Death by PowerPoint [Work Chronicles]

the slides will be in our corporate colors: yellow text on a pink background …
- And the presenter will regularly quiz attendees on the content
  
  Not quiz as such. More like “any questions so far?” at the end of each slide, but will not give you time to ask anything “no? Ok, moving on”

Add to that going back 2-3 slides every 5mins and you get my professor at uni. Watching his classes was actual torture
- One of my teachers at uni used a Word document instead of a presentation. And yes, he still read it word for word. It was like a very shitty audiobook
  
  Alternatively, the best live audio textbook performance ever
- Or Bob the boomer goes can you go back 3 slides?
  
  There was a guy, I shit you not, that would ask him to go back to the previous slide cause he wasn't done writing it down
  
  Bob The Boomer may have been passive-aggressively trolling the presenter. "I'm not in here with you, you're in here with me" kind of thing.

At university, I had a lecturer who took this one step further. Instead of a power point, he used a word document that he read word by word.
- legere (lat) to read => lectura (lat) the reading event => lecture (en) => lecturer (en) a person giving/hosting a reading event.
  A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
  Books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive, and this new thing they established in Bologna in 1088 – the so called "universities" offering lectures will be a major breakthrough in the history of mankind to distribute knowledge!
  Good to know some professors still honour the only true way of teaching.
  
  Pfff this generation is wasting good expensive sheets of paper when good old oral tradition has worked for thousands of years. Writing was invented only 4000 years ago and still haven't caught on.
  
  books written by professional scribes are incredible expensive
  some things haven’t changed …
  
  A lecturer is supposed to read the text of a book to students so that they are able to write it down and obtain a copy of it for themselves.
  Does this still happen, with digital and all?
- We had one who pulled up the pdf of the textbook to read it word by word
- You sure they weren't just sharing the wrong screen?

Oh no my kid's school just texted me he got a fever I have to go. Hate to miss the presentation, can you post the slides in chat after? Thx!
- can you post the slides in chat after?
  Can you post the highlights in chat after?
  
  Someone who gives a presentation like this is incapable of summarizing - you will be getting the full presentation.
  
  Select all.
  Copy.
  Open ChatGPT.
  "Please sum up the following in a tweet: "
  Paste.
  Submit.
- Oh thats fine. We'll have a make up presentation on thursday, i'll schedule you for that one.

It’s even more fun when your manager makes you do a presentation. And he schedules it at 10pm, so that all the people 12 timezones away can attend at their “morning time.”
But they don’t even bother to join the zoom. The only people attending are also in your timezone up way later than they want to be. And he’s like “it’s ok, we’ll record it for them.” Like wtf.
And then they go and do stupidass incorrect shit anyway, whether they watched the recording or not.
- stupidass incorrect shit
  like scheduling a meeting at 10pm
- If you seriously wanted to communicate something, you wouldn't do a presentation.

I'll never forget the one professor who put up a side of code... And had no idea what the class was about. We spent most of the class reading together with him to try to figure out what the lesson was supposed to be about
Apparently the guy was one of those crazy low-level guys who can do things I don't understand but build on top of. Guy just constantly looked bewildered by reality, he belonged in the code world
- So what was the lesson supposed to be about?
  
  "sometimes it's okay to skip class"
  
  Semaphores. It was obviously C++ code with a bunch of threads, but as it was a standalone C++ program it wasn't really clear why it was lol

Here is my opinion: Slide should have images, diagrams or charts to illustrate what I say, almost never any text. What I say is written in advance in the notes of the presentation that is only visible to me while presenting, but will be readable by anyone who look at the file afterwards. I prepare the duration and delivery of the speech at least three times in full before presenting.
- This person points that power

Death by a hundred slides.
- This is the waterpark I want to go to this summer.
  
  death by a hundred slides water park you say?

Have you ever been to an office meeting that turned out to be a CEO circlejerk that dragged on for hours?
But a friend of mine went to the grandaddy of them all, something about state politics, some ambitious asshole making a power play and filibustering for an entire day, he had come prepared specifically to wear everyone down, I think he was trying to approve a new set of rules and conditions that benefitted his position, something along those lines.
- CEO of our company does one every single Friday at lunch over zoom. Luckily I have never attended. But my boss does has to eat his lunch while listening to CEO talk about all the ways they doing great when we aren't.
  
