Powerpoint Users
Hey – if you’re going to use Powerpoint (or Beamer or Prosper, or any other slideshow-making program), please, please follow these rules:
Don’t read your slides to me. If I can get this information from the slide, I will. If you read your slides to me, I’m going to start ignoring one or the other, and I like visual things, so I’ll start ignoring you. Use the slides to supplement what you’re saying.
On a related note, don’t put too much text on your slides. A rule of thumb that Dodds seems to use is that for every complete sentence, you need at least one picture. If your slide contains 3 full-length paragraphs, it feels cluttered, and becomes hard to focus on. Ideally, the slide will have a list of 2-5 sentence fragments reminding the presenter about what they are supposed to talk about.
Spend 1-3 minutes on each slide. If you skip through a slide in 5 seconds, it probably wasn’t necessary. If you spend 5 minutes on a slide, it’s probably too complicated.
Only use Powerpoint when it will enhance your presentation. If a slideshow will not help your talk, don’t make one! Saying “it’s the standard; everybody makes one” is no excuse. When I saw security guru Bruce Shneier give a talk, he started out by saying something to the effect of, “I used to have a Powerpoint to go with this talk, but it wasn’t very useful, so I took it out.” For this comment alone, he got a huge ovation.
It seems like everyone is confident that they can use powerpoint well, when actually around 95% of people cannot. Last night, I had this very discussion with my PerCog partner while making our presentation. She had her heart set on a Powerpoint presentation, with her main reason being that everyone else uses them. I stressed several times that we shouldn’t just read the slides to people, and at the end she said she’d make an introduction slide after I left. You know what’s on it? I shall paste the text below:
“[…] Bouhuys, Bloem and Groothuis asked whether music affects our actual perceptions of the facial expression of emotions of other people (5). […] Music had a powerful effect. For example, after listening to depressing music, subjects judged neutral faces to more express rejection/sadness and less invitation/happiness, despite the fact that such emotions were actually not present in those faces.â€
I’m almost positive that during our presentation, she will read this verbatim to the class. We also have 3 slides on which we will probably spend less than 5 seconds each. Argh!
Go read The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint by Edward Tufte.
Which means, “come borrow it from me”.
A summary of the pamphlette
I just finished reading this, and discussed it with Mac. For the benefit of others who read my blog, however, I’ll summarize: Tufte says that the density of information on a Powerpoint slide is ridiculously low, and you would do better to make a handout to give out. On several points, I agree with him: Powerpoints should not be substituted for technical reports (as he claims they are at certain large orginizations), nor should they be published online with the intent of people digesting them in lieu of actually seeing the presentation, nor should they be given as handouts (unless intended to be used as topical note-paper). However, he sets up many straw-man arguments to “prove” his points: he seems to think that you should be able to fit as much information into a Powerpoint presentation as you can into a medical textbook, and since this is obviously not the case, Powerpoint is a flawed form of communication. However, I feel that the purpose of the PP is not to replace the talk, but to augment it. As Mac mentioned, it’s great for showing pictures and diagrams. I would also go so far as to say it’s great to give a summary of what you’re talking about, in the form of a short list of bullet points, to remind the presenter of what he or she is supposed to say, and to tell the audience where this is all going (though Tufte disagrees quite loudly here).
Unlike Tufte, I maintain that it is possible to make a good Powerpoint: at least two of my professors (Dodds and O’Neill) make excellent PPs on a regular basis. However, the vast majority of Powerpoints are awful. What we need is for everyone to take some sort of seminar/class/etc about how to give talks, how to represent information, and maybe even how to give a Powerpoint presentation (something like the Math Forum class here, but without the math angle). Those rare times when it is used correctly, I think that Powerpoint is great.
Re: A summary of the pamphlette
Beat you to it, buddy:
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses
If you’ve got time, you should borrow the rest of his books from me. His powerpoint rant is reasonable, but the rest are unbelievably right in a way that’s hard to describe.
Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!!
For putting this in words. Mind if I link to it on my journal at some point? I never noticed how much it got to me until this year, when two of my classes rotated “discussion leaders” throughout the quarter, and almost every class people felt this bizarre NEED to do a PowerPoint; like it showed they did more work or something. My partner made one too. And it was classic! She read from the slides, spent only about 15 seconds on most of them, and didnt even understand what the graph on the last one meant! She just thought it “showed the info well, or something” Ugh! I like a good powerpoint, one from which I can jot down quick notes, but listen to the speaker to get clarification. Otherwise, I tend to just tune them BOTH out. >_<
Re: Thank you! Thank you!! Thank you!!!
Please link! The more people who read this, the better, I feel.
Hear hear. The only time more than a couple words of text might be justified on a powerpoint is if you are using a block quote–I find it’s easier to process a large quotation if you can both read it and hear it. Other than that small exception, though, NO!
A Quick Addendum…
In our presentation today, my partner said, and I quote: “I’ll just read this to you now… ‘Bouhuys, Bloem and Groothuis asked…'” We really did spend less than 5 seconds on each of 4 slides (the 3 I expected, and another). My partner also decided this afternoon to add in another slide in the introduction, without telling me. It described a lit search that she did on the subject. She talked about correlations between sadness and skin conductivity, fear and heart-rate, happiness and breathing rate. I’ll grant that it was mildly interesting, and the slide was actually pretty good. However, it was totally unrelated to anything we actually did. We didn’t do anything remotely biological in our project, and here she is talking about skin conductivity. I don’t even know how to measure that (you know, without electrocuting the person and stuff).
I’m glad you all like my rant on this subject! It’s good to know that this bugs other people, too. If you’re looking for an example of a good Powerpoint, try to go see a talk by Bob Full from Berkeley. His talks are really entertaining, and he uses Powerpoint really well.