Death to PowerPoint!

By Bob Parks on August 30, 2012

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-30/death-to-powerpoint

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-30/death-to-powerpoint

No matter what your line of work, it’s only getting harder to avoid death by PowerPoint. Since

Microsoft (MSFT) launched the slide show program 22 years ago, it’s been installed on no fewer

than 1 billion computers; an estimated 350 PowerPoint presentations are given each second

across the globe; the software’s users continue to prove that no field of human endeavor can defy

its facility for reducing complexity and nuance to bullet points and big ideas to tacky clip art. On

June 18, the Iranian government made the case for its highly contested nuclear program to world

leaders with a 47-slide deck. (Sample slide: “In the Name of ALLAH, the Most Compassionate,

the Most Merciful, Why Enrichment is an Inalienable and Chartered Right under the NPT?”) A

few weeks later, scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)

announced the momentous discovery of the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” using 52 PowerPoint

slides in the Comic Sans font that inspired more mockery than awe. Two years back, the New

York Knicks tried to woo LeBron James with a PowerPoint pitch, which may explain why James

won his first NBA championship in Miami.

As with anything so ubiquitous and relied upon, PowerPoint has bred its share of contempt. Plug

the name into Twitter and you’ll see workers bashing the soporific software in Korean, Arabic,

Spanish, and English as each region starts its business day. Part of this venting may stem from a

lack of credible competition: PowerPoint’s share of the presentation software market remains 95

percent, eclipsing relative newcomers Apple (AAPL) Keynote, Google (GOOG) Presentation,

Prezi, and SlideRocket, according to Meinald Thielsch, whose study of PowerPoint appears in

the May 2012 edition of the journal Technical Communication. Microsoft’s other ubiquitous

products, such as Word and Excel, don’t draw the same widescale ire. As PowerPoint’s sole

function—unlike word processing and arithmetic—is grounded in visual arts, its slides do more

harm than good. They bore audiences with amateurish, antiquated animation and typefaces and

distract speakers from focusing on the underlying structure of their creators’ speeches. It’s a

wonder that today’s groundswell of PowerPoint refuseniks has taken so long to emerge.

“The best speakers at any corporate level today grip an audience by telling a story and showing

some slides to support that,” says Thielsch. The boldest among them do away with slides

entirely.

Photograph by James Duncan

Davidson/TEDMental health activist Ruby Wax uses a whiteboard for a TED talk

The problem, say communication experts, is that PowerPoint has gone from being an aid to a

crutch. “If you have a presentation due, you say to yourself, ‘I’ll just do it like my boss,’ ” says

Joel Ingersoll, a manager at Minneapolis database firm Lorton Data. “ ‘I’ll start vomiting

information I found on my hard drive until I hit, oh, about 20 slides, and then I’ll wing the

talking-to-people part.’ ” Statistics support Ingersoll’s observations: Thielsch found that 36

percent of the preparation time for the average proposal was consumed by design and animation

work by people without formal graphics training. “People rely on the graphics and stilted effects

[that come with] these programs because they think they plump out an otherwise poorly told

story,” says Jonah Sachs, creative director of the communications firm Free Range Studios. For

Sachs, author of Winning the Story Wars, storytelling isn’t about opening your talk with a funny

anecdote about your uncle’s prizewinning sturgeon. It’s about building a message using a

powerful story line with a conflict and a resolution. “A story takes all the senseless data that the

world provides and turns it into something meaningful,” he says.

That advice is easier to apply to a high-profile, Steve Jobs–style keynote than to the types of

presentations that move business forward in the trenches. But accountants need stories, too,

argues Nancy Duarte, whose eponymous firm creates corporate slide decks: “Even if you’re a

middle manager delivering financials to your department in slides, you’re telling a story. A

manager is constantly trying to persuade, contrasting where their team is today vs. where they

want them to be.”

Starting a presentation with a story in mind also implies that you’re working hard to keep the

audience involved. “Everyone is sick of the one-way diatribe,” says Duarte. “Visual

conversations are where things are headed.” She created the graphics for Al Gore’s presentations

on climate change, featured in the Oscar-winning 2007 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, and

now works for the TED conference organizers to train its speakers. She describes her most recent

corporate projects as “immersive” and “participatory.” In one, the senior managers of a major

information technology firm watched visuals projected on the floor while they engaged in polls

via hundreds of customized iPads. In another example, an executive came to her looking for a

killer PowerPoint, but instead she trained him for days to tell his story using only a whiteboard.

Many of the top presentation gurus advocate judiciously limiting the role of PowerPoint. “Pin up

butcher paper on the walls, draw a map of your thinking, and hand that out. There are endless

techniques that are more appropriate than PowerPoint,” says Keith Yamashita, founder of

communications firm SYPartners.

If only by its novelty, ditching PowerPoint makes a strong impression, but that’s easier said than

done. Advertising executive Amelia Torode of London-based firm Chime Communications

describes her terror when, in early July, she spoke without slideware for the first time in her 15-

year career. She had to step onstage unassisted. “It felt unplugged—no guitar fuzz, no backup

singers, just me,” says Torode. “I felt naked up there.”

