PowerPoint Attack & Rebuttal Round ?

Matthew Stibbe at BadLanguage has a post discussing whether PowerPoint is that bad.  He argues that "At worse it is an accomplice to the crime not the criminal".  He provides links to various arguments pro and con for PowerPoint including Tufte's "Con" review in Wired magazine -"PowerPoint is Evil" and Don Norman of Nielsen Norman Group's "Pro" essay - "In Defense of PowerPoint". 

Don Norman argues that presenters should have 3 components to their presentation

• Personal Notes
• Illustrative Slides
• Handouts

Comments

[Dr Simon Raybould]

I've been saying this for a long time. I do voice & presentation skills training and the biggest problem we see (including on our public courses is that people hide behind PowerPoint. They're afraid and they leap to the the software as a crutch.

We argue that firing up the software should be the *last* think you do, once you've got the design sorted out.

The other problem, of course, is that the general standards of PowerPoint are pretty low and people tend to do what they've seen, not realising how much better a half-way decent presentation can be!

Simon