Ohhh the analogies are just flowing. In response to this comment  on TechDirt regarding Sunday's NY Times article on PowerPoint and its culpability in the Space Shuttle crash, Microsoft's software is compared to a gun, a baseball bat and a saw. Surely PP is a tool, and a tool is only as good as the hand that weilds it. I think it's about time we put that argument to rest as its about as old as... well let's put a moratorium on the metaphors shall we.

The biggest thing (IMHO) that we can pull from all this is that PowerPoint is somewhat of a one-trick pony (damn, it's just too tough to stop, sorry). Actually, I take that back because PowerPoint is a pretty versatile tool, but because of it's versatility it lacks focus. Microsoft has really focused their development time on creating a very powerful container application. It's designed to ingest and somewhat organize all of your stuff, but it seriously lacks any creation tools, unless you call the ability to explode text a creation. I call it a distraction.

Nay, PowerPoint itself is not responsible for bad presentations. However, Microsoft is quite responsible for not placing more powerful tools at the fingertips of average people attempting to design effective visual communication experiences. So if I had to pick one, I think Adam Rice had the best comparison with the hammering nails with a saw analogy.

Alright, as many gripes as I have about PowerPoint I think the author of this article in Sunday's NY Times has gone a little too far in pointing the finger of blame towards Microsoft's slideware. For one thing, the reference was taken slightly out of context from Edward Tufte's 23 page Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. Although Tufte DID perform an in-depth analysis of the slide in question, the times article draws a more succinct line between the misuse of PowerPoint and the horrific tragedy of the Shuttle tragedy. And to clarify my point here, although nothing has been misrepresented, it's all too easy to walk away from the article and declare the very same statement as the title of this entry, sans question mark. It's definitely a great point of reference in the never-to-be-solved debate of "Is it the driver's or the vehicle's fault?" In the case of the Ford Explorer rollovers the culpability was pretty obvious. In the Case of PowerPoint and the Space Shuttle I don't believe it to be quite as clear.

Obviously not. I know that I haven't a lick of color theory, typographical know-how, nor expertise in page layout, yet PowerPoint solves this issue with their templates. To quote a highly-respected presentation guru, Jim Endicott:

“Presentations have been the orphan child of marketing communications. They have not been considered at the same level as corporate brochures.”

Why would we want to allow a presentation, projected onto a screen at like 200 times the size of a brochure or 1000 times that of a business card, to not be designed by a professional designer? Companies spend significant money on creating a compelling and well-thought-out identities for themselves and then they let Joe down in the corner office go on the road to pitch a client with a self-designed PowerPoint presentation. Well no offense to Joe, because I'm in the same boat as he is. But he's not likely to be qualified to be making decisions on layout, typography and color, and is certainly not a motion graphics expert (more on the subject of PowerPoint's animation choices in an entry soon to come). So where does Joe go? Hopefully not the stock template gallery supplied with PowerPoint. Unfortunately, all too many times this is the case and the world of presentations has suffered because of this scenario. 

I just came accross yet another article identifying PowerPoint as a member of the dark underworld. It remindeed me of something Seth Godin mentioned in his Unleashing the Ideavirus book regarding a Google search using the phrase "More evil than Satan Himself." Aparently this search yields Microsoft as the number one hit and PowerPoint seems to be heading down a similar road. Yet there plenty of people openly defending PowerPoint, so it's tough to really say what the popular consensus is out there. From my personal experience it seems as though though most people see PowerPoint as sort of an inert substance, neither good nor eveil, just there. So this has got me thinking about whether presenters prefer to standout or blend in. Certainly if their goal is the latter, an inert substance is going to be just the trick. But what if a presenter wants to stand out from the crowd? Is there anything they can do with PowerPoint to help their cause?

"...how did I get here?" Well I asked the same question of PowerPoint and here's my short answer. PowerPoint was first created as a tool to convert digital images, which users designed on their computers, into digital files that were then converted into 35mm slide by service bureaus. This was long before the introduction of LCD projectors and laptops powerful enough to produce major motion pictures. So back in the days when presenters carried around carousels of slides, PowerPoint's slide metaphor worked very well. But we've come so far in the evolution of the tools used to deliver presentations. Frankly I'm aghast at how little PowerPoint has been willing to adapt its metaphor to meet the needs of presenters who are no longer limited by hardware and should not have to deal with an outdated slide-based paradigm.

So here's the follow up swing...

Brilliant ideas don't necessarily fit on a single slide.

And to back up my point, you can take a gander at Edward R. Tufte's insightful "Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" essay as summed up in a PowerPoint presentation: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/000931.

So as we sit around praising or abusing PowerPoint, it's nice to keep its history in the back of our minds. Then at least we can partly answer David Byrne's lyrical question.   

Yesterday I came accross this article which I fully enjoyed, but mostly disagreed with. Actually, that's not true. I agreed with most of it, but disagreed with the fundamental premise. The author points out many truisms regarding the fact that the software people use to create presentations is not responsible for all of the awful presentation you see out there. This is only partially true. I believe that really good software should be designed to promote the creation of really good content. PowerPoint USED to be really good software, but it simply has not lived up to its responsibility to evolve alongside the dynamically changing world of presentations.

And here's my first full swing at the 800 pound gorilla...

PowerPoint is designed to give slide shows, but presentations are not slideshows!

Let the games begin

Well folks, here it goes. I'm writing a book about presentations and I thought I'd better jump on this blog bandwagon to see if I can drum up some conversations about my chosen topic. I've been researching this area for almost two years now and have come to some very firm conclusions about the future of presentations, and intend to begin sharing them here in this open forum.

I welcome anyone to jump into the fray, whether through comments or links. Presentations are sort of a love/hate type topic, and as soon as you bring up PowerPoint, well forget about it. It seems like everyone has either a scathing comment or a defensive stance on that application, and yes I'd like to hear those too.

But above all, my research and pending book are aimed at furthering the artform we know as presentation design and delivery. With that in mind, I'd like to see if we can begin to move past this old-school idea that bullet pointed slides are the most effective form of visual communication. And I'd like to see this movement come from a community rather than a single individual.

So come one, come all. Let's take a peek at what's past the corner of PowerPoint and Main...