PowerPoint Turns 20
One of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers is 20 years old. There won't be a lot of birthday celebrations for PowerPoint; the program is one the world loves to mock almost as much as it loves to use.
While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.
As it happens, what might be called the downside of the culture of PowerPoint is something that bemuses, concerns and occasionally appalls PowerPoint's two creators as much as it does everyone else.
Robert Gaskins was the visionary entrepreneur who in the mid-1980s realized that the huge but largely invisible market for preparing business slides was a perfect match for the coming generation of graphics-oriented computers. Scores of venture capitalists disagreed, insisting that text-based DOS machines would never go away.
With major programming done by Dennis Austin, an old chum, PowerPoint 1.0 for Macs came out in 1987. Later that year, Microsoft bought the company for $14 million, its first acquisition, and three years later a Windows version followed.
Gaskins and Mr. Austin, now 63 and 60, respectively, reflected on PowerPoint's creation and its current omnipresence in an interview last week. They are intensely proud of their technical and strategic successes. But to a striking degree, they aren't the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint. In fact, the best single source of PowerPoint commentary, both pro and con, (including a rich vein of Dilbert cartoons) can be found at RobertGaskins.com, his personal home page.
Perhaps the most scathing criticism comes from the Yale graphics guru Edward Tufte, who says the software "elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch." He even suggested PowerPoint played a role in the Columbia shuttle disaster, as some vital technical news was buried in an otherwise upbeat slide.
No quarrel from Mr. Gaskins: "All the things Tufte says are absolutely true. People often make very bad use of PowerPoint."
Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.
Since then, he complains, "a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work."
One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which is was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.
Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. The men call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.
Christopher was given a PowerPoint assignment this year in social studies. Next year, at the end of 8th grade, the kids can do one of two projects for their big ELA assignment:
- make a movie (no instruction provided)
- make a slide show (no instruction provided)
That's nothing compared to The Masters School, annual tuition $26,000/year and climbing.
I went to their Open House with a friend to hear the pitch, and they made us sit through a whole, long PowerPoint prsentation their 5th grade class had done.
That was it.
PowerPoint
A PowerPoint presentation made by other people's children. Ed had to tie me down to get me to watch my own kid's PowerPoint presentation; why would I want to watch anyone else's kid's PowerPoint presentation?
answer: I wouldn't.
My friend said, "For $26,000/year they better show me something that will rock my world."
PowerPoint isn't it.
update
I'm pretty sure Public Relations for Dummies says never use PowerPoint.
PRfD is a great, great book.
I read it a few years ago when I needed to write my first press release ever.
Result: my church got a news story in the New York Times, with photo.
[pause]
hmmmm...
Having read the one negative review on Amazon, I think I'm wrong about that.
I bought PRfD, which seemed terrific, but I didn't use it. Let me find the book I did use.
got it!
Writing Effective News Releases...: How to Get Free Publicity for Yourself, Your Business, or Your Organization by Catherine V. McIntyre
fantastic
I'm pretty sure I'm right about PowerPoint & the Dummies book. Yaverbaum says don't use PowerPoint.
I think.
Tufte's tips for a successful presentation
cyber tips from Tufte
ask Tog (Challenger graphics)
21st century skills
Ahhh, the drug that is PowerPoint. I attended the U.S. Dept. of Education's Teacher to Teacher conference here in Phoenix last week. Presenters are required to use a PPt presentation (no more than 25 slides.) You can learn more about the initiative and see the wonderful, bulleted, small font slides at this link:
ReplyDeleteTeacher to Teacher Inititative
The Phoenix Conference was the first to ever be sponsored by Charter Schools (or Dean Kern, of the US Dept. of Ed's Director of Charter Schools ). It was very interesting when he spoke and less than half the attendees were from charter schools. He needed to add a speech the second day explaining what a charter school was and why public schools should embrace them.
