Abstract Powerpoint slides
A toolkit of abstract slides that you can use for your Powerpoint or Keynote presentation. Be cause “PEOPLE cannot COPE without some kind of visual STIMULATION”. (via bbj)
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kottke.org posts about Powerpoint
Al Gore won a share of the 2007
Al Gore won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for what is essentially a PowerPoint presentation. More info here.
Update: Yes, yes, I know Al Gore uses Keynote and not Powerpoint. Hence the “essentially”. (thx, everyone in the world)
Update: Amazingly, Al Gore now has an Emmy, an Oscar, and now a Nobel Prize. All he needs is a Grammy for the full Gore. (thx, brent)
Update: Man, you folks are testy today. When I say that Gore won a Nobel Prize for a Powerpoint presentation (again, “essentially”), I’m not being derogatory towards Gore. I like Gore…I’ve written several posts about him. But whatever his other accomplishments regarding the environment, he won the Nobel for An Inconvenient Truth. No movie, no prize. Period. Suppose someone had told you two years ago that someone would win a Nobel Peace Prize for a Hollywood film of a Powerpoint presentation…you’d have laughed in their face and every other part of their body!
Some background on how Al Gore’s global
Some background on how Al Gore’s global warming presentation got so polished. Also references Spike Jonze’s Al Gore video from 2000 which pictures Gore as anything but stiff. Some backstory on the Jonze video.
Update: More on Gore’s use of Keynote.
The Onion: Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint
The Onion: Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation. “We all got Ron’s message loud and clear when that JPEG of his wife wipe-transitioned to a photo of her tombstone”. (via mathowie)
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of
Is PowerPoint responsible for the woes of the Space Shuttle? Well, no, but it’s not helping any. “The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America — the PowerPointing of the planet, actually — is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese.”
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte has a new 24-page pamphlet out called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint on how to improve your PowerPoint presentations:
In corporate and government bureaucracies, the standard method for making a presentation is to talk about a list of points organized onto slides projected up on the wall. For many years, overhead projectors lit up transparencies, and slide projectors showed high-resolution 35mm slides. Now “slideware” computer programs for presentations are nearly everywhere. Early in the 21st century, several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint were turning out trillions of slides each year.
Alas, slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?
I love the cover image.
Tufte on Columbia evidence presentation
Tufte on Columbia evidence presentation: “a PowerPoint festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism”.
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