It started in the comment form on Manan’s blog, but when it started becoming so large, I decided to make it a blog post on my blog.

Well well well!! Max has made some points here!!

I am sorry to say that a person who has spoken about how things need to be presented to people, seems to have himself not been able to do it effectively.

Now, why would I say that? Mainly because I had to go through his whole post on BBC twice to actually figure out what the point he’s actually making in this post is.

As I see it, he has basically pointed out how people tend to make mistakes in the manner they present & in the way they select and represent their content.

He has done this apparently while attempting to – as the title of the news item suggests – find the core problem that Power Point as a tool carries.

As a person who carries some interests in user experience & usability, I find some of his points here very interesting and useful.

What is the point Max is trying to make?

Mr. Max here, in brief, is saying that:

Power Point is an amazing tool. But, it carries a flaw of usability. It is more usable to create content in a certain manner(paragraphs, bullets) and fails to make other functionalities easily usable(like the ability to add visual representation of data or ideas or thoughts).

My argument to that

Well, yes. Of course the way data/ideas are represented are important. But, blaming a tool which empowers people to do this in n number of ways for not being able to make the user use the `better` ways, is not really justified.

Specially, when Power Point actually gives an effective solution to all of these:

• You want to use paragraphs of text for the user to read
• You want to use sets of large sentences mangled together
• You want to use brief <15 word bulleted sentences
• You want to use images to represent your ideas/content
• You want to use graphical tools to represent your data
• A lot of other options or possibilities can be definitely worked out, and are out of the scope of this exhaustive bulleted list

The above functionalities are all enablers. They help you represent your content in the way you want.

As I see it, whatever Max has mentioned in his article, are more decisive attributes of the presenter, rather than the tool(Power Point).

The presenter has all the power on Power Point to disentangle his web of content and draw it out to people, but there are a few possible reasons I can think of why he/she is not successful in doing it:

• The presenter knows shit about presenting. He just copy pastes data, in whatever disposable form available to him through various resources, right into the presentation.
• The presenter is a lazy a**. Although he has time, he wants to do it quick and hence, he `doesnt want` to use the features available to him.
• Irrespective of the representation of the content, the presenter just doesn’t know how on earth to interact with his audience.
• The presenter has nothing to say to the audience. He’s only there to read out what the presentation carries.

Like I mentioned above, all of these are things that can be improved on by the presenter.

The tool gives us all the options. It depends on us, how we use them.

Take a look at this presentation by @thakkar, and this one.

The first one is a award-winning presentation by @thakkar for Slideshare’s annual contest. It speaks out. And if you know @thakkar, I’m sure you can visualise this. If he would be in front of you presenting this, you would have spent around 90% of your time listening to him and the remaining 10% to actually imagine yourself eating Pani Puri(thanks to the images).

The second one is of types available in abundance, that I randomly picked up from Slideshare. Take a look at it.

Both have been made using Power Point. The only difference is, @thakkar has represented the content in a more eye-appealing and brief manner, while the other presenter has not.

So, Power Point is just a tool. It is an enabler. Don’t blame it for what the presenter has done.

P.S. This topic will always remain open-ended. It will draw comments from various schools of thought.
Please do not flame or get into a recursive debate here.
But, yes do make yourself heard without doing the above by adding your views through the comments.