  I've had a CEO like that. I call it the sunshine and smoke up your ass meeting.
  
  Friday lunch meeting over zoom 💀
- If somebody did that, I'd disapprove of those rules out of pure spite.

Even if I'm only presenting a handful of slides I'll slap some blank ones on the end just to make everyone sweat over "Slide 1 of 83". Everyone is pretty darn quiet and glad to help speed things along most of the time.
- That's genius!
  
  No, I think it is cruel and unusual punishment.
- Do you give presentations to people on whom this works more than once?
  
  Ya got to mix it up, sometimes you really do have an 83 page slide deck.

People who aren't good at presentation making think that they are supposed to convey absolutely everything they are saying and be crammed full of information. I was doing a group presentation sometime ago where my group members insisted I put paragraphs of info in my slides and were worried we would fail for not enough information. Even after explaining that they were meant to guide the audience in what I was going to say, they insisted that it was wrong

Also:
Presenter: Can we hold all questions to the end, please? Thank you!
The end obviously never arrives.
- It arrives, but by then there's no time for questions.
- Usually there aren´t any at the end. Perhaps only one or two people actually paid attention and they don´t want to put themselves in the spotlight.

My best presentation at university was during a small seminar. It was a 45min talk about 3 papers and how they relate to each other. I procrastinate a lot, so I didn't really do anything besides reading those papers until the day before my presentation. That day, a friend called for a spontaneous barbecue, so I had just an odd hour to actually prepare slides. I managed 8 slides in total, the rest I just impromptu recalled from memory. People liked it and it was the least effort I put in any talk I held at university.
- reading those papers
  Woah there Mr. Overachiever, you're making the rest of us look lazy...
- Honestly, that's the right way to do it if you really know your stuff.
  The slides are there as a visual aid or backdrop. The "presenter notes" is where all your bulleted items and prompts for recollection go.
  Also, and this is where a lot of people get it wrong, the slide deck is NOT a useful document for distribution. It is specific to both the subject matter and speaker; it's analogous to sheet music. A video of the presentation (e.g. TED) is far more useful as we're really talking about a performance. At worst, there should be "references" page in some appendix, with hyperlinks to actual media that folks can digest on their own time.
  
  what's a slide deck?
- The best presentations are about topics you know well enough to discuss at length, and aren't constrained by paragraphs of points you need to get through. And a presentation is the best way to explain a graph or diagram.

It really baffles me when people make presentations like this. It's such an easy thing to correct as well but it just keeps happening.
- I assume it's passive aggressive when they're forced to present instead of email.

I hate this. It's basically just a lecture with slides as the cue cards, which the audience can read for themselves.
It's like having subtitles in real life.
Ugh. Give me some data, graphs, or pictures of cats to look at for the slideshow or something. Something other than what you're saying. If you add nothing to what we're seeing, then.... I have eyes. I don't need you to read it for me.
PowerPoint, at least, has a notes section and a presenter view, so you can hook your computer up with the projector or TV or whatever as a second monitor and PowerPoint can be set up to use the TV/projector/whatever, as the slide show, and give you a presenter view on your screen which shows the current slide, and all your notes.
So if you can't get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at, and leave the cue cards notes in the notes section, so the audience doesn't have to stare at the exact words you're saying, as you're saying them, because I guarantee you that if you do, I'll be judging you on your spelling and grammar.
- I do like subtites almost everywhere, but hate these slides.
  Maybe I also want adjustable playback speed, fast forward and readable high contrast subtites in my real live playback.
- So if you can't get relevant pictures, at least put up something interesting to look at
  Got it. Filling my PowerPoint Deck with porn, and pictures of Battlemechs
  
  I approve of this.
- Yes. A good slide show contains a lot of visually pleasing elements that are easy to read and understand but they still hold a lot of information. Like graphs or statistics or just bulletin points with some keywords or single short paragraohs that tell how it is in a nutshell. Then the one who makes the presentation should tell the rest
  A good way would be to write an essay with all the information you need. Then you would strip just the most important main elements and add those to the slide show.
  That way I got the best grade from one course even though I submitted it late and lacked a lot of other tasks in the course. The teacher was actually impressed by how much information I packed in so simple powerpoint. I also had like 20 sources, did it all in on afternoon the day before deadline lol. Adhd is interesting. You procastinate something for weeks and then do multiple days work in one crunch. Medication would be neat but I live in a country where you can't get medication even if you smoke weed.
  Anyways. I don't know why I wrote all this. I should be programming
  
