The markings are unmistakable: plain white headlines set in 40-point Helvetica; audience-friendly bullet points; a media-blue background with a gradient fade. Clip art may be in evidence. Welcome to a presentation enhanced by Microsoft PowerPoint.
It's a familiar experience for conference-goers and meeting slaves the world over. The de facto standard for presentation software is bundled with Office 97, installed on 45 million desktops worldwide. But some fear the program's popularity has unintentionally created a scourge of PowerPoint amateurs.
"It's not so much the software that's the problem," said Jacci Howard Bear, a presentation expert with The Mining Company Web index. "It's the way people depend on all those bells and whistles that come with the software to try to shore up a weak presentation."
No doubt about it, said Tad Simons, "There are a lot of anti-PowerPoint people out there."
The editor of Presentations magazine, Simons said the backlash, if there is one, is really directed at poor or inappropriate use of the program. "What most people out there experience is bad PowerPoint."
PowerPoint bashing surfaced Monday on the mailing list of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Engineers balked at the number of PowerPoint slide shows at a weekend meeting in Orlando, Florida.
One poster sniffed at "silly borders and corporate logos." Another suggested PowerPoint presentations "lull people to sleep." Others argued that the software used to deliver them was not the problem but the very fact that presentations were made at all.
"The face-to-face meetings of the IETF have a very special purpose -- high-bandwidth interaction," said participant Pete Resnick. "Doing presentations is just a lousy use of that time."
"The real issue is how we keep IETF discussion focused on technical issues, rather than wasting time on tutorial material for newcomers," said IBM Internet division consultant Brian Carpenter.
A Microsoft spokesman said that PowerPoint 2000, the next version of the product, will include more features -- such as so-called wizards -- designed to make PowerPoint easier and more accessible.
"We are trying to make PowerPoint a much more intuitive product," said John Duncan, product manager for Microsoft Office. "We are in the business of giving people easy-to-use tools. It is up to the users in terms of how they want to use them."
The PowerPoint backlash among techies appears to have begun in earnest last year when Sun CEO Scott McNealy purged his company's PowerPoint files.
"We had 12.9 gigabytes of PowerPoint slides on our network," McNealy told the San Jose Mercury News. "We've had three unbelievable record-breaking fiscal quarters since we banned PowerPoint."
Sun did not return phone calls from Wired News to ask about the company's current PowerPoint policy.
The simple fact is that many developers have a natural aversion to PowerPoint. They favor simple, pure binary code. When IETF engineers gather to talk shop, the natural tendency to gussy up technical information only soaks up time and gets in the way of efficient information exchange.
"The IETF meetings are about negotiation and discussion of Internet draft documents that are going to become standards," Resnick said. "People are shouting out a problem and figuring out what the heck is going on."
In such environments, multicolored slides only get in the way.
Simons said the academic and scientific communities are rife with PowerPoint bashing.
To engineers, a graphic on a screen is pointless and detracts from the purity of science. Scientists tend to prefer "plain white paper," Simons said.
So is all the backlash PowerPoint's fault? No, Simons said. "The fact remains that a really well-done PowerPoint presentation that is tailored specifically to a certain message can get their point across better.
"If I'm in an audience and a guy gets disgusted, it's obviously getting in the way," Simons said. "But there are other people for whom that visual support carries the message."
PowerPoint is just a tool, and like so many readily available tools, Simon said,
- "a lot of people
- really don't know
- how to use it very well."
