PowerPoint...Good or Evil?

There are those out there who are convinced that PowerPoint has "dumbed down" corporate America and has become an insulting process where presenters read their slides to the audience.

On one side, you've got Edward Tufte who HATES PowerPoint. He goes so far as to suggest that a poorly done PPT presentation had something to do with the Columbia disaster. He makes some good points about how people just toss a ton of info up on their slides and the audience gets lost.

Isn't it true that by the time a presenter has finished reading his slides to you, you are well done? Something to think about.

On the other side of the debate is Cliff Atkinson, who argues that PowerPoint is really like a Hollywood storyboard. If you use it to tell a visual story, you are going to get the results you want, but you have to plan it out beforehand. That's the hard part, of course, but something to think about when trying to persuade an audience.

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2006
  Well I am not sure, PowerPoint if used correctly can be a great tool. However, in the wrong hands...
  
  It is really comparable to MS Front page. In the right hands, someone who took the time to actually learn html and understands the server extension and the proper way to do things, it can be a very powerful and useful tool. In old classic asp programming with Visual Interdev not really being the greatest at quick UI design I often created forms and so on in Front page then would copy and paste into VI and clean up the html and go from there. However there are a ton of poorly design websites with horrible html out there built entirely in front page. I even met a consultant that firmly believes the way you changed the look and feel of your SharePoint site was through FrontPage and saved every single page. Which if you know SharePoint this saved the page to the database hence any upgrades and so on to the main portions of SharePoint will not affect the saved pages.
  
  My point of making the comparison between Front Page and PowerPoint, there are a few web designers that know how to use Front page and they find it useful in certain situations. Unfortunately, for every one of those people there are at least 100 who use front page only and honestly thing they are web designers. PowerPoint is the same way, there are a few people that can do great things with PowerPoint and create great presentations. However, for every one of those people there are several thousand that creates a presentation in PowerPoint presentation thinks they have just created the solution to world peace and can't figure out why people do not comprehend their ideas.
• Anonymous
  April 25, 2007
  If you ever get up in front of an audience and say "I know it's an eye chart," your presentation is headed