  Damn. Are you me? I'm not a programmer so I guess not.
  I was hounded by one of my HS teachers to put in a little more effort, constantly.
  I got annoyed by this and basically rage-wrote an essay that was due in the span of a few hours the night before it was due. Despite my lack of sources (I couldn't be bothered to look up the information), I still got an A on the paper. She stopped telling me to try harder. IDK if that's because she realized I didn't do poorly because I couldn't understand, because I clearly did, or she was just satisfied that she got me to do something and didn't bother pestering me about it, but regardless, I felt like I won.
  I never did that well on anything else in her class. I just couldn't be bothered.
  20+ years later, it turns out I have ADHD. So yeah. That explains a lot.
- It's pretty bad practice to just read what's on the slide. Presentations would be prepared in such a way, and known to a degree where the slides act as refreshers for the presenter with something visual to give context. There are specific cases where you can't get away from it, but those are incredibly specific and not very common. Like, safety meetings with specific things that need to be read verbatim to every employee, and even those still need something to break it up. I can't think of another example.

The comic strip sounds like someone made a plugin to export obsidian vaults to .pptx
- This comic strip sounds like a 20 year-old Dilbert comic with all the wit removed.
  
  Dilbert comics have wit?
  
  part one, How the Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind
  part two, How the Dilbert Guy Lost His Mind
- Check out pandoc

People who do this shouldn't be in management.
- As Dilbert laid out
  Even the most intelligent worker will become an idiot once they are put into management
  
  Being in management is surprisingly more difficult than it appears to be when you're not in management.
- Also, if you can't fucking type properly (ie touch type) you're not competent to manage others.
  
  There are non-labor people alive today who can't touch type?

Good old PowerPoint karaoke

How anyone even remotely thinks they should do this boggles my mind.
- I don’t think they think, to be honest.

In university I had a prof that used an overhead projector and a marker to slowly follow the lines drawn on the sheets.
I'd have given anything for a few PowerPoint slides.

Just send the powerpoint and an audiobook at this point and add a comments section
- Better yet, just send me a transcript, or just the PowerPoint. I don't need someone to read to me. I can read faster than they can talk.
  
  just the transcript please – PowerPoint is a horribly bloated file format if you’re doing nothing more than transmitting text …

Wow! What a quick reader!!

- IRL subtitles for deaf attendees feels like the only valid reason for this.
  
  Honestly, a deaf audience would overwhelmingly prefer to read the document themselves. Otherwise, you're just sitting there spending seconds reading the slide, then minutes of lip-flapping while they wait for the hearing world to catch up. For each slide.

You scheduled 15 min for this presentation and I have another meeting after this. So cliff notes only please.
- Just email me the script. I’ll have an LLM summarize it.

I'm more prone to making the slides be my notes, possibly with data-driven visual aids. 3-5 short bullet points per slide is usually reasonable. I don't actually give a lot of presentations these days, though.
- I take this to the extreme: my slides have little to no text, or even white space. Each slide is basically a collage for pointing at while I rant about the thing. I'm a mechanical engineer, so I also imitate the sounds the machine makes.
  
  My issue with this is that I'd like to be able to distribute the slide deck afterwards for people who can't attend. I've heard people advocate for keeping separate infosheets to accompany the presentation but I can't be bothered usually.
- I hate these kinds of slides because I'll come across them somewhere and be like "WHAT THE FUCK IS THE CONTEXT FOR THESE NUMBERS??? WHAT DOES THIS HALF-ASS DIAGRAM REPRESENT?" and the information I extract becomes less usable as a result.
  I often won't read PowerPoints in that style unless a recording of the presentation is available, otherwise I just pretend it doesn't exist and get my information elsewhere because certainty ain't optional mf.
  
  I think if you've chosen your bullet points well then the point should come across through them, but if you're looking for a higher level of detail then the slide deck is probably not gonna get you there regardless. It's standard practice to record this type of presentation, but if you're really wanting a deep dive, you probably want to see the supporting documents, not just an executive summary. I guess it depends on what kind of presentation we're talking about, too, because a presentation to push info up to management is pretty different from the type someone might give at a conference.

