In Defense of PowerPoint

Every few months there’s another article on the evils of PowerPoint, but it’s a poor craftsman that blames their tools. If you can’t think of a decent sentence to write, would you blame your pen? If you seem to habitually crash cars, would you blame the shape of the steering wheel? Regardless of how good or bad your pens and cars are, the burden of writing and driving is placed squarely between your ears. Speaking is no different. What kind of person insists on claiming otherwise?

Presentation tools are a distraction from the real issue: fools get lost with great tools all the time. PowerPoint is fine for what it does, which is put images on a screen. It’s better than the slide and overhead projectors it was designed to replace. But that’s just the point: slides are rarely the hard part of communicating anything. Slides are props. They support the ideas and points the speaker is making. For thousands of years great leaders and orators did their thing without a single slide. If the speaker is an idiot, or renders themselves virtually idiotic by their own hubris, forgetting why the audience is there, or gets distracted by animations and fonts, the fault is theirs, regardless of the tool. I prefer Keynote, but most criticisms of Powerpoint apply to it as well. All speakers have the option of speaking without any slides. which is how its been done for most of human history.

In every organization that’s ridiculed for “PowerPoint stupidity” (Such as the U.S. government in this NYT article), I blame the leaders of the culture, not the tool. In these articles there is rarely any evidence the use of Keynote, Prezi, or any other presentation tool in the same culture wouldn’t result in the same intellectual misery. In fact it doesn’t even appear the image so ridiculed by the NYTimes was made in PowerPoint. It was likely made in Illustrator or some other graphic design tool. If your boss demands you have 100 slides, with 50 arrows, and 30 different fonts, the problem is not the software.

The better question is: Why do some cultures reward poor communication skills? Why do they confuse charts, spreadsheets and animations with clear thinking? (perhaps its a data death spiral). Environments like these ruin the power of any tool, and eventually any mind. Any leader who confuses volume with clarity, and density with wisdom, has set up the entire organization to fail, independent of what tools they do or do not use. And when a culture is in trouble, look to the leaders as the leader’s behavior defines the culture.

The next time you find yourself victimized by a bad presentation, don’t just blame the presenter or their software. Instead blame whoever is in charge. Ask the following:

  • Who invited this speaker and chose to give them the floor?
  • Does the majority of the audience find the speaker effective?
  • If not, what is the leader doing to improve this?
  • What communication example did the leader set? Is this speaker simply emulating him/her?
  • What constructively critical feedback will the leader give the speaker so the speaker is better next time?

Blaming tools can be a copout for people who should be held responsible, from conference organizers, to department heads, to the speaker themselves.  Event organizers often do nothing to train, coach or reward good speakers they invite. Same for bosses and their staff. The feedback loops are broken and poor communication skills are, by default, reinforced. Training people to use PowerPoint isn’t speaker training, just as teaching someone how to use a hammer isn’t architecture.

Edward Tufte is fond of criticizing PowerPoint (See PowerPoint is evil, Wired). And I agree with his critique, but not his target. If you see him present his famous workshop, he shows images on a big screen behind him. He seems proud not to be using a tool as crude as PowerPoint, but the functional distinction is trivial. Regardless of how, he shows images on a big projection screen. While he is wise in not centering his lectures on his slides (often turning the screen behind him to black) he could very well use PowerPoint to do all these things and no one would know the difference.  The key distinction is not the tools, but his choices as a speaker for how he uses the tools. Hit B any time in PowerPoint, and you get a black screen.

Word Processors, email programs, and now blogging software have all been criticized for lowering various bars of quality and distorting people’s focus away from good thinking. But this is what popular tools tend to do and always will do. When you democratize a kind of power, you enable people to use that power in new ways. This enables the creation of great, as well as awful, things, as people without training or discipline now have  great power without earning it. With fresh blood innovations can be made, but also trash.

In the end, most “X is evil” type rants contain a logical fallacy, which is this: you can do stupid things with any tool. Most tools are indifferent. A chainsaw works just as well on your foot as on a log. The more powerful the tool, the larger the problem or solution you can create.

