On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 08:59:47AM -0600, Palit, Nilanjan wrote: > From: Ben Tilly > > Personally I don't like the way that Powerpoint is used because it > > encourages oversimplification.
The way powerpoint is used encourages oversimplification? I suppose you could argue that, but that's an argument about *how it is commonly used*, not an argument about the tool itself. > > Also I think that spending great > > energy on fancy presentations for internal use is a waste of company > > time and money. I won't argue with that. The solution is to use the tool to create clean, simple, effective, communicative slides instead of using all the whizz-bang features just because you can (and then reading the bullet-points off them instead of using the slides as *part of* your presentation). It's a great shame that a bunch of slides is so often called a presentation. While it *can* be a presentation, I don't believe it can ever be a *good* presentation. A good presentation requires a knowledgeable enthusiastic speaker. > There is a lot of selling that needs to be done inside companies, as much, if > not more so than outside (especially for big companies, but I'm sure for > small ones as well). In some ways, selling internally is a lot harder, since > you're trying to communicate (or sell) to people who are just as or more > competent as you, have as much or more significant stakes than you do in the > outcome of the decision and in many cases control your paycheck. Not to mention that they may well know just as much as you do about whatever it is you're trying to change (and that's normally what you're doing when "selling" something internally) and so unlike in an external sales thing, you can't get away with lieing or just omitting a few details! > Presentations/animations (& thus PPT by extension) are also crucial to convey > complex ideas/thoughts, especially in fields of science of engineering (& I'm > sure in many other fields). There are countless cases I can list where an > animation (rightly done) can convey a complex idea otherwise impossible to > describe in words. Bravo. If I wanted to explain how, eg, a Newcomen engine worked, I couldn't do better than use this animation: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Newcomen_atmospheric_engine_animation.gif and then talk about it, pointing out all the details. -- David Cantrell | Bourgeois reactionary pig Do not be afraid of cooking, as your ingredients will know and misbehave -- Fergus Henderson _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list Boston-pm@mail.pm.org http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
