In the war on clarity, some feel the U.S. military is spending too much time on a program some believe "stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making," creating the illusion of understanding and control, writes Elisabeth Bumiller in We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint(NY Times, 4-26-10).
Is PowerPoint inevitable?
Read the following pieces and at least make the most of it.
• Life After Death by PowerPoint (video, comedian Don McMillan)
• Prezi vs PowerPoint: Which One Should You Use? (Orana Velarde, Visme, 12-16-20) Prezi is a cloud-based tool for creating non-linear presentations while PowerPoint is an offline tool for creating standard presentations. Choose the element you’re interested in from the navigation in this article and figure out which option is the best for your presentation needs.
--- Prezi vs. Powerpoint (YouTube, Landon Phillips, Technology and Learning at Pepperdine, the ways the two programs differ)
--- Prezi vs PowerPoint: Which is Right For You? (Kiri Rowan, Udemy, 5-5-14)
• 24 of the Best PowerPoint Presentation Examples Every Marketer Should See (Ginny Mineo, HubSpot, 1-23-15)
• Dumb-dumb bullets by T.X. Hammes in the Armed Forces Journal.
• PowerPoint: You’re doing it wrong (Andrew V. Abela, Armed Forces Journal, 6-1-12) For persuasive presentations, try this alternative approach.
• How Not to Use PowerPoint (clever slide show by Alexei Kapterev)
• How to un-suck your PowerPoint slides (slideshow, SlideBoom, no spoken voice, Dennis Meredith)
• Death to PowerPoint (Bob Parks, Bloomberg, 8-30-12) Microsoft’s presentation software is as reviled as it is ubiquitous. Bullet points are the enemies of thought. People are drawn to narrative storytelling—not slides. Thankfully, the workforce is starting to rebel.
• Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides Then Sit the Hell Down (Daniel Pink, Wired, 8-21-07)
• Cloud Computing (YouTube) Simon Wardley's smart use of images, concept, humor in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentations (Jerry Weissman interview)
• The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward R. Tufte ($7), and you can read a sample here of why understanding PowerPoint is particularly important with technical material: PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports (Tufte analyzes one incident of flawed PowerPoint, in a Boeing analysis of launch damage to the space shuttle Columbia, arguing that poor PowerPoint design led to grave misinterpretations of Columbia's vulnerability and to Columbia blowing up on re-entry). Go here for links to many more Tufte essays by the author of the classic The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (now in its second edition).
• 11 Presentation Lessons You Can Still Learn From Steve Jobs (Carmine Gallo, Forbes, 10-4-12)
• Jeff Bezos And The End of PowerPoint As We Know It (Carmine Gallo, Forbes, 9-7-12) The next time you deliver a PowerPoint presentation that matters—a product launch, investor pitch, new client meeting— take a cue from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and ditch the bullet points.
• Top 20 Best Powerpoint Presentations (Cubicle Ninjas)