As someone who understands design, I recognize ways to make PowerPoint better. A good chainsaw could have a foot proximity detector, and try to minimize the odds you’ll do stupid things. And in turn, PowerPoint should help you think about what you want to say before you make any slides at all. But thinking takes time, and in many cultures thinking is made to seem like a waste of time.  Since all slide tools inherently worship slides, and all tool lovers inherently worship the tools, many people tend to jump in to making slides well before they know what they want to say. Apple’s Keynote will never tell you when you’d be better off using fewer slides, or demand you practice your talk, two things most experts agree are big and easy wins for better presentations. But both require acts of thoughtful patience, something no tool yet designed can grant us.

As a final example, Carolyn wrote about why lazy professors who abuse PowerPoint suck. And I agree, but I think the professors carry the balance of the burden. A lazy professor would be nearly as lazy with other tools. Years ago, in the age before computers in the classroom, I had courses where professors copied their own crusty, aging notes onto huge chalkboards for an hour, so I could copy the same fucking notes down in my own book. This was complete mass-scale idiocy masquerading as learning. Did anyone say chalk-boards were evil? slide-transparencies were evil? The reuse of lecture notes? Do we really expect a piece of software to redefine human nature? The professor gets paid a salary to be accountable for how they use whatever tools they choose. And same for any speaker.

In summary, of course there are ways to make PowerPoint better, but that’s not the real problem to solve.

When someone finds a gun that fires anti-lazy/anti-stupidity rays at people in power, I’ll be the first to buy. But until then, lets for once put some blame on the users of tools, not just their creators. When you step up to the microphone, you are responsible for everything you present. If you put up a slide and stand in front of it, it is your show: you have no one to blame but yourself. If you are a leader, part of what you are responsible for, like it or not, is how well the people who work for you communicate with each other. If you don’t like what you see, do something about it.

Also see: Why I hate Prezi

33 Responses to “In Defense of PowerPoint”

  1. Rich S

    Good points! It’s easy for me to look at someone presenting and writhe inside as they read me word for word what is printed on the slide, but my focus should not be on the tool but on the presenter herself. I like how you related this to tools in general…it’s very true. The guitar doesn’t make the musician and the keyboard doesn’t make the programmer.

    Reply
  2. Greg

    Totally agree.. Powerpoint is just the messenger.

    One of the things that pisses me off the most is when management dings me because my slides don’t have enough words. They want a slide deck that can be used in a presentation, AND also emailed around and understood by people reading through the slide deck offline

    Reply
    1. Phil Simon

      Presentation and word-processing apps should not be confused for twins. Shame on your management for forgetting that.

      Reply
  3. Stephan List

    Great article, it seems blaming PowerPoint is quite in fashion at the moment. It’s the user not the tool. Thank you for getting this clear. – Stephan

    Reply
  4. Rich S

    Greg…ha ha! Just fought through that on a WP7 presentation I gave. :)

    Reply
  5. Terence Coughlin

    This post was a 9 out of 10 – and then I got to this snippet which made it a 10 out of 10:

    “Years ago, in the age before computers in the classroom, I had courses where professors copied their own crusty, aging notes onto huge chalkboards for an hour, so I could copy the same fucking notes down in my own book.”

    Thank you for sharing this piece of solid gold insight – I thought I was one of the only ones subjected to this unique brand of lecture hall torture! And no, I’ve never once read any critical opinion piece on such a practice – until now.

    Reply
  6. Susan de Sousa

    Whenever I am asked to do a Powerpoint presentation my heart sinks. I am not a Powerpoint expert and quite simply mine are of the short and bog standard variety. I can never see the point of spending precious hours making them flash.

    However I have sat through 72 slide presentation decks (fell asleep after the 3rd slide) with god knows what wizzy stuff in it and not remembered a thing about what they were actually trying to present.

    The moral here is, it’s not the tool which is the problem, it’s the way in which people use it which is!

    Regards

    Susan de Sousa
    Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com

    Reply
  7. Kathy sierra

    This is going in my favorite-posts-ever file. I was one of those anti-pp people until I started presenting to groups larger than 30. Today, I am almost extreme in the other direction… I can easily use 200 slides in a keynote. I agree that when we complain about bad pwerpoint, we are complaining about a bad presentation, period.

    But in many domains, the bar is being raised for presentations… It really stands out, even at a tech event, to see slides with nothing but bullet points. At least that’s progress. Though as someone said recently, now stock photos are the new bullet points ; ). Still, I will take even a cliched visual over a hard-to-process, high cog load text-heavy screen any time.

