I hate PowerPoint

But it is not sour grapes. True, it took me a while to feel comfortable with PowerPoint, but the more comfortable I got the more distanced from it I became. This is a chronicle of why and how I have sustained my not-too-fond feelings of .ppt.

One of the earliest interactions between the head of the company I work for and me started off OK, but descended into unsatisfactory territory quite fast. When asked what plans I have for doing the task assigned to me, I started detailing, as is my wont, to enable a reasonable level of comprehension. But he stopped me short: “You have to learn to speak in bullet points!”

That is precisely the moment I started hating bullet points, and PowerPoint which has descended into bullet points and their ilk – bubbles, 256 colors, fade outs etc. If there is one characteristic that defines PowerPoint, it is its inability to add value to information. OK, I have been too harsh – PowerPoint and also bullet points do help in capsulizing but it is most often taken to extremes where the purpose of elucidation is lost.

On top of it, PowerPoint helps score points, particularly when you have a selling job at hand. I am cynical enough to acknowledge the truth in the refrain, “There is money in poverty.” Almost 10 years ago, in Volume III, Issues 5 & 6, 2002 of The Little Magazine, I saw a page that looked to me to be a pictorial of this idea, of money and poverty going together. I did some touch up to the page, given below; please take in the whole, yet focus on the last frame, which is all mine.

While the picture cannot be a PowerPoint presentation, the statements in the frames are precisely the instructions one gets from whoever is going to make the presentation. This is one reason for my hating PowerPoint.

That was in 2002. Fast forward to 2010 [1]. It is all about how PowerPoint wastes time and confuses decision makers, the precise opposites of what it is supposed to enable – time efficiency and focused decision making.

Look at the .ppt slide below. “Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of the American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer.” The good military man’s response: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.” I do not know whether the US actually won that war and accomplished all it wanted to in that region of the world. But surely, the general and his men must not have figured out that slide yet!

“PowerPoint makes us stupid.” Amen to that. But, what is perhaps more relevant is PowerPoint thinks you are stupid, stupid enough to want 256 colors, dozens of “bullet points” and so on, just to aid comprehension. Come to think of it, it is more or less proven that you need no more than four colors in a map to ensure that no two regions sharing a border are of the same color. Go figure, then, the 256 you are offered!

“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izeable.” I love such free-wheeling use of one’s native tongue, no reference to dictionary or a thesaurus! My only grouse on the above statement is if you can figure which problems are bullet-izable, then there may not be a real need to bullet point it. Basically then, bullet points fall between stools.

In the military, the writer says, .ppt “ties up junior officers.” I can vouch for that in my office, far from being a military outfit. I, though at best a middle level manager ten years ago, avoided being stuck with that charge to a very large extent. I was not a “systemizer” but a “satisficer”. If I felt the substance in my slide – quietly ignoring the aesthetics aspects – will get the job done, I took it as is. But, not so my immediate boss! Unless he wasted the time of his junior officers, including me (perhaps not realizing he is doing so), he would not be satisfied. His satisfaction lay in engaging his juniors. Period.

But things are changing, at least in my office. We do not have now the separate unit which went under the name, “Presentation Cell”. I do my own presentations, for the most part, and I do not want to waste my time. Our clients used to ask for PowerPoint presentations of the proposals we submit (perhaps they are not literate enough beyond bullet points). I believe this has come down. Even the fewer presentations we do make are more substantive rather than style heavy.

I do not know what the situation is in the US military; but of my more immediate concern is the trajectory of Indian military. There is one redeeming aspect to PowerPoint though, as per senior military officers: “[T]he program does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefing for reporters.”

What is the civilian version of this advantage? Well, presentations at seminars, conferences, colloquiums etc. Yes, I do take a little more pain in preparing my presentations in front of outsiders – more effort is needed to make them deaf, dumb and mute!

All said, I hate PowerPoint but for selfish reasons I do not want it to go extinct.       

Raghuram Ekambaram

References

1.    We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint, Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, August 26, 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?_r=0).