What’s in the President’s Briefing Book Anyway?

Nancy, as a former U.S. Navy officer, I can attest that your brother-in-law was not kidding about PowerPoint. When I was the assistant to an academic department head at the Naval Academy, from 1994-1996, one of my main duties was to create PowerPoint slides for the many briefs we were called on to deliver–some of which were presented to members of Congress. On my last deployment on the staff of an amphibious battle group commander, in 1998, we briefed each multi-national amphibious exercise on PowerPoint the night before. I even recreated pictures of the beach approaches (using the application’s shapes functions the best I could) to represent features and layout of the “assault” beach. I often wondered what some of the foreign national military and political leaders thought about these briefs, when they were in the audience. As a result of the over-use and mis-use of this tool, I really appreciate your books and the work you do. Thank you for helping me to gain some distinctions on effectively communicating ideas.

Best post ever.

Nancy,

A frightening image after reading the NYT article and many of the comments on it…
WE ARE LIVING IN A WORLD OF DUMB ASSES!

Hellooo, there is no such thing as “dumb idiot power point presentations”, there are “dumb idiot presenters”.

Just imagine a CEO, after a transparencies overhead projected presentation conducted by an employee, telling the presenter that the presentation sucked, being answered:
“well, it is film and lumocolor pens fault!”.

Gonna hang myself in the nearest light post…

I don’t think it’s PowerPoint’s fault for bad presentations but it certainly doesn’t seem like a tool conducive to making good presentations. I’m a designer / production artist and I work mostly in the usual CS4 apps, Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, some others and PowerPoint when I really have to. The thing is I can’t stand PowerPoint. I understand the power of presentations and how useful they can be but coming from a heavy Illustrator and Photoshop background I don’t understand how people can stand working in this program. Do you do most of your illustrations and graphs outside of PowerPoint? How can you work with such crude tools – no layers, no precise transformation & alignment tools, and no key command controls. It seems to me these are crucial for making complex illustrations. Am I missing something? Do you just have to get used to the horrid interface?

The typical Microsoft interface makes me completely crazy. I recently took a stab again at brushing up my PowerPoint skills but I again got frustrated with it’s interface. I have to keep moving things out of the way to edit some other object and then move it back, placing it by hand again. I asked a PowerPoint expert that I farm out PowerPoint work to about how she deals with some of these issues, like when you have many layers and you need to change something underneath. She said she usually goes out and has a cigarette first. She also said she saves a working document, keeping layers on separate slides which she can edit and then rebuild the slide when needed. That sounds like something I used to do in the 80s when I was an illustrator for a text book company working in Illustrator 1.

To me the whole presentation idea seems great and when you see a really nice presentation like what Duarte does it’s very impressive and captivating. But PowerPoint itself just seems like such a completely lame and crude tool. Do you just have to get used to it’s crudeness. Is Keynote any better?

@ Peter, sorry but you seem a little confused. Where did you read (or heard) about any professional presentations designer using PowerPoint as a drawing tool?
I design multimedia presentations since 1988 and use PowerPoint since 1997 and never did…
If someone does, he or she may be needing urgent brain surgery…
PowerPoint or Keynote, even if with some interesting features, are presentation slideware, not drawing tools.

Sorry, maybe I wasn’t clear. I know that people use other tools for drawing but from what I’ve seen people also use the drawing tools within PowerPoint as well. One of Nancy Duarte’s sample slides from her book shows how to create shapes with lighting and shadow effects in PowerPoint (Traversing_Dimensions [slideology.com]). These are simple shapes but there’s a lot of them, and all overlapping and with different effects to create a 3D look, and done all in PowerPoint.

But even if you did draw these type of objects outside of PowerPoint my main frustration with PowerPoint is that there are no layers and precise transformation tools. From looking at well done presentations I see that slides are often made up of PowerPoint objects and objects drawn outside PowerPoint but they need to be all integrated – on top, or underneath, and/or lined up. And then this seems like hell when you have to make one small edit to an item underneath a bunch of stuff.

I’ve seen Illustrator evolve over the years since version 1. I remember when you could finally edit in the preview mode, when they added layers, etc. Even though PowerPoint seems to be such a popular program it seems to remain crude. They just add a couple of strange bells and whistles once in a while.

Lost in all the generals’ self-righteous indignation about the evils of PowerPoint was the fact that they certainly have the power to do something about the proliferation of bad presentations. They could limit the number of slides and ask the presenter to summarize his or her message in 30 seconds or less. It’s clear that the military uses PowerPoint as an information dump rather than an opportunity to, as Seth Godin puts it, take listeners on a “decision-making journey.” I posted on this article yesterday on http://tinyurl.com/2djvw4r.

We need to remember that a good craftsman never blames his tools!

Peter

As a former designer working on the book for the president during the Bush administration I disagree with the PPT slides comment. There was a team of designers translating content for the book. If there were PPT slides added addditionally, I was not aware of it. I now work as a consultant for a fed client and the use of powerpoint is in need of assistance so I do agree with the overall need. I am trying to make an impact and there are more like me. My biggest problem at the moment is getting the client to develop a message that is fit for Powerpoint. The client continually likes to put too much information on a slide. I do encourage handouts for important information but there is a resistance to printing due to efficiency standards. I will keep pushing though!

I have to agree with peter that PowerPoint is not a great tool for making visually effective presentations. I create and edit lots of PowerPoint documents and always use Keynote to do it. The ease of use from the more design oriented interface more than makes up for the extra time and effort it takes to export and make corrections after it’s converted to PowerPoint.

I am inclined to argue that PowerPoint is at fault, at least initially. It presents users with horrible text-centric designs from the get go. Keynote is only marginally better in that its backgrounds are less distracting and the typeface is more visually appealing.
But for the user who has been trained to create better presentations, at least Keynote allows them to do that efficiently!

@peter – if you are using PowerPoint 2007, there is a “layer” feature of sorts. It’s called the Selection Pane and it allows you to show/hide elements on the slide. This becomes helpful when you are working with multiple objects and don’t want to use the old “send to back” tricks of the past.

Also – you can certainly create some rather amazing graphics in PPT if you are willing to take the time. I’ll admit that most designers will be more comfortable/efficient in Photoshop or Illustrator, but I have seen our designers create some graphics in PPT that blow people away. The benefit is the ease of editing (color changes, etc.) and smaller file size (theoretically).

Of course, nothing beats starting your presentation the old fashioned way – with a piece of paper and a pen.

I should clarify one thing – the “blow people away” graphics I mentioned were used within PowerPoint – thus why they were created in PowerPoint.

After some thought, two things strike me about the graphic used to illustrate the original NYT article and about the overall process Nancy comments on:

1) The graphic: is this an example of diagram developed by the consultants to help them understand a complex idea? If so, the mistake was not the graphic per se, but not developing a new diagram(s) to help explain the newly-understood ideas to their audience. Understanding vs. explanation.

2) If this is true, then – as Nancy rightly points out – the mistake was that the consultants didn’t go through a second (or third or fourth) iteration before delivering this to their client. In software-speak, they released an alpha version (complete with bugs and undeveloped parts).

In both cases, this seems like (since I am speculating) a project execution and delivery breakdown, not necessarily a problem with PP itself (though I readily admit the “cognitive style” of PP does encourage lack-of-thinking).