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	Saturday, August 30, 2003

PowerPoint, the Misunderstood Dictator This post (and this weblog) has a new home. With some talks to prepare, I've been re-thinking the best way to deliver information to an audience. A direct mailing on this very topic grabbed my interest, and in Friday's evening mail, I received my copy of Edward Tufte's essay The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Bill Gates != Uncle Joe Tufte makes some good points to puncutate a barrage of discursive hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims, but by and large, he spends more time critiquing the exposition of particular presentations than the thinking that PowerPoint induces in authors and audiences. The mixure of benign exaggeration and invective lurches between misinformation and actual ignorance with To describe a software house is to describe the PowerPoint cognitive style. as the crown jewel. Proscription without prescription is void, and I can find little to take away from the essay other than a generic admonition on argumentation and craftsmanship. I am no fan of PowerPoint or Keynote or their ilk, but when in Rome..., I unquestioningly accepted PowerPoint as a substitute for chalk and slate when I made the transition from academia to the business world. PowerPoint was part of the top-to-bottom swap-out that included Word for Emacs and TeX, Outlook for Mutt, and Windows for Linux and Solaris. More than any other member of the Office suite, PowerPoint is a brand name that has ascended to noun status like BandAid, Xerox, or Kleenex. Before I continue, I should make a few confessions. I have used PowerPoint Phluff (Tufte's term), and I did inhale. I have labored over gradient-shaded backgrounds with embossed company logos, tweaked animated slide transitions, and struggled with the level, number, and content of bulletted items on a slide. PowerPoint in Perspective Like any tool or framework, PowerPoint makes a set of simplifying assumptions intended to aid users in presenting information. Information is delivered in screen-size increments that use one of a number of pre-fabricated layouts or a custom layout that consists of widgets from PowerPoint (text boxes, simple graphics, basic tables and figures) or pasted-in from other applications for more complex items. The speaker performs the primary function of communication in a presentation with the aid of slides, demonstrations, or props as focal points and with notes provided by the speaker and/or taken by the audience for future reference. These focal points should be dense information: the statement of a mathematical theorem, a work of art for discussion, a graphic demonstration of a physical law, or the visual encapsulation of a large set of data. The proper role of PowerPoint in this scheme is underscored by its own terminology, i.e., "slides", and from this perspective, one should rail not at the quality of the narrative in a PowerPoint presentation but at the fact that it contains narrative at all. Sizzle v. Steak and Abuse of PowerPoint Internal corporate communications and external corporate communications (e.g., marketing and sales presentations) are the most common uses of PowerPoint, and PowerPoint provides a host of features for making presentations visually appealing and for conveying branding. While templates, slide transitions, animations, and clip art convey little or no useful information, many presentations are in fact commercials. As such, these presentations are no different than a spokesmodel, "NEW! IMPROVED!", eye-level shelf position, and videos of happy, fish-throwing workers as tools to influence but not necessarily inform an audience. Contrary to Tufte's rhetoric, the software industry deserves no more blame for the applications of PowerPoint presentations than Gutenberg deserves for junk mail. Ensuring uniformity of information delivery is a key to achieving economies of scale in communications in the 21st century, just as division and uniformity of tasks was a key to achieving economies in manufacturing in the early part of the 20th century. Abuse of PowerPoint in corporate communications comes from treating PowerPoint slides as a set of cue cards for the speaker and the audience alike, and the prescription is simple: Keep the cue cards off the screen and the big ideas in front of the audience. Guidlines for Good Presentations Here are a few guidelines for good presentations: Speaker's notes belong in front of the speaker, not in front of the audience. Slides or other visual displays should be used exclusively for dense information or for thesis-level text. Narrative should be interactive and audience-driven in terms of the depth and pace of delivery. Detailed, take-away information should be provided to the audience in the form of notes. 3:56:56 PM