More PowerPoint Woes

More PowerPoint Woes

Last year I attended The Best Single Day Class Ever, taught by Prof. Tufte. He changed my outlook on PowerPoint for ever. Today in FCW magazine I found a pointer to 8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks, like the slide Bill Gates is presenting at left. While following some of the linked presentations, I came across this line from the shmula blog:

While at Amazon, we were all told by Divine Fiat that ALL presentations — regardless of kind, cannot ever be on Powerpoint. Period. Bezos prefers prose and actual thoughts slapped in a report — an actual paper report with paragraphs, charts, sentences, an executive summary, introduction of problem, research approach and findings (body of paper), conclusions and recommendations — not choppy, half-thoughts on a gazillion slides.

Thank goodness. I am not crazy after all.

That same blog post makes other good points, and links to an imagined Barack Obama "Yes We Can" PowerPoint deck. Hilarious.

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