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PowerPoint: a series of slides full of 'faulty logic'.

At last. Someone has verbally, if not literally, destroyed PowerPoint.

I've been railing against PowerPoint for years. Some of my choicer PowerPoint quotes:
Thick, steaming garlic bread and red wine. It makes the perfect late supper, unless you have an early meeting next morning. However, if you are being summoned to a powerpoint presentation, go ahead and eat all the garlic you like. Anyone putting on a powerpoint presentation in the morning deserves to be blown away in a garlic gale.

I was at my second office reading a forty page powerpoint printout about some marketing genius's idea of what 'sets a company apart'. It was full of words like 'innovate' and 'respond' and 'focus on the customer' but it was devoid of any common sense at all.

Yes, it's Bulwer-Lytton time again; the competition that asks you to write the opening sentence of the worst-ever novel. Shouldn't be hard: just read the average corporate mission statement or the introduction to a bureaucrat's PowerPoint presentation.

Send me a million and I'll throw in a powerpoint presentation complete with pictures of ripe fruit and people scratching their heads in supermarkets and pointing at apples and lots of text and big figures all in different font types and sizes, just like your bureaucrats would do.

It was quieter than usual for a Monday morning. No-one was going to break into a spontaneous powerpoint presentation.

At any other time and in any other place that would mean armed protection. But not on Planet WorkSafe, where everything is solved by regulations in triplicate and endless PowerPoint presentations.

... nothing of any value ever happens in meetings except sandwiches, usually the chicken and avocado or turkey and cranberry variety. They help you try to forget the powerpoint presentation but somehow you never can. You follow each and every word painstakingly, like watching grass grow. And you listen to the presenter reading each and every word that you can see perfectly well right up there on the screen.

I drove to the supermarket at half past six. It was dark and raining and the carpark was full of puddles reflecting neon lights. The supermarket was packed with jaded city workers hunting for their dinner after a day of exhausting powerpoint presentations.
Final word to The Guardian's Andrew Smith, from the article at top:
Perhaps even worse, in the context of the 21st century, is a charge levelled by the French writer Franck Frommer in his book How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid. Because PP can only present propositions and arguments as equations, he says, they appear to have no owner; no one need feel responsible for them. In the post-banking-crisis world, we know both how seductive this is – and how dangerous.

Comments

  1. If I ever write a scifi novel it will begin "It was after the Apocalypse, and there was no more PowerPoint. Which made the carnage almost worth it."

    I never have figured out why the speakers feel compelled to read aloud every word that appears in the slides. Especially the cartoon captions (and there are always cartoons).

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  2. Yes, the habit is teeth-grindingly annoying.

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