CDR time!
(except I've had CDRs that were scheduled for a full work week, 40 hours)
- What is this CDR you speak of? Like blank CDs?
  
  Canada's Drag Race? Corel DRaw? Climate Data Record? Carbon Dioxide Removal??
  Man, Carbon Dioxide Removal for a full week...
  
  Critical Design Review. In aerospace engineering, it happens when drawings and software are substantially complete, but before starting to cut metal. The goal is to provide some assurance that the design will actually comply with the system requirements.
  CDRs are usually presented as a single PowerPoint deck that can run to thousands of slides, with many presenters and dozens of review panel members.
- You had a 40-hour Colonoscopy Debris Removal procedure? Big ups to you!

One of my side projects at work is to record training presentations and I try to be so conscious about this--both trying to avoid the word salad slides, and also trying to make my lecture not just reading the slide word-for-word but actually explaining and expanding on the slide content (with my verbal lecture transcribed as a note in the slide and handed out for anybody who might be hard of hearing/doesn't want to sit through a 30-minute video)

Ugh, I always tell students to avoid this.
That said it reminds me of Larry David on Conan podcast of how he got out of a movie test screening. "I've got one question and then I've gotta go...".
Ah, treasures, both of them.
- I remember back in high school my teachers would always warn students for doing presentations like that, yet all of them did exactly the same thing. And it was even worse in university, when we had to listen to 2 hours presentation read word by word with monotone voice.
  
  Ugh the monotone voice is the worst. A colleague of mine does that. If you are making a presentation and you sound bored all the way through, guess how your audience is going to feel?
  
  Yup! I even tell them to experiment a little because they get full points either way (my logic is, the social pressure alone is enough to get a good effort, and usually that's true lol).
  It's because they didn't trust their ability to remember stuff. But when I lecture, I'm often elaborating beyond the bulletpoints, engaging my audience with questions, making eye contact, etc, so it's not like I'm not setting a good example. I guess my university it's just too late to teach?

- Some people seem to get off on taking longer than necessary

Rather than simply give you a piece of text to read, they do it like this so that you can't scan it to figure out what is actually important and focus on that. Every moment and detail must be indulged to the full.
Proper dickhead move.

I always feel obligated to reword so it doesn't seem like I'm reading off the slide. But then people are reading the slide and listening at the same time and I'm not sure it's better.
- If the slide has all the information, then it's a poor slide deck.
  The slides are supposed to be an outline. The rule of thumb is max seven lines and max seven words per line.
  Here's a couple examples.
  Good slide:
  Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
  Industry trends
  Low demand for new products
  Strong demand for XYZ
  Also good slide, depending on who you're presenting to:
  Revenue: -10% vs Estimate
  Industry: -3%
  New products: -30%
  XYZ: +4%
  Bad slide:
  Revenue is 10% below estimate
  Industry has seen a 3% drop in sales
  New products ABC and MNO have had a 30% lower demand than we expected
  Product XYZ has higher demand than anticipated with sales 4% higher than estimate
  All the extra information on the bad slide can be delivered by the presenter. It's not necessary on the slide. The slide is for people to glance at to assist them during and after the presentation and to help them anchor themselves in the discussion.
  
  I like your examples, you really capture how the definition of a "good" slide is context and audience dependent, and yet despite this, a "bad" slide is something that can be understood fairly objectively.
- Each slide should have a max of 4 dot points, with each dot point roughly representing one spoken paragraph. Each dot point should have only the 3-4 most important words next to it. Speak the rest, but imagine that the dot point is what you want them to remember.
  For example
  Slide says:
  Sales up 15%
  What you say:
  Due to the added bump from Christmas sales, we moved an additional 2500 units this quarter, which is about 15% of our year to date revenue. This is bigger than our Christmas sales last year, by about 7%. We think the increase is due to our new SKUs.
  [Click, next dot point appears]
  It's better to have lots of slides with less info per slide.
  If you have a small number of slides but they are too dense, the audience will read it in a couple of seconds then get bored, and will stop paying attention while waiting for you to finish reading.
- Just...don't then? If you have no further info than what's in the slide, why are you up there talking? Just send an email.

Lets hope they forgot to run spellcheck