lyrics, and in these works he's doing much the same thing. He uses a Ligeti piece, say, as a way of keeping attention while putting together an allusive series of slides on the subject of phrenology.

In the real world, of course, almost no one uses music in their PowerPoint presentations, and the only sound in the room is usually the presenter droning on monotonously, laboriously reading out every last word on every last slide. And as the NASA investigative board – as well as the journalists covering the story – found out, a lot of the time PowerPoint presentations are simply printed out or emailed in lieu of distributing a conventionally-written report.

Every few months I give out various awards in my guise as the Latin America correspondent for Euromoney, and I get dozens of submissions from banks who think they deserve a gong or two. If I didn't put my foot down on a regular basis, nearly all of these submissions would be in PowerPoint form: 3MB or 4MB files which, if they don't crash my computer completely, certainly slow it down and make reading the submission a painfully laborious process.

Banks like sending PowerPoint submissions because they can insert all manner of pretty corporate logos and country maps, but a lot of what they're doing is simply inertia: "submission" is more or less synonymous with "PowerPoint presentation" these days.

Of course, there should be a world of difference: PowerPoint was never designed to convey information on its own. The most interesting part of Byrne's appearance at the 92nd Street Y, for instance, was not his PowerPoint pieces, but rather the presentation which he put together expressly for the talk. He had a series of slides, some interesting, some funny, but he made sure that they complemented what he was saying, rather than reflecting it. He understands that PowerPoint is a tool which can be used as part of a presentation and that it is emphatically not the same as the presentation itself. In fact, I would go as far as to say that a good PowerPoint presentation (and such things do exist) should be pretty much incomprehensible to anybody seeing only the slides and not listening to what the presenter is saying. (Of course, there are always exceptions.)

The best example of a great PowerPoint presentation that I can find on the web is this one by Lawrence Lessig, which can also be reached from this page if you're having any difficulties with audio or video. But Lessig is not the only high-profile master of the medium: Steve Jobs has long been legendary for his Stevenotes, one of which is online here.

What Lessig and Jobs have in common is that they talk with conviction and enthusiasm for their subject, and give carefully-written speeches which are more or less free-standing. Have a look at Lessig's lectures: they read like speeches, and are clearly written in a very different manner to his academic papers. Those speeches are then enhanced with PowerPoint's visuals, which can be used to drive home a message even as Lessig himself is saying something a bit more subtle.

Unfortunately, the tens of millions of people with PowerPoint generally aren't good speechwriters, and invariably don't have any speechwriters available to construct their presentations for them. So they resort to PowerPoint's helpful content wizard. There's a whole default presentation called "Communicating Bad News", for instance, which includes slides like this.

Never mind the fact that the graphics are appalling, this kind of hand-holding is almost guaranteed to end up producing presentations of astonishing superficiality, with, as Tufte would put it, "a rate of information transfer asymptotically approaching zero".

No content wizard is ever going to be able to make people sit down and work out an interesting and compelling way of communicating information, and no gussied-up graphics are going to turn a bad presentation into a good one. (That's why Keynote, Apple's competition to PowerPoint, is not going to do much good for anyone.) And yet PowerPoint can still, very occasionally, be a powerful tool for enhanced communication. I'd just make a few (bullet) points, with a tip of the hat to Hasan:

A series of slides will never turn a bad speech into a good one. So start with the speech, and then use the slides to illustrate it, rather than the other way around.
If you're reading your slides, they have too much information on them.
Graphs and tables are perfect material for slides. Just remember what you learned in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and avoid Excel or PowerPoint defaults.
It is not necessary for every slide to be self-explanatory, but, on the other hand, you do not need to go out of your way to explain every slide. The slides and the speech are parallel and complementary information streams: use each to convey the information it's best suited for.

Finally, and most importantly,

Write out your speech in advance, and think about how it will be received: place yourself in the position of a listener. Jokes are always good, and remember that now you have the extra option of throwing in visual jokes as well as verbal ones. Enjoy yourself, and the chances are that your audience will enjoy themselves too.

Posted by Felix at 14:07 EST

Comments

Surely writing out your speech in advance is the worst possible advice (except, like, bring your monkey with you)? I always find that, even when they aren't reading directly, people who've worked out their phrasing beforehand always sound a lot more stilted than people who've just done an outline.

Posted by: Ned at 18:15 EST, September 28, 2003

Ned has a good point. But in my defense, there's a difference between writing your speech and reading your speech. Some people are good at reading things out loud; many people are bad at it, and rapidly fall into a sleep-inducing monotone. If you're in the latter camp, don't read your speech -- but do still write it out in advance, because otherwise you're going to end up taking your cues from your slides, rather than the other way around. I think the point I was trying to make is that PowerPoint presentations only really work when you're not speaking to the slide.

Posted by: Felix at 18:49 EST, September 28, 2003

If powerpoint is so bad, why is it so successful? Surely its not just because it allows pent up corporate workers a bit of a creative outlet in the cubicles? Tufte actually answers it, powerpoint is very effective at helping people organize and structure their talks/presentations. So perhaps the right approach it to write the speech using powerpoint and then throw away the slides?

Btw I've seen Lessig talk using powerpoint. Its odd, but he's a great speaker so he carries it. He does not control the slides, it runs like a movie, and he does his best to stay synced, strange experience, but it works most of the time. I doubt a less talented speaker could be anywhere near as effective though...

Posted by: Abe at 22:39 EST, September 28, 2003

only bad craftsman blames his tools.

if you recognize that you are not a craftsman, then let's hope you have the sense to realize that you wouldn't want to be trusting any standard issue microsoft product to be useful at communicating information.

remember these are the people who brought you:

"Error: Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue."

Posted by: geoff at 17:19 EST, September 29, 2003

This article was hilarious! hahaha.

Not only did it have some fairly informative bits, but it was the funniest thing I have read in a while! :-)

Thanks for sharing.

DuN D3vianT

Posted by: DuN_D3vianT at 16:56 EST, February 08, 2004