An exerienced, thoughtful, skilled speaker is going to match the best tools to their material. Modern presentation software provides a good speaker with additional tools that they may be able to use to good effect.

The problem is everyone else (and even the better speakers in their weaker moments) that use these things as a crutch, as a replacement for thinking. We live in a world of people who don’t like speaking in public yet have to do so. My father, for example, got a degree in mechanical engineering with no particular training in either speaking or writing, but spent most of his career in management having to do both those things, and not much enjoying either.

What does PowerPoint do to help those people? It gives them the ability to become distracted by themes, fonts, colors, flashy transitions, flying bullet points, and things that blink and twirl. A good presentation ultimately has to be about content, but PowerPoint not only allows, but even encourages everyone involved to focus on PowerPoint Phluff instead of content.

Also, in the interest of full disclosure I’ve never used Keynote. I can certainly hope that it’s less icky than PowerPoint (it’s hard to imagine that it’s worse!). To the degree, however, that it continues to represent a crutch that distracts people from content and presentation, then it’s at least a potential problem. In my experience presentations made with tools like LaTeX tend not have as much Phluff as ones made with PowerPoint, but packages like Beamer (which I use and like well enough) can still lead to a lot of visual clutter; many of the pre-definied themes have a lot of fiddly bits that look impressive but don’t really pay their way in terms of content. One (myself included) can also spend more than a little time fiddling with themes and such instead of organizing content.

One of my biggest personal complaints, though, is how many conference talks are now almost entirely unpracticed because the visuals can be written at the last minute. Back In The Day (TM), one used transparencies, which usually had to be organized and printed well in advance of a conference. As a result one had time to go over the slides numerous times and rehearse the talk in your head if not out loud. Now we can write the talk an hour before of the presentation, hoping we can make some sense of the slides as we go through them for the first time in front of the audience. Or those real winners where someone shows up at a talk with 80 or a 100 slides for a 20 minute presentation; they’ve apparently brought every slide they’ve ever written on this or any related subject, skipping and choosing on the fly.

I’ve been watching people give job talks here at UMM for 16 years, which includes the transition from overhead transparencies to PowerPoint. This includes everything from the very good to the remarkably dreadful. The best almost always had a minimal of visual aids, some with none at all and instead focussed on content and communication and good use of a black (or white) board. The worst were hopelessly disorganized and hastily assembled, whether on overheads or via PowerPoint. But my (admittedly anecdotal) experience is that substantially more (3 to 1?) of the dreadful ones were done with PowerPoint than without.

And JOCP = “Jeez O’ Criminey Pete!”, or it least it does in my weird universe. :-)

p.s. What does JOCP abbreviate?

Over the past several years I’ve seen a lot of very bad PowerPoint, and few that I thought were neutral (i.e., they made the talk neither substantially better or substantially worse), and probably only a handful that were genuinely good. Given that, I’d say disallowing or discouraging would probably be a Good Thing in many contexts :-).

I agree with your thoughts on Word, but I’m not sure what you mean by ‘disallowing Powerpoint.’ Where do you want to disallow Powerpoint? In talks? If so, do you also want to disallow Apple’s Keynote?

One of the best (or worst, depending) examples of the power of marketing.

Whenever I go on one of my little tirades about Office, the standard response is “But what do you use instead?”, usually with the same sort of bewildered look you’d expect if you suggested going without gravity for a day. OpenOffice has gotten very usable over time. It still has its issues (can be slow to start up, for example), but it’s not full of weirdo nasty security problems, it relies on open standards and formats, and can generally read and write Office stuff quite effectively. In reality, though, I almost never use an old-school word processor any more, except for opening other people’s annoying Word and Excel documents. The vast majority of my writing is on-line (e-mail, blog, wiki, etc.). Most people, if they were honest, would find that an awful lot of what they’re writing is for on-line purposes as well, and there is darn near nothing worse than an e-mail with a .doc attachment that’s three sentences and a five item bullet list! Don’t make me open up a Word document to read a few sentences that should have just been typed straight into the e-mail, or at least pasted there if you have to compose in Word!

OK, I’ll calm down now.

But it is late and we have not time to engage all of these impediments to civilization tonight.