    Reply
  8. Stephan List

    BTW: The Picture shown in the article of the NYT has absolutely nothing to do with PowerPoint, related software or even presentation. It’s a systemic approach to the current situation in Afghanistan and yes, probably the situation is that complex. So it’s probably an issue of complexity reduction and systemic thinking, but this is a different field…

    Reply
  9. Bruce Gabrielle

    Great points. It seems authors keep preaching the same things over and over again through blogs and books. My question is – what will it take for all this to land?

    I love your suggestion about holding the leaders responsible. That will at least be a forcing function to DO something different.

    But I’ve always thought PowerPoint has progressed beyond just being an interesting tool for presentations; it’s now a critical business tool for shaping strategic decisions. We should be teaching these skills in business school.

    I’ve shared this idea with a few business schools, but they just think of PowerPoint as a piece of software. They are missing the point that it’s a whole new way to communicate in business, and a critical business skill.


    Bruce Gabrielle

    Reply
  10. Babloo Khan

    I doubt anybody seriously doubts the goodness of PowerPoint as a software. It’s a great application, but people are using for things that it’s not supposed to be used for. Not everything in life can be bulletized.

    Reply
  11. John Peterson

    Scott,
    I’ve been a long time reader of your site and I found your book “MAKING THINGS HAPPEN” to be an incredible resource to my career.

    This article was top notch in all but one regard: “A lazy professor would be nearly as lazy with other tools. Years ago, in the age before computers in the classroom, I had courses where professors copied their own crusty, aging notes onto huge chalkboards for an hour, so I could copy the same fucking notes down in my own book”

    I would have Twitted this article as well as posting to my Facebook except for the fact this one section mars your writing. The content I’m willing to share must be professional, this was not.

    As a professional writer, why would you include this type of language? What does this add to the writing?

    Reply
  12. Andrew

    Fantastic points. Having never been subjected to awful professors transcribing all their notes on the board (but plenty of professors who were/are terrible at powerpoint) I bought into the anti-powerpoint stance pretty hard. So kudos to you for broadening that view. Still though, tools are not neutral; to use (well, to stretch) your chainsaw example, if you cut off your foot, well, it’s a chainsaw, it’s a potentially dangerous tool. In the same way, there are professors who are excellent presenters but terrible powerpoint users, so when they feel compelled to use powerpoint because it has become a sort of presentation standard, the relationship changes and those skills are lost. All I am saying I suppose is that tools cannot be entirely excused from the problem. Guess it’s just an ‘appropriate context’ thing at bottom.

    Reply
  13. Chris Oestereich

    Scott,
    I’m with you on this. By nature PowerPoint is obviously not the most dynamic tool in the world, but that does not preclude its effectiveness in sharing knowledge and inciting wisdom. I believe it comes down to keeping things simple and avoiding the common traps. I wrote a short blog post on this last month, “12 Tips for Presenting with PowerPoint.” Here’s the link: http://right-brainedpm.com/2010/06/13/12-tips-for-presenting-with-powerpoint/
    Btw, I’ve been testing out Prezi recently. It shows promise.
    Thank you,
    -Chris

    Reply
  14. Carolyn

    Scott, thanks for linking to my blog! I appreciate the thoughtful response. While I agree that professors are ultimately responsible for bad instruction, I bet even the professors who copied their crusty notes at least wrote those notes themselves at one point or another. Sliding by with premade (and often inadequate) material bothers me more.

    I must admit, this line made me snicker: “And in turn, PowerPoint should help you think about what you want to say before you make any slides at all.” I feel like Microsoft’s answer to this feature was Clippy the helpful Microsoft paper clip.

    Reply
  15. Mike Nitabach

    My dad is an avid golfer, and he scoffs at his golfing buddies who are always showing up with some new driver or putter or set of irons that are gonna totally improve their games: “It’s not the tools; it’s the mechanic.”

    Reply
  16. DavidCL

    I agree with much of Scott’s argument, but the question of whether to blame the tool or the user is the wrong one from my point of view.

    When I first encountered Tufte’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” I went back and looked at the various PowerPoint presentations I had created over the years. I came to the conclusion that I could give better presentations if I didn’t use PowerPoint.

