Powerpoint's finest hour?

[sbisson]

One of the most common pieces of business software, it's everywhere you go, and badly done, it can be intensely annoying (or mind-numbingly tedious) - and it was Colin Powell's main tool at the UN.

Check out this Guardian piece for a concise history of Powerpoint (without the slides, bullet points and pointless transitions). I have to admit to being surprised to find out that Whitfield Diffie was one of the original authors.

Comments

[codepope.livejournal.com]

Are weapons of mass boredom covered under any conventions?

[kightp.livejournal.com]

... and every professor at the university where I work wants his or her precious PP presentation mounted on the Web.

Yeesh.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Now I love Powerpoint. But then I absolutely refuse to let it tell me what to do. Thank you, little paperclip, but I know how to give a presentation, almost invariably better than you do. And for that matter, most of my powerpoint work has been more in the form of technical lessons rather than management infodumps.

I have certainly seen some very, very bad Powerpoint. (But then I recall plenty of very, very bad OHP presentations. At least Powerpoint mistakes can be easily fixed, whilst bad OHPs just get used over and over.) But I've also seen some very nice examples. It's a tool, and like all tools you have to be taught how to use it properly.

MC

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, I had no idea that one of my heroes had such a shameful past :-)

Death by Powerpoint

[tanais.livejournal.com]

I suffered three fucking days of power point hell at the hands of Microsoft's .NET team and the Biztalk 2000 team. At the end of Day Three I booked a flight to SFO and vowed never to return to the Redmond Campus. It was one of the reasons why I resigned from every computer magazine commission, why every August One/M$ email is deleted at the server,, why I removed every Microsoft product from the house and why I gave up tech journalism. I never ever want to go through that again.

Show me a Powerpoint presentation and I'll walk away. I won't have anything to do with it.