“About six months ago, a group of physicists in the U.S. working on the Large Hadron Collider addressed a problem they’ve been having for a while: Whenever they had meetings, everyone stuck to the prepared slides, and couldn’t really answer questions that weren’t immediately relevant to what was on the screen,” Alan Yu reports for NPR. “The point of the forum is to start discussions, so the physicists banned PowerPoint — from then on, they could only use a board and a marker.”
MacDailyNews Take: Just like Steve Jobs. Jobs used Keynote for keynotes and a whiteboard and marker (which he owned, by the way) for most everything else.
“‘The use of the PowerPoint slides was acting as a straitjacket to discussion,’ says Andrew Askew, an assistant professor of physics at Florida State University and one of the organizers of the forum at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois,” Yu reports. “The physicists are far from the only people moving away from PowerPoint style presentations: The CEOs of Amazon and LinkedIn have eliminated the presentations from meetings. In his recently published memoir, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates calls PowerPoint slides ‘the bane of my existence in Pentagon meetings; it was as though no one could talk without them.’ Gates writes that as CIA director, he banned slides except for maps and charts, but could not do so as Secretary of Defense. Gen. James Mattis, former commander of the U.S. Central Command, has said that ‘PowerPoint makes us stupid.’ Maj. Gen. H.R. McMaster banned PowerPoint presentations when he led a successful mission in Iraq, and he compared it to an internal threat.”
“But this isn’t just an issue for academics, says Richard Russell, a special adviser to U.S. Central Command who also teaches at the University of Central Florida and National Defense University,” Yu reports. “‘There are real-world consequences for this, and so it’s not a purely academic, ivory tower concern,’ Russell says. He also points to a report from the board at NASA charged with investigating the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster of 2003. The board argued that NASA had become too reliant on presenting technical information with PowerPoint rather than reports.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
NY Times reviews ‘Jobs’ bioflick: ‘All the sex appeal of a PowerPoint presentation’ – August 16, 2013
Microsoft’s answer to iPad: Clueless PowerPoint slides – January 27, 2011
Forget PowerPoint, enliven your presentations with Apple’s Keynote – October 11, 2007
Apple’s Keynote frees presentations from ‘Death By PowerPoint’ fate – November 15, 2006
Grab the room’s attention by using Apple’s Keynote and dumping Microsoft’s PowerPoint – April 12, 2006
Apple’s Keynote makes better-looking presentations than Microsoft’s PowerPoint – December 06, 2004
Clean elegant Keynote: ‘the anti-PowerPoint’ – March 10, 2003
Keynote cleaner and better organized than PowerPoint – February 18, 2003
Bill Gates on Apple’s ‘Keynote’ app: ‘I doubt what they’ve done is as rich as PowerPoint’ – January 09, 2003
Another disadvantage of PowerPoint in business meetings: Lost productivity. The managers and engineers responsible for the presentation drop off the map for two days as they try to impress.
Steve Jobs was absolutely right: Keynote for keynotes; grease boards for interactive sharing of thought and brainstorming.
The real problem with viewgraphs is too many messages on the same screen. If you have only one point per slide it will keep the discussion on track. Any time I have total control of a meeting, that is the way it done. The audience stays on point all the time and does not get off on tangents.
Amen.
If you must create a presentation, then Apple’s Keynote is far better than the awful MD Powerpoint.
Two other good tools for displaying organised data that I use are OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle. Omni have some other cool apps that should be good for this, but they don’t fit in with my work flow as it happens.
I love Omni’s stuff. But I too learned a different work flow, that being the use of verbal outlines in my favorite text editor. (Tex-Edit Plus! Hi Tom Bender!)
As for Keynote: I often present to the local PC user group. They always freak out at how lovely my slides are compared to that MS equivalent thingy.
I use BBEdit as a GREP editor mostly because I started with it, though their TextWrangler is free.
I don’t program code, but use it to clean up copied & pasted text, particularly from government web pages where I need to replace spaces, tabs and other characters.
I also use GREP to put lists into proper format to paste into OO or other files so I don’t have to manually format each line.
Omni-Outliner is under appreciated for a large number of uses. OO is where I start projects and presentations with the who, what, why, where, how & when questions.
OO can launch files, store images and bring up webpages, so it sort of serves as my personal encyclopedia of my work.
I have thousands of OO outlines on my hard drive. OO outlines are searchable by their content almost instantaneously from Spotlight.
That means if I remember a person, Joshua, I can find the OO files with his name in it in a second (only two hits in 180 GB of data for me.)
