Powerpoint sucks
I hate Powerpoint. Let me be clear. I have once — once! — seen a presentation where Powerpoint added to the presentation; this was one of the major presentations at BUCLD one year. Many many many others used Powerpoint, unfortunately.
The one professor I had in undergrad who liked using Powerpoint didn’t use them for the class I took, which is good, because he liked to use blue fonts on black backgrounds. (Why?) Only one professor in grad school used them — I still don’t know why; they didn’t add anything to the presentation. Really, watching animated OT tableaux doesn’t actually help make them more understandable. It might have been helpful for earlier discussions, but maybe not. Handouts are better.
When I worked at ETS last summer, we had lots of Powerpoint presentations. Never necessary. Using computers sometimes was, but not Powerpoint, which usually lost a great deal of info. (There’s an article I have somewhere about why Powerpoint is almost information-free.)
The linguistics conferences I have been to have had very few Powerpoints, and very few “Here’s an article and let me read it” talks. (Of a few I can remember offhand, all were by tenured professors, and one was very good — it was written to be read — and most were terrible.)
The way I’ve experienced conferences has been unlike the way Timothy Burke seems to have. There are “neat facts” in linguistics, which stand apart from the theory you look at them in. Facts need some interpretation, and a talk that just gave a fact wouldn’t be a success, but they can stand on their own in a way.
I use bullet points, especially for conclusions. They’re useful. I always have handouts, which are essentially a bunch of things I could put up, but don’t. This is pretty standard.
Still, Powerpoint isn’t going to work for harder social science, either, because it’s so limited in what you can present on a page.
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August 10th, 2004 @ 7:52 pm
Powerpoint doesn’t have any advantages I know of. It’s for the big bullets, the main points, the glossy, and to throw up on the wall, let’s face it, the main points that if your audience is listening, they should get anyway.
I’ve been forced to make powerpoints for my [soon] former boss this semester and they’re just watershed for the masses. Waste of time in my opinion.
January 19th, 2007 @ 1:43 pm
I am a high school teacher and I am convinced that power point is the DEVIL!!! I hate it. It is so lame. Clip Art + Lame Research + Smelly Kid equals D+
March 14th, 2007 @ 6:40 pm
I hate powerpoint because I have to use it. For a 20 year old prgram it is unbelievable weak. Copy text between Word an Powerpoint and neither will reain all formatting.
There are no style sheets! WTF? That’s right, a program designed for consistent, text-heavy formatting has no style sheets after 20 years!
There are tools to copy formatting, but paragraph formatting is ignored.
On the Mac, toolbars cover the window title and close/minimize/maximize buttons in the default positions. Save a new file and the toolbars are in front of the save dialogue and cover the filename. Huh? Is that the stupidest thing ever? Could be.
There’s no way to replace a graphic. I should be able to click on a grphic and Insert > Get Picture > From File (should be in the File menu, but that’s another problem) and replace the selected picture with the one I select. Nope.
Save a presentation as a web page and almost all the texr is rasterized, so it won’t print well and can’t be searched. Also, unless saved for all browsers, the presentation won’t show in many browsers even though the browser is fully capable.
PowerPoint is a crime from a user’s point of view. It’s the worst program I know I’ll have to use again.