[HN Gopher] Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
___________________________________________________________________
Dennis Austin, developer of PowerPoint, has died
Author : sonabinu
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-09-08 23:45 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| gardenhedge wrote:
| PowerPoint.. Well it was Denis or someone but unfortunately we
| haven't grown to something better yet
| hansoolo wrote:
| What I always wondered: is PPT = PowerPoinT or
| PowerPointPresenTation?
| pmcjones wrote:
| Dennis and I overlapped at Tandem Computers in the early 1980s,
| but we didn't meet until 2003, when we were both members of a
| small private club of computer geezers. In addition to being a
| great software designer he was one of the nicest and most
| thoughtful people I've ever met.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| My dad worked at Tandem in the 1980s. I remember going and
| visiting him at work and the huge tape memory. And the swimming
| pool at the office in Cupertino.
| aswanson wrote:
| Computer Geezers would make an awesome band name.
| pmcjones wrote:
| Almost as good as Severe Tire Damage
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_Tire_Damage_(band)
| 2-718-281-828 wrote:
| I demand the black ribbon!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've suggested a dark bullet in this specific instance.
| davidw wrote:
| Dennis Austin dies at 76.
|
| * Born in Pittsburgh, studied engineering at the University of
| Virginia
|
| * Collaborated with Robert Gaskins at Forethought to create
| PowerPoint
|
| * Forethought acquired by Microsoft
|
| * By 1993, PowerPoint generating more than $100 million in sales
|
| * Product is widely used, but controversial and target of jokes
|
| > Mr. Austin and Gaskins acknowledged the complaints, but thought
| they were unfairly aimed at the software and not the people who
| were using it to make lazy, poor presentations.
|
| > "It's just like the printing press," Mr. Austin told the Wall
| Street Journal in 2007. "It enabled all sorts of garbage to be
| printed."
| wredue wrote:
| >thought they were unfairly aimed at the software
|
| Yeah. I'll bet that all of the Microsoft office engineers feel
| this way, and it explains a lot about why the suite is such a
| bug ridden, shitty performing fucking mess.
|
| The only thing keeping the office suite alive at this point is
| the enormity of the task to disrupt it.
| no_wizard wrote:
| I surmise that Google workspace has managed to supplant it in
| a very real ways.
|
| For the last 3 places I've worked everything is done in
| Google Workspace. The only thing that Microsoft has a hold
| over is with Excel, that's all anyone used from MS
| CharlesW wrote:
| Thank you for making a proper slide for this. (Suggestion:
| Remove "." from slide title.)
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| Robert Gaskins wrote an interesting book on the development of
| Powerpoint and the collaboration with Apple and Microsoft.
| [deleted]
| shrubble wrote:
| PowerPoint wasn't the first though, was it? I remember Harvard
| Graphics and something from Lotus also?
| james-bcn wrote:
| Yes, Harvard Graphics was good. I remember using it around
| 1991.
| largbae wrote:
| And HyperCard!
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Aldus Persuasion was far superior to Powerpoint. Sadly it got
| bought and killed.
| ghaff wrote:
| There was quite the profusion of office productivity software
| at one point, some of which had approaches that I preferred
| (at least for some purposes) to those that ended up being
| enshrined in the Microsoft suite.
|
| One of the things I like about Google Workplace is it ended
| up stripping out a lot of the sort of cruft that Microsoft
| added over the years and ended up with components that are
| more streamlined for my generally fairly simple needs.
| shrubble wrote:
| Adobe should never have been allowed to buy them, there had
| been an anti-trust decree which was later removed...
| bonzini wrote:
| Yes, Lotus Freelance. Also IBM Storyboard.
|
| Not sure which of those had vector graphics in the same style
| as modern PowerPoint (Storyboard was bitmapped), and whether
| old PowerPoint already had vector graphics.
