It looks like...
...you're making a twat of yourself.
Again.
Microsoft PowerPoint is set to strip away the last vestiges of humanity from presentations with tweaks to its Designer functionality and a coach to help users "deliver the perfect presentation". The BBC's Tim Harford recently added spreadsheets to his increasingly inaccurately named 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy but …
Duh, you conflated a measure of length, football fields, (although that is sometimes area as well) with volume, Olympic sized swimming pools. We measure height in double-decker buses, stacked one of top of the other. Large quantities of money are normally (Europe) multiples or percentages of the GDP of Italy/Greece/Spain, US: GDP of California/Wyoming, etc.
Larger distances are multiples of moon journeys.
It took me a while to work out what you were talking about: a football is one of the register standard units of volume, while a football pitch is area (as is only right, otherwise which length would you use? diagonal, á la screen sizes?). They are strangely grouped at the low end; one chicken egg being about two walnuts, or one third of a grapefruit (is that a Waldorf salad?), or one thirtieth of a football, or nothing of an Olympic swimming pool, which can contain a little under 20 whales (provided the RSPCA isn't looking).
I guess a lot of British military personnel would say that Texas was "about the size of Afghanistan" were they to even think about it.
However, I have a proposal for PowerPoint which would deal with the problem without AI, without an expert rule engine, and without Clippy. It's a simple questionnaire that would come up on startup.
Q1: Do you work in sales, marketing, or are you preparing a lecture for presentation to a specialist audience?
Answer:
No ---> message comes up "Do not use PowerPoint."
Yes---> message comes up "Still do not use PowerPoint."
Power point is OK for sales and marketing types, it's what it's meant for. It allows you to bamboozle the audience with empty bling while imparting zero useful information to them which basically the description of sales and marketing.
I knew someone who worked in sales who used to start his presentation by offering to not show them his powerpoint slides if the signed then and there so they could all have an early lunch. Apparently this worked about 75% of the time. When his boss found out he was angry but couldn't deny they he was the most successful salesman on the team.
I'm still using PPT(X) 2004 for medical lectures.
With a bit of imagination it can be made a fantastic & entertaining information conveyor.
Its the the lecturer who is dull, not the application.
I don't talk much - each set of slides tells its own story in a few trenchant words (NO charts!!!)
Mac
I guess a lot of British military personnel would say that Texas was "about the size of Afghanistan" were they to even think about it.
It's really not fair to compare Afghanistan and Texas. One is a vast area of wild country inhabited by heavily armed, trigger happy, poorly educated religious fundamentalists who hate women, gays, foreigners and anyone even slightly unlike themselves, while the other is, oh, what's the point? The joke just writes itself. I'm wasting my time here.
I remember a floor talk (science) back around 2000 when one lab head tried to give a PP talk but none of her pictures would show. She had linked to the pictures on her HD but not copied them over and taken a disc of the talk down to the seminar room. An early cautionary tale.
That was back when talks had both a laptop and a slide projector prepped since not everyone had made the switch. Then there were those who used a slide scanner to copy their talks in silico and then just imported each slide verbatim into PP. You can imagine.
There are lots of technophobes and just barely hanging on to a set of long outdated tech people in science.
I had lots of respect for the support people who talked her into an upgrade (she still used actual floppies). Including a word processor 'like' her old favorite. We almost persuaded her that the learning curve from where she was to a Mac was much the same. But that WP was the killer. Can't remember which one it was, WordStar? something like that.
From the article: On that note, we would respectfully direct users to our very own online Standards Converter for a far superior experience.
There is (IMHO) a significant omission from the list; read on...
When I worked for <redacted> my immediate colleague and I were getting progressively more irritated with a manager who clearly had no real idea of what we were actually doing. (FWIW we rather liked it that way, but that's another story.) My colleague had a revelation come to him and he announced that the manager's name should be used as the Unit of Wasted Space.
A few moments later we realised that there were others almost equally deserving of immortality so we finished up allocating Wasted Space names for every standard we could think of; SI, MKS, CGS, FPS.