    It’s important to look at our tools from time to time and think about whether those tools are helping us do our best possible work. It’s undeniable, whether you’re making furniture, software, or presentations, that the tools you use do influence the quality and characteristics of the work you produce.

    Tufte’s concern about PowerPoint is that the software’s design supports a certain “cognitive style” of presentation, which is characterized by a small amount of content per-slide, overly-jazzy but under-detailed infographics (“chartjunk”), too many levels of hierarchy, and “executive summaries.”

    For me, Tufte’s work on PowerPoint helped me understand that the characteristics of a tool I was using were holding me back from doing my best work. That’s a worthwhile thing to learn, and nothing in Scott’s “defense” of PowerPoint changes that conclusion.

    From my point of view the sad thing is not so much PowerPoint itself, but the fact that PowerPoint’s competitors seem to exist in approximately the same mold. Why does “presentation software” mean “something that lets you display slides”? How about a tool that’s oriented towards organizing ideas and making good use of time? That’s a tool that would help me do better work.

    Reply
  17. Michael Durwin

    Since I was chewed out for responding to a statement posted on Twitter rather than following the link, reading the blog post, signing in with my name and email (which will be kept private I’m told), and leaving a longer, more rambling comment in the comment box.

    First off I find it ironic being told that leaving a blog comment is a better tool for discussion than Twitter by the author of a blog post claiming that the tool shouldn’t be to blame but rather the presenter and the content.

    I do agree that bad content cannot be turned into great content with the application of specialized tools ant more than bad presenters cannot be made dynamic presenters with those same tools. I recently watched David Carson’s TED talk in which he used a slide projector that was fantastic.

    On the other hand, to say a tool cannot enhance a presentation is a bit naive. If that were true why do so many use PowerPooint rather than an overhead projector, a white board or a chalk board? Because PowerPoint allows users to create multiple pages, add notes, transitions, etc. It is a very powerful tool for presentation. But it has it’s bugs and could use a lot of room for improvement. Several years ago I was preparing to pitch ESPN with a new campaign. I created a nice deck in InDesign that gave me a really nice PDF for print and presentation. My boss preferred PowerPoint so I recreated the entire deck in PowerPoint and www did a run-through in our office. When we set up to give our pitch at ESPN we used their projector. It reinterpreted all of the type (which was in Arial) into Courier and resized it. To say that this had a negative impact on our presentation would be putting it mildly. Whether it was the fault of PowerPoint, the Dell laptop or the projector is immaterial, The point is that the tools had an impact.

    Now I personally prefer Keynote to PowerPoint as it is a far powerful and intuitive tool for presentations. Both have room for improvement. But both have the ability to significantly enhance a presentation. A powerful presenter with great content can be torpedoed by a crappy presentation program and an ok presenter with ok content can be elevated with a great presentation tool.

    Reply
  18. Michael Durwin

    BTW Scott,
    When you post an opinion, even if it’s the title of your blog onTwitter, don’t be so acidic to people that respond to you there. If the tool isn’t important then Twitter is as good a place to have a discussion. Better in some cases. I do 75% of my Internet communication through my cell phone. Your blog, which I’m hazarding a guess is WordPress, doesn’t function well on my iPhone. Regardless of what Steve Jobs says, iPhone don’t offer the comp,tee web viewing experience, nor does your site have the free plugin that converts it for mobile devices. This means that halfway through my response, I could no longer see what I was typing because the comment box wouldn’t scroll and the Submit button hovered over the text. Regardless of whether this is the fault of your blog, my iPhone or whether we’re having this discussion via your blog or Twitter, I agree, the message is the most important thing, but the right tools make it better.

    Reply
  19. Scott Berkun

    Michael:

    I didn’t chew you out, nor was I acidic. Take a look – I simple opted out of the conversation. Your first tweet was this:

    > mdurwin: @jkvirtualoffice @berkun have you used
    > an alternate to PowerPoint? You might think different.

    And I responded by asking you on twitter if you actually read the post, but you never answered.

    In the post, I talk about Keynote and Prezi. I also talk about how while there are definitely ways to make PowerPoint better, it’s mostly unimportant in why a given presentation is good or bad.