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| steve1977 wrote:
| Nothing from Microsoft was ever the first.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| PowerPoint is where I first understood the concept of image
| editing as a kid - dragging and dropping. And clip art was before
| it's time - imagine how much people would love that exact same
| thing copypasted onto a reel or a TikTok. RIP Dennis.
| h2odragon wrote:
| + did his job well
|
| + helped many communicate + made it easier to
| miscommunication thereby;
|
| Summary:
|
| tying manager types into harmless video games was probably a net
| win for the world
| ggambetta wrote:
| He's moved on to the next slide, please.
| revskill wrote:
| What's best library to create powerpoint on the web nowadays ?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Let's all remember that correlation is not causation. Although we
| all know it was dangerous to work with a toxic product for so
| long.
| [deleted]
| p5a0u9l wrote:
| One aspect of Amazon culture I've enjoyed is that meetings are
| document driven, and PPTs are rare, even non existent. Meetings
| start with dedicated reading time. It feels like PPT engendered
| this false sense of communication by making it easier to bullet-
| ize and visualize. PPT in practice lowers the critical thinking
| required of presenters and presentees.
| F-W-M wrote:
| Why do meetings start with dedicated reading time? Did people
| always come unprepared? How can I imagine this? Is it like:
| "Hey folks, thanks for showing up. This is the document we'll
| be discussing in 20min. Please read it now?".
|
| I don't think it's bad. I like written, long form content. It
| just is very far from what I know.
| therealdrag0 wrote:
| Meetings at my company often are like this too.
| lol768 wrote:
| I've asked some friends at Amazon this and never quite got a
| satisfactory answer.
|
| It feels really disrespectful to waste my time, when I've
| bothered reading the preparatory material, because X number
| of other attendees haven't. And, presumably, for Amazon to do
| this for every single meeting, it must have been commonplace
| for folks to not manage their time effectively to get
| prepared for the meetings they attend? Quite a bizarre
| approach.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "Quite a bizarre approach."
|
| Or a pragmatic one. Also I imagine there are other positive
| side effects like preparing a focus for the topic at hand.
| And 5 minutes, or even shorter might be enough for most
| topics I think. Better than people pretending they know
| what is going on.
| netcoyote wrote:
| If there's a meeting and most, but not all, of the folks read
| the document, then there's the potential they'll have to wait
| while the others read the document. To avoid that
| eventuality, the convention is that no one reads the document
| until the meeting, and then there's no wasted time.
|
| source: worked at Amazon and was told this by my boss
| joegahona wrote:
| I've never worked at Amazon, but this is something I really
| envy about my friends who do. I love a well-written, concise
| document, but the large enterprise I work at now is in love
| with Google Slides. I can't stand them.
| meej wrote:
| When I got a job in academia and was faced with creating my first
| conference poster, I was amazed to discover PowerPoint is the
| customary software for creating them. It does a pretty good job,
| too.
| pmcjones wrote:
| [dupe]
| galoisscobi wrote:
| A strange legacy. Most of the management in my company cannot
| digest even simple information if it's not on PowerPoint slides.
|
| Even when it is on preparing PowerPoint slides, text heavy slides
| are a big no no.
|
| Some days, more time is spent on PowerPoint slides than writing
| code, or actually engineering. We jokingly call presentation prep
| work as getting ready to push the PowerPoint to prod.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I don't see an issue with this. I had a very technical CTO at
| my n-2 job who was in his 50s and would often write POCs
| himself in C# or Python as research.
|
| When he wanted to see if data that we got had the information
| we needed he would upload it to S3 and run some Athena queries.
|
| But I still know when he asks me some questions he just wants a
| very high level overview and doesn't want the details. I'm
| working with him now on a side contract.
|
| He now has graduated to using Athena, AWS glue with Python and
| Quicksite reports. He does that when he is "tired of dealing
| with product managers and all of this scrum shit".
| safety1st wrote:
| Sounds like an amazing guy to work with.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| The rest of the story was that he was hired at a startup
| that was founded by two non technical brothers. The
| brothers got funding and hired a consulting company to
| build the MVP and find product market fit.
|
| They brought him in to build out an internal team to remove
| their dependence on the consulting company. I was his
| second technical hire. He wanted to make everything "cloud
| native" for HA and scalability reasons. We sold access to
| micro services to large health care providers.
|
| We just talked during the interview. No leetCode, no techno
| trivia and I came up with my proposals and even though he
| knew I had no practical experience with AWS, later on he
| told me he thought I was a smart guy and could figure it
| out.
