Comments on: Clipart Microsoft – How to Create a Dumb Presentation

By: chris

chris — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 13:16:49 +0000

I found a good response to Tufte by folks who teach business communications. They take the horrible shuttle slides and make them into a coherent story.

For those of us who go to church on Sunday and hear a sermon without slides, we know that PPT is not necessary to communicate a message. Of course, the sermons I hear do not talk about major shifts in business strategy based on learnings from customer service research.

Then again imagine the Gettysburg Address in ppt
http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/Gettysburg.ppt

By: jd

jd — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 20:43:31 +0000

The cap thing mentioned by Jeff reminded me of working at a GE subsidiary. In GE culture they are called “pitches” as opposed to decks. And every freaking word is in title caps. So you end up with stuff like:

The ROI Waterfall Walk Clearly Indicates a Year Over Year Trend Toward a New Paradigm of Profitability on a Going Forward Basis

The good things that I got out of the GE culture was to un-clutter graphs (no grid lines, no 3D, easy colors) and keep graphics simple (big chevrons, simple shapes and no clip art).

Of course I always laugh inside when people refer to giving a presentation as pitching because of the gay sex metaphor of pitching and catching. But as they say… if the shoe fits…

By: jeff barson

jeff barson — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:41:43 +0000

Did these Amazon reports have to include capitalization?

On the map: I hadn’t realized that the French had lost the majority of their men (300k+) before they reached Moscow. I’m going to read more on this.