Jason Jones, who presents to clients at least twice a day for network storage company EMC,

knows the feeling. Though he’s never gone Full Monty, he’s learned to keep his slideware to a

minimum. He changed his attitude on a roasting hot day in Boston in 2008 on a job for a former

employer. The presentation had not started well. Jones had just flown up from Charlotte and was

locked in a stuffy room with a dozen potential clients. According to former colleague and fellow

sales engineer Dave Eagle, the group consisted of mostly buttoned-up “New Englandy” types,

and Jones’s Southern accent and physically outsized presence clashed with the tenor of the

gathering. Jones was supposed to deliver a monster slide show of two hours.

As Eagle fiddled with the digital projector, his colleague suddenly veered off script. “All right, I

got two presentations for y’all, one where I throw a bunch of crap on the wall, and one where I

just tell y’all what I think y’oughta do.”

Jones went on to give a radically shortened shtick and lead a conversation about the pros and

cons of various products. In the end, he won the account.

Today, Jones refuses to deliver the standard-issue PowerPoint developed by his current

employer. “I eat based on what gets sold,” he says. “A business audience doesn’t care about the

how, they care about the why.” Instead, Jones keeps his slide deck short, focused, and written for

the specific client. He even hands out a small chrome bell in his opening gambit. If anyone gets

bored during the talk, he tells them to ring the bell. “Once in a while,” he says, “People still ring

it—yes they do!”

PowerPoint Is Evil

Power Corrupts.

PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely.

By Edward Tufte in Wired Magazine

September 1 2003

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but

didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone

into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side

effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in

government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft

PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline

their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The

standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of

commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today's slideware, presentations

at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors. But

the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in 1984 and later

acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the

audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any

metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

AP/Wide World Photos

Tufte satirizes the totalitarian impact of presentation slideware.

Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools. Rather

than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client

pitches and infomercials. Elementary school PowerPoint exercises (as seen in teacher guides and

in student work posted on the Internet) typically consist of 10 to 20 words and a piece of clip art

on each slide in a presentation of three to six slides -a total of perhaps 80 words (15 seconds of

silent reading) for a week of work. Students would be better off if the schools simply closed

down on those days and everyone went to the Exploratorium or wrote an illustrated essay

explaining something.

In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds'

worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are

needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another.

When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate

relationships. Visual reasoning usually works more effectively when relevant information is

shown side by side. Often, the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding.

This is especially so for statistical data, where the fundamental analytical act is to make

comparisons.

GOOD

A traditional table: rich, informative, clear.

BAD

PowerPoint chartjunk: smarmy, chaotic, incoherent.

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to

those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe

survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers.

Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical

disaster. The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the

table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the

meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and

evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical

stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty

travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival

chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft

abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your

numbers are boring, then you've got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on

point, making them dance in color won't make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a

content failure, not a decoration failure.

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely

disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a

school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.

The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But

rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores

the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

Gene Zelazny

Say It With PowerPoint?

I trust you’re aware of the heated battle now taking

place among business communications experts

over PowerPoint. Never has a piece of software

generated so much emotion. You’d think that the

combatants had all been shot by bullet points.

Shouting loudest are the critics. Chief among

them is Yale Professor Edward Tufte, who argues

that PowerPoint causes people to trivialize content

and profoundly corrupts serious communications.

“Meetings should center on concisely written reports

on paper, not fragmented bulleted talking points

projected up on a wall,” Tufte demands in his essay

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint.

Say It With PowerPoint?

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Say It With PowerPoint?

Comedian Don McMillan takes a lighter, if no less devastating approach, mocking the software in his own PowerPoint presentation, as seen in this fun YouTube clip, Life after Death by PowerPoint.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgSRM

On the other side is visual designer Garr Reynolds, who argues in his blog Presentation Zen that the problem is the misuse of PowerPoint. “You do not need to (nor can you) pound every detail into the head of each member of your audience either visually or verbally. Instead, the combination of your words, along with the visual images you project, should motivate the viewer and arouse his imagination, helping him to empathize with your idea and visualize your idea far beyond what is visible in the ephemeral PowerPoint slide before him.”

http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html

From my point of view, the only way to have a reasoned discussion on this is to split it into two questions: 1) Is PowerPoint a useful tool for designing visuals? To that, my answer is an emphatic yes. �) Do people abuse it, and other tools, by over-relying on text visuals with bullet points? Also, a fervent yes, and I’ll add there are some easy way to avoid this.

For now, allow me to concentrate on the virtues of PowerPoint as a tool. I’ll address text visuals in another article.

Given my experience, I can’t help but marvel at how PowerPoint has transformed our professional lives, most of all as it applies to the production of visuals used in business presentations.

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Say It With PowerPoint?

As I think about how we produce our charts today, I find it incredible that using my laptop and PowerPoint, I can produce the following chart in less than 10 minutes … in black and white … or in color. I can correct typos … create animations such as fly, zoom, fade … add scanned pictures … add sound … add video clips … link it to a URL … send it to colleagues all over the world … make copies …project it in conference rooms of any size … all in 10 minutes. Awesome.