|
| Two years later when a little worldwide pandemic hit and
| people were hammering our services, they didn't miss a
| beat.
|
| After I basically "put myself out of a job" and had done
| everything I was initially hired to do, I got bored and got
| a job at AWS in the Professional Services Department.
|
| Three years later, the company we worked for had had an
| exit, he moved on to another company and I got Amazoned. I
| called him up and we talked about some problem he was
| having with an Amazon Connect (call center) implementation.
| It was a service I knew well and he offered me a consulting
| contract on my last day at AWS.
|
| FWIW: I also got another full time job two weeks later.
|
| I don't see anyone else giving me the opportunity that he
| originally gave me to lead his "transformation" vision. He
| knew I had never opened the AWS console when he hired me.
| appplication wrote:
| I also got my start in tech with an irrationally
| benevolent technical manager. He was a PhD research
| scientist who has built this incredible system and was
| quickly building a team out to scale it.
|
| I was just getting out of the military, and trying to
| find what was next. I had no internships or previous
| engineering experience. The most I could speak to was
| some comp sci classes I was currently taking for my MS,
| and a background in excel. He didn't grill me with
| leetcode. There wasn't really even an interview. We just
| talked about big picture ideas for 45 minutes. And then
| he told me he wanted me on board. Keep in mind this was
| at a large, well known unicorn - hiring didn't normally
| work like that was but somehow he just sort of made it
| happen.
|
| The code base was in Java. I had never written Java, but
| he knew that and told me I'd probably figure it out. The
| team also didn't have the bandwidth to upskill someone as
| junior as I was. I appreciated the opportunity to sink or
| swim and prove myself.
| scarface_74 wrote:
| I would usually just upvote you. But I love the term
| "irrationally benevolent".
|
| Unlike Amazon that is "irrationally malevolent". But I
| knew that going in. I made my money. Learned what I
| could. Put it on my resume and let it open some doors.
|
| I don't mean to come off bitter. It was a completely
| transactional decision to go to AWS and it served its
| purpose.
| galoisscobi wrote:
| Sounds like a really good leader. Looking back at my
| response, I realize I was somewhat unclear. I meant that most
| individual contributors are expected to do prepare a lot of
| slides so management can understand what's going on and it
| very much cuts into actual time to build the thing.
|
| Then when things aren't going expected, we make more slides
| on why it's not going as expected instead of allocating time
| to do the engineering work that's needed to course correct.
| mhh__ wrote:
| This is the way it should be. People get promoted being their
| knowledge and/or intelligence and thus the status quo.
| ssscool wrote:
| [dead]
| tmpX7dMeXU wrote:
| This is literally their job. Implying that they "cannot digest
| even simple information" is almost certainly a
| misrepresentation. ICs will naively paint ideal management as
| simply "master craftspeople that get usually paid more than
| me", and when management doesn't meet those expectations,
| they're dunked on because they're fish that can't climb trees.
| Management are often there to contextualise and decide. It's
| not that the information is in PowerPoint form, it's that
| (aside from the weird "slides full of text" people) things in
| PowerPoint form are often well summarised in a way that they
| typically aren't in an email or whatever else. Quite often
| their job is not to go deep on something. It's often
| detrimental. Sometimes it's detrimental to not go deep on
| something in particular, or to not have the right people in
| place to do that leg work for you. Overall though, management
| having PowerPoints is a good thing. Easily.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| I've heard multiple folks at a big 3 management consulting
| firm--and not the green recent-grad meat, I wasn't
| interacting with a team on an engagement--state the same
| thing, in terms that implied even less intellectual capacity
| or ability on the part of the average C-suiter than that post
| did.
|
| It's not just "ICs" getting this impression.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| https://www.computerworld.com/article/2468895/u-s--army-disc...
|
| You aren't the only one. :) I always find it fascinating and
| terrifying thinking about how PowerPoint may be crippling
| people in charge of things like nuclear weapons.
| ihaveajob wrote:
| There's past evidence of that. Some link the 2003 Columbia
| disaster to a slide-based presentation format with
| insufficient/unclear information.