Eventually, much the better for our little diversion, we got back to work.
I have yet to see a Powerpoint of any worth.
Whether it's a (entirely third-party) YouTube video per slide, or just a bullet list that someone reads out, or just long blocks of text that have nothing to do with what's being said and are skimmed/skipped, I see no value in Powerpoints whatsoever.
The presenters who need them just need a prompt, that's all. The presenters who don't, don't need anything at all really.
There is nothing worse than having read the entire slide, getting the point, but being held to that wait-for-the-clicker moment to read the next one while people waffle on.
Honestly... if you want to do it... say "There'll be a summary Powerpoint sent to you after the talk, so don't worry about missing anything, let's just dive right in".
Similarly, however, I actually can't remember the last time I was in a room where someone was powerpointing where the *entire meeting* wasn't worthless. Either full of lies that never materialised, contained no useful material of interest and/or was not relevant to the majority of people there and could have been handled better with smaller individual meetings or even emails.
As someone whose job involves *setting up* for those kinds of presentations, that just baffles me. I've yet to load something up for someone who's giving a talk and thinking "Wow, that's pretty cool/useful/interesting".
Were I a CEO in charge of a company, emblazoned in place of the corporate "mission statement" would be a set of commandments instead:
- Thou shalt not Powerpoint.
- Thou shalt not conference call.
- Thou shalt not Skype/Whatsapp/Videocall.
- Thou shalt not call a meeting involving more than 5 staff without prior authorisation.
- Thou shalt confirm everything in email, even if a meeting took place.
- Thou shalt use email groups appropriately and in a targeted manner.
But if you don't reach out, will they be there?
I have. I used to attend lectures of the Cambridge University Astronomical Society. There were (of course) many bad presentations, but there were also some very good ones †. It's really hard to talk about astronomy without showing *either* pretty pictures that your telescope has taken *or* graphs (I tended to prefer the "graphs" lectures, but that's personal taste).
† I have a theory about Professor Martin Rees: if he wants to, he can give a bad lecture. This theory is just like String Theory; intellectually very attractive, but entirely without any experimental evidence.
A slideshow of images is a different thing altogether. The subject then *is* the image. Rather than repeating what the image clearly shows.
I found proper exceptions: Dave Gorman. And Prof. Brian Cox latest tour that I intended (purely because humungous 8K images of the deepest universe are pretty... but even he knows to just have them as background while talking about something that needs no informational slides for him to explain).
> There is nothing worse than having read the entire slide, getting the point, but being held to that wait-for-the-clicker moment to read the next one while people waffle on.
This, so very much. Also, it drives home the fact that these presentations almost always take an hour to say what it would take a normal human being about 10 minutes to say.
Best presentation I ever saw at a conference was a reasonably long one relating to some scientific investigation/endeavour, and had a comic strip running long the bottom of it.
So slide to slide it was telling a story, and at the end the presenter simply asked "and I guess you all want to know how things finally concluded" and put up a totally blank slide except for the cartoon conclusion at the bottom, whilst verbally summarising the end results of the experimental investigation.
There is something worse: a presentation scheduled for a 15 minute slot, and a statement of the type "slide 2 of 65" in the corner. You just know this is going to go WAY over time, and that the presenter hasn't thought properly about what his core message actually is. You also know most slides will contain a load of irrelevant information. I really would like an automatic tool that cuts down all presentations to a reasonable number (say one per minute tops), by randomly removing slides. Failing that, as session chair at such a conference, I would love to have a trapdoor installed, so the speaker can be removed from the stage unceremoniously when he overstays his welcome (or before, depending on my mood).
> I have yet to see a Powerpoint of any worth. [...] I see no value in Powerpoints whatsoever.
Then you're clearly a 'do-er'. I regularly have to produce short presentations because we have too many people with fingers in the pie. They are not necessarily managers and certainly not workers, but that worst of all breeds: people who have the power to say 'no'.
Whenever some issue arises, the only hope for getting them up-to-speed and (with luck) being able to get them to agree on a course of action is to produce a quick Powerpoint. So it's two slides to remind them what we intended to do; one or two slides to show the problem; and another one or two to give the solution options and costs.