    Given I spent hours writing the post, I have little motivation to argue about ideas from it on twitter with someone who didn’t read it. You never answered me, so I assumed you hadn’t. Eventually I said this:

    > berkun: @mdurwin If you really care for my opinion: the blog post is a much better tool
    > than a twitter argument.

    Which seems reasonable as: Why would I want to re-explain everything i just spent hours writing in a long post to some stranger in 140 character chunks? Why would I be motivated to do that?

    > First off I find it ironic being told that
    > leaving a blog comment is a better tool for
    > discussion than Twitter by the author of a
    > blog post claiming that the tool shouldn’t
    > be to blame but rather the presenter and the content.

    I did not say this opinion applied to all tools in the universe. I said in the first paragraph I’m thinking about common tools, like pens, cars and presentation software. Certainly when I have brain surgery I want them using very specific and highly specialized tools. But if instead of surgery, my doctor merely needs to write a prescription, I wouldn’t be worrying about the tools he’s using to do it.

    > On the other hand, to say a tool cannot enhance
    > a presentation is a bit naive

    I did not say this anywhere in the article. Again: Did you actually read it? The core theme of the article is how in most bad presentations the tool is not the problem. It’s the person using the tool and the culture that defines how they are allowed to present.

    Reply
  20. Rene R.

    Great article. Like John P., I find the profanity a problem because now I have to think three or more times about whether to assign reading this article/blog post to my grad class on giving seminars, which I would love to do. I was nodding my head the whole way through until then, when I realized I might not be able to assign it to them. The writing already conveys the frustration without the profanity: “This was complete mass-scale idiocy masquerading as learning.” (Even “suck” in this case is mild profanity but would be fine to me to have students read.)

    “If you don’t like what you see, do something about it.” Big fan of what you write, so thought I’d say something about it.

    Reply
  21. Scott Berkun

    John/Rene:

    Thanks for feedback on the profanity. I’ll think about it.

    I like words. Some of the words I like are considered profane. I think it’s silly that some words are profane but not others. They’re all just words to me – they can all be found in the same dictionary.

    But I do respect people feel differently than I do, regardless of why.

    Reply
  22. Larissa Meek

    Thank you for this post! I am still a PC and just gave a talk at a conference on Brainstorming.

    I used PowerPoint and it worked fine for me. I’m sure there could be improvements but in thinking about the art of public speaking, I focused more on what I was trying to say and less on how the slides were animated. PowerPoint forced me to keep things simple which, in turn, gave me more time to polish my session.

    Reply
  23. Elisabeth Bucci

    @Chris Oestereich: I liked your article very much (how to use Power Point properly). Great advice that goes along the themes of Scott’s post: it’s not the tool, it’s the presenter.

    As for this post, Scott, it’s bang on. I have watched awesome presentations given by excellent speakers who clearly used PowerPoint. And, of course, presentations-from-hell where the speaker read from the presentation. In both cases, I put the credit, and the blame, where it belonged: with the speaker.

    Along those lines, my last few PowerPoint presentations have been: black text on white background, no more than 6 words or short points to a slide, no animation or transition effects. I have been trying to focus more on the message and my speaking than the words on the slide. It seems to be working.

    And, while we’re killing the tool analogy, I am fond of saying that I can do a lot of damage to the walls of our house with a hammer (trying to hang a picture). However, I hardly blame the hammer, but rather the idiot holding it. :)

    Reply

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  1. […] In defense of PowerPoint « Scott Berkun In the end, most “X is evil” type product rants contain a logical fallacy, which is this: you can do stupid things with any tool. Most tools are indifferent. A chainsaw works just as well on your foot as on a log. The more powerful the tool, the larger the problem or solution you can create. As someone who understands design, I recognize ways to make PowerPoint better…thinking takes time, and in many cultures thinking is made to seem like a waste of time. Since all slide tools inherently worship slides, and all tool lovers inherently worship the tools, many people tend to jump in to making slides well before they know what they want to say. Apple’s Keynote will never tell you when you’d be better off using fewer slides, or demand you practice your talk, two things most experts agree are big and easy wins for better presentations. But both require acts of thoughtful patience, something no tool yet designed can grant us. (tags: powerpoint presentation communication scottberkun) […]

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