|
| https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd.
| ..
| aswanson wrote:
| Jesus Christ. This outdoes the hilarity/horror I heard when
| someone got contracted to implement a battle management
| system in Microsoft Office.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| As a former staff officer . . . whaaaa???
| nenadg wrote:
| People hating PowerPoint should really try hating invention of
| gunpowder first then Edison burning down elephants with
| electrical current.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Thanks for the informative comment.
| netfl0 wrote:
| Advance.
|
| May his memory be eternal.
| lemper wrote:
| I just hope those goons from big four consultancies sent their
| condolences.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no? So much so that
| my boss always says "Prepare some slides for the meeting" and not
| "Prepare a power point".
| foooorsyth wrote:
| Nice anecdote. Microsoft 365 has triple the market share of
| GSuite. The world still runs on Excel and PowerPoint.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| In which countries...
| foooorsyth wrote:
| The rich ones. All of Wall Street runs on Excel. All of
| management consulting runs on PowerPoint. Private equity
| runs on both.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Possibly. Yet I never used PowerPoint.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Everyone is using Google Slides though now, no?_
|
| I don't know anyone using Google Slides (never knew that even
| existed). So I guess not everyone.
| ETH_start wrote:
| Every death is an utter tragedy. We should collectively work to
| end biological mortality.
| darreninthenet wrote:
| I heard he was shot several times...
|
| ... died of too many bullet points
|
| (I'll see myself out)
| fuzztester wrote:
| Yes, just slide out and fade away. Don't transition back either
| :)
| bigmattystyles wrote:
| RIP - what an impact though. i wonder if they'll have a
| PowerPoint slides at the memorial, if it was me, i would have
| told my loved ones to do that.
| Simulacra wrote:
| Will there be a PowerPoint presentation at his memorial service?
| mysterydip wrote:
| Hopefully with all the text on the slides, which someone then
| reads verbatim out loud.
| sokoloff wrote:
| But only after verbalizing that they won't "read all of that
| to you"
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Dennis Austin
|
| o Born
|
| o Developed PowerPoint
|
| o Died
| gizajob wrote:
| If they can get the projector working.
| inSenCite wrote:
| Truly a sad day for consulting. The entire industry runs on PPT.
| delish wrote:
| https://archive.ph/y77f8
| sshah1983 wrote:
| I'll never forget the grade 9 science class Powerpoint
| presentation I did in 1998. I had each letter of every headline
| flying in one by one with a laser sound (pew pew pew). That was
| my first moment of magic with Powerpoint.
| replygirl wrote:
| missed an opportunity to format the article as slides
| PM_me_your_math wrote:
| [dead]
| globalise83 wrote:
| Apart from being useful for presentations, Powerpoint is still my
| go-to for mockups - screw Figma, I can achieve 80% of the result
| in 20% of the time.
| 3seashells wrote:
| [flagged]
| nickpeterson wrote:
| powerpoint is one of those things that most people don't think
| about nowadays, but before presentation software, people had to
| carry printouts, or slide decks for projectors, maybe laminated
| sheets for overhead projectors. PowerPoint has saved people a
| huge amount of work.
| glandium wrote:
| I don't think I'm particularly old (only in my 40s) but I'm old
| enough to have made presentations with transparent sheets on an
| overhead projector. I don't quite remember how I prepared those
| sheets (I want to say a printing tracer?).
| [deleted]
| codetrotter wrote:
| > old enough to have made presentations with transparent
| sheets on an overhead projector
|
| I'm in my early thirties and we sometimes used transparent
| sheets on overhead projector too when I was in school.
| Although in our case we made the sheets with the computer
| (Microsoft Word, Paint, etc) and they gave us transparent
| sheets that we put in the printer. I remember that the ink on
| the transparent sheets would smudge if we touched it, which
| sometimes accidentally happened when we handled our
| transparent sheets.
|
| Even in high school I sometimes saw teachers use overhead
| projection with transparent sheets.
