Power Point is ubiquitous because it offers improved communications. Just because some journalist isn't old enough to remember slides and overhead projectors doesn't mean such things didn't exist. If there's a shortcoming with Power Point it's that it is based on the idea of printing everything out rather than dynamic interaction. It's an old paradigm, but it's hard to beat something modelled on the physical world.
In the pre-PowerPoint era it was more common for people to actually prepare a talk rather than hide behind hastily-created slides that usually serve more as prompts for the speaker than visual enhancements to the content.
It is certainly possible to give bad presentations without PowerPoint, and good presentations with it, but most people only learn bad habits.
PowerPoint PRO TIP: The "b" key will bring up a black screen, and the "w" key will bring up a white screen, so people can look at your actual face when you are talking to them.
In my experience, well prepared presentations were not more common in any absolute sense. Perhaps it was more common in a relative sense since carefully prepared presentation slides were often the purview of a more select few. In those days a third grade teacher might have some overheads. These days, the third grade students are preparing pptx's as part of the curriculum.
Banning Power Point because there are so many mediocre Power Points out there is like banning email because there are so many poorly written emails. Power Point provides unprecedented access to presentation tools as part of the "computer on every desk and in every home" revolution. A presentation no longer requires a draftsman and special print media. People can do it themselves. Even those for whom visual communication and on stage presentations are not core competencies. Most presentations aren't very good. They don't need to be. They just need to be good enough.
My Tip from making architectural presentations: Place yourself on the audience side of the fourth wall and point to your images as you tell your story. If it's about you and not the content, you're already on the wrong track because it's about you and not the audience.
Prior to PowerPoint people would... write entire reports filled with all of the substantive details, in clear language explaining everything. That got replaced with pitch culture, which is brain dead in comparison.
But how many people read them? Once you wind up having to point to the contract, the relationship is already south bound. Today people are readily writing software in languages with no specification other than the prototypical implementation. When communication was expensive, investment in big documentation was usually sound.
Today, I don't need an atlas of Georgia Counties. I've got Wikipedia and the US Census Bureau and free long distance on my cell-phone plan and minutes that go unused every month. If I have a question about Ubuntu, I don't need a manual. There's StackExchange and Google. There are lots of lightweight channels.
Don't get me wrong, I love books and deep knowledge. But the six months that it takes to produce, publish, and disseminate a tome doesn't offer slam dunk ROI. The agilists have a point.
You're confusing a bunch of stuff together here. Agile and powerpoint aren't the same thing. And BDUF/waterfall isn't the same thing as writing specs nor is it the same thing as using reports/essays/documentation to drive discussion and design.
The problem with PowerPoint is that it incentivizes laziness and promotes pitch-culture to the detriment of quality in-depth discussion.
As I wrote in another post, how I would drive getting off of the pitch-train is through internal blogs, wikis, and possibly forums. The way things are today you tend to have 2 main tools in use: the pitch and then reactionary response (the email thread, bug trail, backlog, what-have-you). That's very limiting, myopic, and reactionary. It makes it difficult to have meaningful discussions at a meaty level of detail on things (designs, architectures, directions, etc.) Those things tend to happen in email threads which get unwieldy rather quickly.
You certainly don't need to have a report/document/memo/manifesto about every little thing. But when you need to have a discussion about, say, the direction of your whole product stack, major engineering changes, that sort of thing, it hurts when what should be a conversation at a level of an RFC is reduced to a pitch-deck that people then either thumbs up or thumbs down.
People had to prepare transparancies and it was time-consuming and expensive, so they took a bit of care over it.
I can dump 7,000 words into powerpoint, chose a terrible font and terrible colours, fill it with weird clip art and transitions, and then bore and confuse my audience.
I like the idea of powerpoint. But there are far too many examples of suboptimal powerpoint presentations.
Perhaps there should be a gallery of good presentations (this probanly exists) which have the slides but also a video of the actual presentation, so people can compare the sparse slides and detailed talk.
I spend ages whenever I have to do a powerpoint (or libreoffice) presentation.
Drawing a box with text in it will take me maybe ten time longer in PP compared to a transparency. Admittedly the lines will be straight, and the text more readable (assuming I choose a reasonable font size), but its so time consuming in comparison.
Agreed. Powerpoint is good when its NOT a set of bullet points. Instead, show data rendered in a way that can't easily be explained in a word or two. Use the maxim that 'a picture is worth 1000 words'. There the presentation shines.
Data representation should properly be at least two variables plotted against one another, neither of which is time.