We only get 50 minutes each week in our computer lab. One project we chose (There's no technology teacher at my school!) was to teach the 3rd graders PowerPoint. First, in class, they each wrote 5 fun facts about themselves. In complete sentences. Then we moved to the lab and made a 6 slide presentation.
ReplyDeleteThe computer lab is a great place for constructivism. I'll bet most people on Blogger figured out how to design, post & comment on their own, with little help from the site.
People have no idea what charter schools are!
ReplyDeleteStill!
I didn't know what they were, either, until quite recently (a couple of years ago, when I finally started paying attention).
The first time I asked the middle school principals about KIPP's superior math teaching every parent in the room jumped all over me.
They kept saying, "KIPP has to raise money; that's why they have better scores."
I kept saying, "KIPP is a charter school; it's a public school."
Finally someone demanded to know whether KIPP did any fundraising and of course I said yes.
That settled it. KIPP has to raise money so KIPP has to have good scores.
There's a bunch of great stuff on PowerPoint and the Iraq War.
ReplyDeleteH.R. McMasters banned PowerPoint because he wanted real writing with real verbs.
verbs and conjunctions
ReplyDeleteThe PowerPoint thing is particularly salient to me at the moment since I'm in the process of ripping our first chapter apart, totally retooling, and putting the damn thing back together again.
ReplyDeleteIf a book were a PowerPoint presentation I would have been done with the whole thing a year ago.
Instead I'm doing major reconstruction on the first chapter.
As I always say to Temple, "A list is not a book."
ReplyDeleteWhat is the Teacher-to-Teacher institute??
ReplyDeleteAn outline isn't a book either. But sometimes it's a good way to get thoughts organized. When things don't go beyond outline form, then that's not good. In the govt, the main form of communication is presentations. I believe most managers in the govt have some sort of ADD affliction, since they have the attention spans of fleas. Hence, PowerPoints are good for them. They can absorb info quickly and flit about from one topic to the next. My boss takes advantage of this by using PowerPoint to outline the ultimate report we have to write. So in effect, he is using PowerPoint to force us to organize our thoughts, but unlike public schools that are satisfied with PowerPoint as final product, we are using PowerPoint only as the starting point from which to write the report.
ReplyDeleteThis is not to say I like PowerPoint. I hate it in fact. Nor do I like meetings.
Verbs? Overrated.
ReplyDeletePower point: Both misused and overused, but not inherently problematic
Power Point users:
* Mostly untrained speakers
* Mostly incapable of using any presentation tool (including chalk boards) effectively
* Generally better with Power Point than without
8-)
Verbs? Overrated.
ReplyDeletelol!
of course, I happen to like bullet points
I've been in List Hell.
ReplyDeleteThe book I'm using for Temple's & my sequel to AIT is pages & pages & pages of lists of animal stereotypies.
With a horrifically bad index, I might add.
It's a nightmare.
Took me 6 months even to be able to classify the different lists...
In my experience, government departments use Powerpoint because they can then call what they are doing a "presentation" which means they don't have to go through all the procedural rules for documents (eg circulating them two weeks beforehand).
ReplyDeletePowerpoint is wonderful if used properly. That means using it as something adjacent to a speech. A set of slides should not be a standalone document - if it is people are going to spend all their time reading the slides and not listening to your speech.
In my experience, government departments use Powerpoint because they can then call what they are doing a "presentation" which means they don't have to go through all the procedural rules for documents (eg circulating them two weeks beforehand).
ReplyDeleteThere are many documents other than PowerPoint that can ciruclate without going through procedural rules. But in the end, if someone files a Freedom of Information Act request about a particular subject, and wants ALL documentation related to it, PowerPoint presentations must be provided to comply with the request.
Okay, in my experience NZ government departments and agencies use Powerpoint slides for the reasons I gave.
ReplyDeleteIn NZ slides from presentations may be obtained under the Official Information Act (unless there's an extremely good reason why not). Indeed, officials have been required to write down their recollections of what was said at informal meetings and release that under NZ's Official Information Act.