Don’t ditch Powerpoint, it can be a very creative tool! Just look what David Byrne did with it 🙂 http://www.davidbyrne.com/archive/art/eeei/
Ok, no Keynote or PowerPoint for you. Get back to the cave walls and get that presentation ready! That will fix it. Maybe it is the person doing the presentation?
We banned powerpoint years ago at my work in meetings.
It became a coloring book for morons.
Maybe the problem is that there are just too many morons.
Not defending PowerPoint, but I morons are the bigger part of the problem. PowerPoint is just an enabler.
This is like déjà vu, all over again. All this was said years ago. Yawn. Goes to show how slow most people are to really think different.
Most Power Point users have no idea of how to properly use it. They often put their entire talk on a few slides and then read it. The name of the software should give a clue that you only put up the most powerful points and then speak to those points. Just look at Steve Jobs Keynote presentations. Very few words on each frame and he changes them only when he introduces the point. No more than 3 bullet points on a frame and no distractions.
You are spot on with those points. Font sizes, color background images number of visuals per unit time, all these have an effect. It’s a poor carpenter that blames his tool. They may be great physicists, generals and CEO’s but poor presenters.
That being said, Power Point is still a horrible presentation tool.
PowerPoint abuse could be cured if the slides were only prepared by the actual presenter. Idiot presenters would soon be outed, once they couldn’t hide behind their smarter underlings. I guess being and idiot would get you fired. Well, maybe not.
The Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) is another government organization that’s addicted to the PowerPoint presentation.
If the taxpayers could recoup the hours spent preparing these mostly useless presentations, there wouldn’t have been a need for the sequester.
The problem I have with powerpoint is what was said earlier, it becomes a coloring book for executives who think they’re artsy or creative.
I got my ass chewed out last week because an executive wasn’t using the “official template” that I had created for the company I work for. It wasn’t that he didn’t have access to it, it was because this executive decided to “pretty it up” with fonts, colors, effects, transitions, backgrounds, colors and crap that are not “approved branding styles”. No matter how I lay out the “template”, there’s no total controlling the end-user from doing their own thing.
I’d rather have the “extra work” and create each and every presentation for them than have my day mucked up by trying to play referee between my CMO, owner of the company and rouge executives… Just saying.
“rouge executives” Just the women,eh?
Hey, you never know.. Rouge may not be as gender specific nowadays.. Just sayin… 😀
There is some power in your point.
As a regular Keynote user, I have to point out that this PowerPoint “problem” is actually a PEOPLE problem. It is NOT a technology problem.
Thankfully, I personally have not suffered from this lazy presenter problem in my own presentations. But I completely understand it, having endured countless boring-as-hell PowerPoint presentations due to boring-as-hell lazy presenters. As ever, it’s about doing one’s homework.
IOW:
Shoot the presenter, NOT the tools.
My strategy:
I always over-research any topic I am going to present. I take that too-much-stuff and cull it down to essentials for the intended audience. That’s what goes into the screen slides. I always allow questions during my presentations and after. If an audience member wants to go beyond the presentation, I have all of that too-much-stuff at the ready to offer as needed. I also am very clear about what I do not know. Never fake anything you tell an audience.
Too much me stuff, in case it’s useful:
I should add that I’m trained in improvisation and particularly enjoy it with an audience. I have zero stage fright, as long as I’m prepared. It’s a terrific skill, worth the learning curve for anyone interested in presenting in front of a group of people. For me, it’s the equivalent of bungie jumping fun.
Whenever the lights dim and the projector fires up with some inane PP thing, I start to nod off. At one presentation to a group of us engineers by a software company I did a Mr Bean and slumped forward until I suddenly snapped back with a huge snort and a wild wtf look on my face.
I have never ever made a pp presentation. They always bore the crap out of me and I will not inflict that on others.
They don’t HAVE to be creative. The one I did two weeks ago was fun to watch. I kept it simple: The blackboard background, which fit nicely into my final message. The Chalk font to go with it, the test alone sliding off to the left for each new frame. Then I got to the end and the last frame was a corporate IT doofus sitting in a corner with a dunce cap on, like he had failed elementary school. The subject? Target and how they handled their being hacked to the tune of 110 million stolen customer accounts.
I tossed in some imagination, the audience liked it. They also had a ton of questions, which I always enjoy. It’s the sign of an interesting subject and an interested audience.
I have complained for years that there should be white boards present for any conference/symposium presentation. It allows too many do nothing professors claim their grad students work as their own.
I’m using the Doceri.com app which keeps the audience hypnotized to the moving pen on the screen