|
| One of my math teachers in high school brought a special
| device with him one day. This one
| https://www.calculatorsource.com/ti-89titanium-vs.html (or
| some other model by TI). It's an external screen that you
| connect to a TI graphing calculator and then put it on top of
| the glass plate of an overhead projector so that you can
| project what the calculator is showing for everyone to see :)
| ghaff wrote:
| They were often just typed/handwritten and copied onto
| transparencies for internal/academic stuff. It was also
| pretty common to use HP pen plotters for quite a while when I
| was working in the late 80s/90s.
|
| We had 35mm slides for customers but that was frequently an
| exercise in: "Here's our roadmap but this has changed and
| this isn't correct" because it took effort and time to get
| changes made once the slide was created.
| dalai wrote:
| I think I remember using an inkjet printer for that. If I
| remember correctly, the sheets had a white margin on one of
| short edges.
| tgv wrote:
| Bit older. For my first presentations, I drew on them with
| markers. I've still got one where I inserted a Snoopy cartoon
| by hand. But later, you could photocopy them, or put them in
| a laser printer (assuming you had one).
| wanderingstan wrote:
| In my school, there was a copier that's could copy onto a
| transparency. Also, early laser printer ads would promote
| that they could print onto transparencies.
|
| My HS teacher had elaborate combinations of transparencies
| that he would layer on top of each other. The upper layers
| containing hand-drawn marker annotations.
| baz00 wrote:
| I still do a "virtual" version of this with GoodNotes on an
| iPad and Zoom.
|
| It feels better than using Powerpoint.
| cpach wrote:
| Indeed. Apparently even Powerpoint started out there. From
| Wikipedia: "The first PowerPoint version (Macintosh 1987) was
| used to produce overhead transparencies, the second (Macintosh
| 1988, Windows 1990) could also produce color 35 mm slides."
|
| Apple invested in the company (Forethought, Inc) before
| Microsoft aquired it in 1987.
| ftio wrote:
| If you're interested in more on this, I highly recommend the
| book Sweating Bullets by Robert Gaskins, the inventor/PM of
| PowerPoint.
| steve1977 wrote:
| > PowerPoint has saved people a huge amount of work.
|
| Probably not. The fact that making presentations got easier
| just caused many more (often unnecessary) presentations in my
| experience.
|
| So at the end of the day, people spend the same amount of work
| without getting more results.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Right. People didn't assemble a presentation deck back then,
| just to mail it to someone for them to look at on their own.
|
| It's also taken the place of the business letter and some
| other formerly-common office document formats. I'm not
| convinced it's saving time, just creating more junk. Which is
| how I feel about a lot of application of tech, actually--I
| suspect huge productivity gains in some narrow cases mask
| that most tech use is somewhere between a lot worse and only
| slightly better than whatever it replaced.
| ghaff wrote:
| Going back many many decades my experience is that people
| were at least almost as bad about reading documents as they
| are today. The fact that people used overhead projectors and
| transparencies didn't change the fact that I spent a great
| deal of my time in meetings with slides.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| ...And created a lot of revenue for storage companies and
| headaches for email admins. When MS Exchange rolled out, people
| discovered that email database size was higher than typical for
| just email messages.
|
| A little bit of investigation revealed that PowerPoint slide
| decks and other multimedia was consuming the increased storage
| since Exchange made it much easier to send large attachments to
| others.
| ftxbro wrote:
| i'm guessing hacker news won't put the black bar
|
| EDIT: i'm not roasting a dead person you guys. anyway i feel like
| if people hate a tool it's sometimes because the tool is _so
| good_ that it gets abused for every other purpose and some of
| those purposes aren 't a good fit, it's not because the tool was
| bad it's the opposite.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Related video from years ago, an interview with the Computer
| History Museum:
|
| _Oral History of Dennis R. Austin, 2015_
|
| https://youtu.be/DgNIHXEHTTs?si=bQdAlW3bteVH7xvL
| vector_spaces wrote:
| I use Google Slides as a lightweight notetaking format at work.
| This works great for me because it's super flexible, and has the
| added benefit that I can easily convert my notes to actual
| presentable slides during standups or other meetings. Usually
| these aren't actual polished slides such that you'd see in a
| corporate presentation, but talking points to keep meetings more
| focused and productive.