While painful, there is at least one advantage: there is some evidence for later when they have completely forgotten what they previously agreed and are challenging why something is a particular way in the design. :-)
When I taught computer science I used word (what?) for my "slides". Powerpoint was landscape and word was portrait, a much better match for showing code. I never read the slides (I assumed the students could read) but added information to the information on the slides. I also handed out a (reduced) paper copy of all of the slides so the students could concentrate on the material rather than trying to copy down the slides.
I noticed that some students, in lab, would have these lecture slide copies for reference.
I got good reviews from the students.
> Reading The Slides Out Loud
Well, that's better than almost silently and with barely visible lip movement, I guess. I would characterize the cardinal sin as "Turning your back to your audience to look at the screen and then reading the slides out loud". Sadly, I've seen it done far too many times.
The best presentation advice I ever saw was to treat your material as a story - it has a setup, an exposition, a moment of drama (or at least hopefully some sort of revelation, otherwise why bother?), and a resolution. Story-board it like a movie short, and then create five or six slides with no more than ten words on any one.
"Turning your back to your audience to look at the screen and then reading the slides out loud".
Public speaking is a skill that requires practice and effort, PP cons people into believing that just with this benighted piece of s/w they can shine and delight an audience with their pithy and occasionaly amusing slides and witty banter with the audience (the latter is of course deep into fantasy lala land).
The reality is, most casual presenters brains switch to read only the moment they step up in front of their audience.
...the unstoppable animations, that not even Ctrl-Alt-Del could cut them short?
It was all the rage, back then, to use a NSFW image, an unskippable animation, and a loud orgarsmic female moan. Or a guy yelling GET BACK TO WORK at full lungs.
You still have the moan version on Whatsapp these days.
The title was something like "Your order" or "Your purchase" or "Soccer results", whatever enticed anyone to open the e-mail attachment.
If I give a presentation, I do the test run without a computer.
This is (a) to ensure what I say is compelling enough not to need slide based embellishments, (b) to make sure that I know which slides DO matter (typically graphs, a descriptive diagram or the one picture that does indeed replace a lot of words and (c) as protection against a tech or physical fail. Anything that shows up in (b) can be printed if need be as backup.
I also don't have so many words on a slide that it takes people 5 minutes to read it because that is a totally pointless exercise and anyone doing it should be banned from presenting until they have learned their lesson and I put that here just by way of illustration of why that is so MASSIVELY irritating..
Typically, my use of slides is twofold: (1) illustrative, to make things clear or add some amusement (I hate boring presentations) and (2) to keep me on track, which means that slides usually only contain 10 words at most because the content has to come from me as speaker.
Last but not least, the first thing I either ignore or actively remove is a lectern. I know lab rats like to hide behind them when-they-read-their-presentation-in-a-voice-and-body-posture-that-says-they-would-rather-be-back-behind-their-desk-and-could-everybody-please-stop-looking-at-them-but-not-fall-asleep *, but in the 30 or so years that I had to explain things to people I have used it exactly once, and that was to rest my own laptop on it.
When you're presenting, you have been granted the use of a bit of people's most precious resource in the world: their time. Don't present if you cannot treat that with the respect it deserves.
As for software, I hate Powerpoint. Too many pointless bells and whistles get in the way of the actual story.
* That is not their fault, it's just a mistake to assume all experts are good with audiences
"or add some amusement (I hate boring presentations)"
In my experience, there is no slide so amusing that it can make a boring presentation not-boring. At best, it can only distract you from the boring presentation for a brief moment.
"which means that slides usually only contain 10 words at most"
The only words that should appear on any slide are labels for the data visualization being presented. If the slide is not presenting data visualization, or is not purely decorative, it shouldn't exist.
In my experience, there is no slide so amusing that it can make a boring presentation not-boring. At best, it can only distract you from the boring presentation for a brief moment.
But that's the whole point: a presentation is basically telling a story. If you cannot make that story interesting for your audience, either you or the audience is wasting their time.