O

Omaar

Guest
I recently saw powerpoint used in a funeral home to accompany the speaker's summary of the life of the deceased. No bullet points fortunately ( [ol]1925 - X attended primary school at ..etc ..[/ol]) but it was strange to see techniques of bureaucracy applied in this context, even in death you can't escape managerialism.

Actually it was quite a nice speech and the powerpoint was used as a slideshow really, but I did find the concept a little disturbing, not sure that it bodes well for the future of funerals.
 
O

Omaar

Guest
Powerpoint Funeral

It sounds worse than it was, there weren't any dissolves between slides or nothing
 

jadrenos

Member
The traditional Powerpoint presentation is rarely informative. It possibly goes beyond the reduncency mentioned upthread in that the audience is often distracted from the speaker by the text and unable to concentrate on reading what's on the screen because of the speaker... The worst Powerpoint presentation moments are where a list of bullet points is shown on the screen and the speaker goes through them. The audience has to sit through points that it has already read as well as seeing the speaker struggle to paraphrase and make it sound fresh...

I read that Powerpoint is now being used to make animation. Apparently the pioneers of this were webmasters making animated advertising banners for porn sites, almost always depicting a 'money shot' - which seems rather appropriate...
 

jvm

Member
This just in

PowerPoint Turns 20, As Its Creators Ponder A Dark Side to Success

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.

Mr. 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.

Still, the men don't appreciate PowerPoint being blamed for crimes it didn't commit. Mr. Gaskins studied a vast collection of presentations before designing the program. Bullet points, he says, existed long before PowerPoint.

While the two certainly know how to use PowerPoint, neither consider themselves true power users. They don't even know many of the advanced features it has come to sport. They also have no patience with cubicle warriors who, in the guise of doing actual work, spend endless hours fiddling with fonts. And they like telling the joke that the best way to paralyze an opposition army is to ship it PowerPoint and, thus, contaminate its decision making, something some analysts say has happened at the Pentagon.

Both left Microsoft in the 1990s and now pursue personal projects. Mr. Austin attended every day of last week's Apple developer conference, keeping up with the kids. While the two agree there is probably room for a PowerPoint-like program for building high-end Web sites, neither has any desire to create it.

Not being the self-promoting type, neither of the men are particularly bothered about being much less famous than their creation. Whenever they do tell a stranger what they did in life, they usually hear how much the person can't live without the program.

If they have a lament, it's that complaints about PowerPoint are usually not about the software but about bad presentations. "It's just like the printing press," says Mr. Austin. "It enabled all sorts of garbage to be printed."

As Mr. Gaskins puts it: "If they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else."
 

swears

preppy-kei
Yeah, I can't remember bugger all of any use after sitting through a powerpoint presentation at work. Just give me some proper printed info to read through a few times.
 

blubeat

blubeat
Part of my work is to deliver technical training. I attended an Institute of IT Trainers course where they said that use of PowerPoints and Demonstrations - i.e. passive audience were worse than useless. It certainly opened my eyes. I now deliver a five day technical training course with no slides whatsoever. It took a while to adapt but I love it and so do people on the course.

I explain a concept - draw on the board, invite people to ask questions or to copy my notes (usually I have a handout with the diagram/notes for them) and then try it for themselves in practice. I also give them a folder of tech briefs to take away as per "swears" comment above.

So yeah, PP sucks, I can't use it and now luckily I don't have to!
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I recently saw powerpoint used in a funeral home to accompany the speaker's summary of the life of the deceased. No bullet points fortunately...

Holy shit!
I hope he did it properly - multicoloured Comic Sans, clip-art stick men, animated slide transitions...
 

Eric

Mr Moraigero
I also use beamer. I don't think it is much different from pp in the end but the result may be different b/c it doesn't come with presets (or maybe I am just too ignorant a user?).

Is anyone but me puzzled about the relation between this content and the thread title?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I quite like PowerPoint, it's easy to use and it gets things done.
And you can make cool stuff with it, like this:

hmltgz8.jpg
 
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