| orionblastar wrote:
| I remember we used Harvard Graphics for DOS before we used
| PowerPoint.
| tedchs wrote:
| I hope his funeral has a slide presentation with some amazing
| animations and sound effects! :)
| simonh wrote:
| You should see his marriage proposal.
|
| Joking aside, I worked for a big corporation once where our
| project manager's emails were literally blank, with the actual
| message in an attached powerpoint.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Some people don't understand that you can attach just an
| image file to an email. I often get Word attachments
| containing a single image.
| steve1977 wrote:
| Made with Keynote you mean? Wouldn't that be a bit
| disrespectful?
| WoodenChair wrote:
| If you want to read about the development of PowerPoint by its
| visionary, you can checkout the book Sweating Bullets by Robert
| Gaskins:
|
| https://amzn.to/3PvTvF0
|
| Dennis Austin was the lead developer and Gaskins was the idea
| guy/manager.
| throy930493 wrote:
| "Sweating Bullets", "Almost Perfect"
| (http://www.wordplace.com/ap/), "The Autodesk File"
| (https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/) and "Show Stopper!"
| were a few books that I think pair very well, and as a
| developer who wasn't around in the time really gave interesting
| and comparable insights into the development of a few really
| important companies and pieces of software.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| For Visicalc, Dan Bricklin has a few blog posts:
| http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm
|
| For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its
| history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-
| ashton-ta...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Robert Gaskins, co-creator of PowerPoint, has a personal
| website with info about PowerPoint:
| https://www.robertgaskins.com/
|
| One can also download the "Sweating Bullets..." book in PDF
| form for free from his website (listed in the PowerPoint
| History section on the main page of his website):
| https://www.robertgaskins.com/powerpoint-history/sweating-bu...
| FFP999 wrote:
| [dead]
| Maro wrote:
| I work in a Corporate where we have lots of "strategy" teams and
| PPTs flying around.
|
| What I learned is that PPT are more than a presentation format in
| this culture, they are a signaling tool:
|
| * something that is "just" an email, or "just" something somebody
| said in a meeting doesn't carry much weight in Corporates
|
| * .. but if you put it in a PPT with some graphics, it signals
| you've thought about it, and probably had some lesser minions
| also think about it and prepare a PPT
|
| * .. further, if you put it in a PPT, that means you're serious
| about your position --- it signals commitment
|
| * .. and finally, a PPT shows that you know how to play the game,
| you're not some tech weirdo that thinks PPTs are irrelevant
|
| PPTs are a cultural currency in Corporates.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > PPTs are a cultural currency in Corporates.
|
| Sure, but not always in a good way
|
| Where I work it seems that for the execs the PPT _is_ the
| product
|
| They get credit for the PPT/presentation and zero demerits for
| not actually following through and delivering
|
| For dev groups reporting up, you get more credit for a good PPT
| putting a spin on a shitty project than for a project well
| done.
| tough wrote:
| The theater has always become the work indeed
| KingLancelot wrote:
| [dead]
| analog31 wrote:
| I think it's as simple as, if you put it in a PPT, you can rest
| assured that it will be readable and usable by the recipient,
| which includes passing them along to other people, presenting
| it, using the slides in other presentations, and so forth. If
| you choose some "weird" format, then the burden is on you when
| someone can't use it for some reason.
| WanderPanda wrote:
| As a tech weirdo I still think PPTs are the best way to convey
| concepts. You can mix bullet points with images and video and
| have everything be progressively revealed exactly when you
| explain it. I can't even think of an alternative to this other
| than adhoc whiteboard drawings which can't match PPTs on any
| axis except if you're just (collaboratively) developing an
| idea/concept
| 2devnull wrote:
| Yep. I think things like Jupiter are really just imitating
| ppt. It's generally the same concept, a linear series of
| information chunks, mixing text and graphics, the formality
| of written prose stripped away, just enough for one sitting.
| PPT are great, it's the people who only use PowerPoint, often
| for nefarious ends, that I am distrustful of, not the
| modality itself.
