if you've ever worked an office job you've probably experienced all the
typical trappings of being a corporate wage slave sitting for eight hours at a
cubicle uncomfortable lunches with irritating co-workers and useless
meetings which of course feature a powerpoint presentation indeed research
has shown that most workplace meetings do very little to increase productivity
and just seeing the first slide of a poorly executed powerpoint intensifies
this particularly mundane form of dread but despite the fact that most nine to
five workers agree that powerpoints kind of suck as a tool to convey information
we just keep right on using them what gives what's the deal well it helps to
know what the point of powerpoint originally was before we were all
looking at bullet points on digital projectors workplaces had to use
old-fashioned contraptions such as vacation photo style slides projectors
which you probably remember from high school or chalkboards but despite the
fact that making presentations for these devices was time consuming hundreds of
millions of presentation slides were being created every year and even though
software and equipment that could show powerpoint like presentations were
around before the 1980s they were very expensive however once the personal
computer started becoming widespread software developers quickly figured out
that using them to show visual aids in the workplace made both giving and
creating presentations much quicker and easier and since people were already
used to the slides presentation paradigm programmers already had an idea for what
presentation program should look like so lots of presentation programs came out
for the pc in the 1980s with powerpoint hitting the scene in 1987. and while
this did make it much easier for workers at all levels to share thoughts with
colleagues the problem was that no one really knew how to use it i mean think
about the options most people are familiar with when creating a powerpoint
you can choose a fancy looking background embed animations to your
heart's content or even throw in some word art but while all this stuff can be
flashy it often doesn't do a great job conveying information yet presentation
programs tend to emphasize these bells and whistles not what's going to get the
point across most effectively and even if you skip these options there are user
errors too like cramming way too much information onto one slide i know we've
all done it while you've probably seen this any given board meeting or college
lecture this exact problem was actually implicated in the space shuttle columbia
disaster back in 2003 you see a
presentation for nasa actually contained information about the defect that caused
the shuttle to ultimately explode but it was buried far down on a slide which was
mostly a wall of text that actually started on a positive note meaning no
one paid much attention to it but this example highlights not only that
powerpoint slides often contain too much or too little information to be helpful
but that it's also been roundly criticized for making people too passive
with how they learn or absorb new concepts i mean it's almost as if a
linear presentation where slides come out one after the other is too
straightforward instead of getting viewers to engage with the material the software's
fundamental paradigm seems to reward passive learning as a result of the
audience being too distracted by a shoddily made slideshow while missing
more important information coming from the speaker some critics have even gone
as far to say that it makes people less curious and if you've ever sat through a
confusing powerpoint at your 8am lecture that your professor put basically no
thought into you might tend to agree but is there a brighter future ahead for the
program we all love to hate well both powerpoint and its rivals are
incorporating features that attempt to make presentations less linear such as
zoom features that allow the presenter to access different pieces of
information and make the experience less predictable and torpor inducing without
breaking flow important in this age of instagram adult attention spans
regardless it might be worthwhile for us all to just learn how to use powerpoint
correctly a good presentation should be a useful learning aid even after you've
wrapped things up and have snuck out to an expense account lunch so make your
slides informative without cramming so much stuff onto them that no one can
read them use interesting visuals that help your audience understand instead of
pointless clip art and stock photos of business people and don't just read off
the slides verbatim in my day we used to call that given a speech
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heard about a section thanks freshbooks appreciate you anyways
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