It wasn’t always like that. I entered the field of visual communications in the year 1961 B.C. That’s Before Computers, Before Calculators, Before Copiers. Here’s how it worked then.

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Say It With PowerPoint?

A visual aids draftsman at a drafting table, would create the lines and the plots of the chart using a light blue pencil, triangles, T-squares, protractors, compasses, oval templates, engineer’s scales.

If you needed to translate absolute values into percentages of their total, you’d use a slide rule.

The chart would go next to a varitype operator. These typewriters had several type fonts, none larger than 11 point.

From there, the chart went to proofreaders, who indicated typos.

Changes were made through a process known as “cut-outs.” Don’t ask.

The chart then went back to the draftsman, who would go over the blue lines with ruling pens and India ink.

Then, on to someone who would apply Zip-a-tone: commercially available self-adhesive sheets of black and white patterns – diagonals, crosshatched, etc. – to create chart shadings.

If you wanted to use your charts in a business presentation, they would be sent out overnight to be produced as enlarged photostats, or overhead transparencies, or �5mm slides.

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Say It With PowerPoint?

I leave you to imagine how much time all of this took, but it was significantly more than 10 minutes. So if nothing else, let’s give PowerPoint a standing ovation for saving us loads of time.

Come to think of it, I marvel at how Microsoft has remained silent through the barrage of bad publicity about PowerPoint. On the other hand, given that I’ve read that it’s used every day to produce some �0 million presentations, it’s probably a wise strategy to let the software speak for itself. After all, to blame PowerPoint for the evils of presentations is like blaming cars for accidents. Let’s put the blame where it counts: on the overuse, misuse, and abuse of PowerPoint.

To give you a sense of the sophistication that is PowerPoint, allow me to follow up on Professor Tufte’s observation of what “may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn” – this map of Napoleon’s March on Moscow designed by Charles Joseph Minard (1781-18�0).

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Say It With PowerPoint?

I’ll grant that this is indeed a highly informational chart, especially considering that, when it’s published in a book, you can take as much time as you need to study it (with the help of a magnifying glass in this case). Moreover, you also get this patient description of the chart by Professor Tufte on the facing page.

Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. the width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,000 men. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of the auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army. Minard’s graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening that just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variables are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army’s movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.

It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.

For me, however, it doesn’t work anywhere as effectively in a presentation, prepared with say, PowerPoint. In this situation, the presenter must describe the chart one step at a time so everyone in the audience focuses on the same point at the same time. Clearly, the chart’s complexity makes this a challenge. Secondly, and I emphasize the word, AND, AND, the chart must be legible to each and every member of the audience. Clearly it’s not.

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Say It With PowerPoint?

I’ll take credit for the second, which I show as an animated build: first, wiping right, and then wiping left as the red temperature thermostats indicate the dropping temperatures.

The first was designed by one of my talented colleagues, Manfried Krombholz.

Given these challenges, here are some additional options to tell the same story. All of these rely on the sophistication of PowerPoint as a production tool.

THE COLDER IT GOT, THE MORE SOLDIERS DIED IN NAPOLEON’S 1812 MARCH TO MOSCOWTHE COLDER IT GOT, THE MORE SOLDIERS DIED IN NAPOLEON’S 1812 MARCH TO MOSCOW

96,00096,00087,00087,00055,00055,000

20,00020,00012,00012,00010,00010,000

Dec 7Dec 7 Dec 6Dec 6 Nov 28Nov 28 Nov 21Nov 21 Nov 9Nov 9 Oct 8Oct 8

24o-9o-20o-21o-24o-30o

400,000400,000

175,000175,000 143,000143,000 100,000100,000

422,000422,000

Aug 9Aug 9 Aug 20Aug 20 Aug 30Aug 30 Sept 7Sept 7 Sept 21Sept 21

THE ENEMY, HUGE DISTANCES, AND ICY TEMPERATURES DECIMATED NAPOLEON’S TROOPS FROM 422,000 TO 10,000

Poland Moscow Poland

400,000

300,000

200,000

100,000

00 250 500 750 1,000 1,250 1,500 1,750 2,000

Phase 1: Invasion Phase 2: Retreat

422,000

10,000

Kilometers

Temperature 0 -9 -20 -27 -30 -25

Date Aug 9 Aug 30 Sep 7 Sep 21 Oct 18 Nov 10 Nov 20 Nov 30 Dec 15 Dec 31

Source: E. Tufte

© 2005 Manfried Krombholz

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Say It With PowerPoint?

For the third, give a hand to Tom Bunzell, as he animates the changes in the data as the troops march to and from Moscow.

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Say It With PowerPoint?

Finally, say thanks to Joe Pep, the Art Director of Archie Comics.

Contrasting any of these with the original chart, I leave you to decide on the value of PowerPoint as a tool for visualizing the march. Come to think of it, I wonder what Charles Joseph Minard’s chart would have looked liked had he been able to capitalize of the wonders of PowerPoint.

Gene Zelazny gene_zelazny@mckinsey.com

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Say It With PowerPoint?