| broast wrote:
| I usually just scroll up and down a formatted document
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| On the other hand, there's a good reason that bullet points
| aren't how formal communication is actually done, which is
| that they're terrible for actually doing the job of conveying
| information. For that, you need sentences in paragraphs, and
| PPT can't really do that.
|
| The best option is probably just an html doc -- mix text
| (real text, not bullet points) with whatever media you want.
| Can be viewed on every device in the world.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Bullet-points deliver facts and concepts. Paragraphs
| deliver _narrative_.
|
| Both have their place, and you could trace each to far
| earlier forms, such as religious iconography or clan
| shields, and sagas or mythic poems.
|
| Iconography encapsulates an existing notion, or expresses
| an identity or affinity.
|
| Sagas and mythic poems contain _stories_ with characters,
| events, themes, morals, and other teachings, _and are
| structured mnemonically_ through verse, meter, rhyme,
| allusion, and often musical intonation or accompaniment, to
| facilitate recollection _both_ for the teller _and_ the
| audience.
|
| I'm not much of a fan of slide decks myself, largely,
| though _as a storytelling aid_ they can be quite useful.
| That takes skill however, and instruction. Edward Tufte 's
| suggestions for how to use slides to accompany a talk (but
| not substitute for it) are excellent.
| ako wrote:
| There's really no need to limit yourself to bulletpoints in
| PPT. Powerpoint offers so many other ways of illustrating
| information. I really like powerpoint as it's one of the
| simplest tools to do visual animated story telling.
| xattt wrote:
| > On the other hand, there's a good reason that bullet
| points aren't how formal communication is actually done ...
|
| You clearly have not met my grad school classmates who used
| PPTs to lead seminars, but used slides as their full-
| sentence speaking notes.
|
| Slideshow presentations work, but execution is key.
| graypegg wrote:
| I think what the GP comment is conveying is the cultural
| factor of a PPT. It's not good for information
| communication when not paired with a human being giving the
| presentation that would say those sentences shown in bullet
| form. If you have the human, writing full sentences on a
| slide deck that they just read out is the worst.
|
| But the cultural factor is you signalling "I want to
| PRESENT something to you". It implies this is a pitch, and
| you're only seeing the notes. It's a way to say "come talk
| to me".
|
| The information density being so low is kind of a feature.
| atrettel wrote:
| > I can't even think of an alternative to this other than
| adhoc whiteboard drawings which can't match PPTs on any axis
| except if you're just (collaboratively) developing an
| idea/concept
|
| I think this is a major part of the problem. Powerpoint is so
| commonplace now that we cannot even conceive of different
| ways of presenting information to groups. If you cannot
| figure out how to express an idea in the medium of Powerpoint
| or slideware in general, then that idea is difficult to
| express nowadays. That limits the kind of information you can
| share, especially complex information that is not so easily
| conveyed in bullet points or in sparse infographics. "The
| medium is the message", in other words.
|
| Maybe I'm old, but I remember going over a lot of information
| in group settings without the use of Powerpoint. Here's a few
| examples of alternatives:
|
| - overhead projectors (common when I was in elementary
| school)
|
| - slide projectors
|
| - lectures and speeches
|
| - live demonstrations
|
| - field and laboratory work (can be very hands-on learning)
|
| - panel discussions and debates
|
| - group discussions (after everyone reads a book or report)
|
| - displaying a written report on a screen rather than
| distinct slides (I do this myself sometimes)
|
| Some of these aren't going to work that well if you need to
| convey Q3 sales figures, for example, but my point is that
| there are other options out there even though Powerpoint has
| flooded the arena. Note that you can even combine these with
| Powerpoint or slideware and get the best of both worlds too
| for that matter. I'm not against Powerpoint as much as I
| dislike how it is conventionally used.
|
| (I must also note that many people, myself included, hate the
| "slow crawl" of having information revealed progressively. It
| might work sparingly for dramatic effect but having been in
| so many meetings with bad speakers, it is far too easily
| abused and always makes me ask myself "When will the speaker
| get to the point?").
| ekianjo wrote:
| > I still think PPTs are the best way to convey concepts.
|
| Man I wonder how humanity was able to function with concepts
| before the PPT format was born. Surely this resulted in an
| explosion of productivity?
