Charles on… anything that comes along

I’ve been browsing a fair few sites about presentations lately because it’s clearly open season on Bill Gates and his dire, dire, dire presentation to introduce Windows Live earlier this month.

The ur-photo seems to be the one by Niall Kennedy, showing Gates stood in front of a slide that seems to be an explanation of how hurricanes form when there’s a big 01010101111 storm going on and your computers are getting old. This, it’s generally agreed, is comprehensively awful, because it lacks focus, is cluttered, and has no message. Yet this is the point in the presentation when Gates is supposed to be telling everyone what the whole shebang is about.

Reading the posts at Presentation Zen: Bill Gates and visual complexity, Erikso’s How to avoid making boring presentations and How to present Microsoft-style I realised that the real weakness was that Gates had fallen into the trap of using bullet points. He’d become a victim of his own software. The irony could only be greater if he unwittingly unleashed a Trojan on the company network by using an internet cafe PC.

The point is, bullet points are easy to program - and to write slides from. (You work down the list going “This.. that… the other.. great, end of slide”) And they completely fail to get their message across.

As I said about my day chairing an IEE conference, the most effective, and most admired presentation came from someone who didn’t use Powerpoint (it was actually lots of Flash slides strung together).

As I was reading the posts above, I was wondering “Why are bullet points so bad?” And then it struck me: they reduce everything to the same value. (That’s the point made in “How to avoid..”, along with the remedy.) “We have become No.1 in the world” and “We have a new sales manager”, when put into a single slide of bullet points, fails to distinguish between the relative importance of those two items.

But the trouble is that Powerpoint is seductive. It offers bullet points because it was easy for the people who wrote PPT to do that. They weren’t really into the finer aesthetics of multiple presentations. They just wanted something out the door, and the original form of PPT was developed by a company called Forethought, for the Mac, as it happens, between 1984 and 1987 (then Microsoft bought it). And you remember what hummin’ machines they had back then. A bullet point was about all you’d get if you were nice.

If Powerpoint really came with a helpful assistant, then it would start saying “You seem to have six elements on this slide. Are you sure that isn’t too many?” But instead you’ll get dragged down the bullet-point alley.

Which reminds me - I’ll have to go and edit all my presentations now. But as I said to the people who were presenting at the IEE, the audience has come to hear you speak, not to read your slides. Bear that in mind and you won’t go wrong. I’ll live in the faint hope that PR people reading this will pass it on to their clients, but I’m not expecting any Zen presentations in a hurry.

BTW please, no comments about “With Apple’s Keynote..” You can still bullet yourself to death with that too. (Interestingly I can’t recall an Apple person presentation where they’ve used them. Possibly they have some sort of sikrit training school where those tempted to use them are slapped on the hands with split bamboo canes.)

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• For want of Part Number 09330-4945-NAIL (29 June 2005; score: 81.3%)
• Two links just to prove that technology isn't good or bad... (11 July 2005; score: 53.94%)
• Where should you start if you want to read blogs? Here. (And how should you give presentations?) (1 August 2006; score: 51.09%)

• Simon Willison: Social engineering and Orange
  

  I had a call on my mobile earlier today from a lady claiming to be from Orange (my phone service provider) who told me that my contract was about to expire. She asked me for my password.

  Alarm bells instantly went off in my head, so I told her (truthfully as it happens) that I didn’t know my password. Then she asked for my postcode instead.

  At this point I was pretty sure this was a social engineering attack, so I started to quiz her about why she needed the information. She said it was for a “security check”. I told her I was uncomfortable giving out information like this to a cold caller over the phone and she said it was nothing to worry about because it was all covered by “the data protection act”.

  A very weird experience for Simon Willison being phoned *by Orange*. And it could very easily be a con - the call came from a “mobile” number..

• Paris Hilton doesn’t change facial expressions
  An animated GIF of many photocalls with the DIY porn video heiress at the centre. Weird but true. Viewing may cause epilepsy, or regurgitation, or just slack-jawed amazement. No, you have to look at the web page. Work-safe, but turn the volume down first.

These posts might be related (the database thinks..):
• The dramatic news from the Apple Expo: Phil Schiller is *funny*! (31 August 2004; score: 41.33%)
• Walt Disney's mind. What was it like, exactly? (8 January 2008; score: 28.53%)
• Mac mini: my review at The Independent (9 February 2005; score: 27.5%)