| agumonkey wrote:
| If you can't see, it may be that you're not a player /s
| blululu wrote:
| Video is usually more effective for asynchronous
| presentations. Powerpoint is great for spoken presentations
| where everyone is in the same room. But they generally suck
| as summary reports. For thinking and analysis word docs are
| superior. For asynchronous presentation video is superior.
| Video allows you to control the timing and framing in a way
| that a slide deck cannot. The main downside to videos is that
| they are harder to make. But there is a reason people prefer
| science documentaries over recorded lectures or lecture
| slides.
| smfugit wrote:
| Books beat them all imho :)
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| While I agree, I think we're almost extinct species.
| 2devnull wrote:
| Most good video presentations include a ppt or the
| equivalent. A video is just a spoken presentation that's
| recorded, like a live spoken presentation it can include
| visual aids or not, it's still a spoken presentation. You
| may confusing categories of things, or maybe I'm too used
| to seeing ppt with slides containing embedded video.
| blululu wrote:
| Just as a movie can go far beyond being a recording of a
| theatrical play, a video presentation can offer far more
| possibilities than simply being a recording of a slide
| presentation. It can allude to possibilities that are
| closer to experience and convey a sense of reality that a
| slide deck can't achieve.
| Maro wrote:
| At least in Corporates, the point is not the content usually,
| or at least not 95% of the content. Usually there are 1-2 key
| slides per PPT that the audience actually cares about,
| something like the "Roadmap" slide, where you commit to a
| timeline on the project (even though nobody understands what
| the project actually is), or the "Costs" slide, where you
| commit to a budget (even though it's way too early to say).
|
| This is the point, supported by the signaling of the PPT
| itself.
|
| The remaining 95% are slides that the audience doesn't care
| about and/or doesn't understand anyway.
| ekianjo wrote:
| And ppt is the main reason why people stop doing any work and
| instead prepare powerpoints all day long for the next reviews
| or meetings
| jdblair wrote:
| The classic corporate PPT slide is a disaster of over-
| information! I try hard to keep my slides short, with text that
| is a jumping off point for my actual presentation, but my
| effort to teach this method has mostly fallen on deaf ears.
|
| When the information density is high, or there is a just a lot
| of text, then the audience reads the slide instead of listening
| to the speaker (that is, they're reading the slide instead of
| listening to me).
|
| When I gave a colleague this feedback, he just told me that the
| information density is a positive thing, and then showed me a
| 100 page PPT from a previous job that amounted to the spec for
| a contract.
|
| So, different strokes? I guess if the PPT is meant to be
| standalone, to not accompany a speaker, then the high
| information density works. I still try to convey only one major
| idea per slide, and I leave specs to written documents.
|
| A final comment: the only thing for me that is personally more
| distracting than a high density slide is looped animation in
| the slide. My ADHD brain just locks onto that visual cue, and
| it takes serious conscious effort to keep focused on the
| presenter.
|
| [edited to correct a typo]
| onion2k wrote:
| _The classic corporate PPT slide is a disaster of over-
| information!_
|
| There are two kinds of slidedeck. One that's behind you when
| you're presenting, and one that's shared to be viewed without
| the presenter. Using either in the wrong situation results in
| people thinking it's a 'bad powerpoint' that has either too
| little information because the presenter isn't there to fill
| in the blanks, or too much because the presenter is just
| reading it out.
| VoodooJuJu wrote:
| Yeah, you're a tech weirdo. Don't out yourself this easily.
| Don't talk about "your brain" and ADHD and "information
| density" and all that. It's better to conceal your power
| level in the corporate world. If you want to play with the
| corporate chads, you need to play by the rules, however awful
| those rules may be.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Heh I work in a very large corp everyone here knows and
| deal with 70-80 slide decks more than code these days and
| also happen to be named Chad ;)
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| This is on the money, especially "commitment" to playing the
| game. In my industry, the supplicant presenter is acknowledging
| that the audience is busy, important, and only needs the "smart
| points" that s/he's slaved to provide on the corporate template
| and color scheme.
|
| Of course, Tufte pointed out that this can kill people.
|
| https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...
|
| https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
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