Tag: powerpoint

The Best News For PowerPoint Users Since Its Creation

From this link, Jeff Bezos says it is the end of PowerPoint.

To be honest, I don’t really give a flying fig or a rats rump about either Bezos or his product, but PowerPoint has always been a crutch that rarely connects emotionally with the audience.  Of all the tools we’ve used, it must rank lowest on the rung of real importance when compared with the time wasted compared to other tools.

The author explains it:

In no way am I advocating that you ditch PowerPoint. I am recommending that you ditch PowerPoint as we know it—dull, wordy, and overloaded with bullet points. Image-rich presentations work effectively because pictures appeal to the right hemisphere of the brain—the emotional side. You can have great ideas backed up by data and logic, but if you don’t connect with people emotionally, it doesn’t matter.

START FROM THE BEGINNING

Back in the dark ages, companies used overhead projectors and presented “foils”.  This was the forerunner to PowerPoint only you had to manually change them.  Given the projector fails I’ve seen, it at least was more reliable, albeit archaic.

It was a hoot to watch people try to figure out how to configure a projector or a multi-media room to get their PC to connect.  Entire sessions have had to be conducted without PowerPoint due to operator or machine error.  For the most part, they were likely more productive meetings.

THE DEARTH OF OUR EXISTENCE BEGINS AND CREATES MANY JOBS

The jobs being created were PowerPoint slide creators.  A pretty easy job if you were ahead of the curve.  The only caveat was unrealistic executives who thought they were presenting to the UN. One VP of Social Business Evangelism at my last company used to put us through 20 changes minimum, often commenting that it was not what she wanted.  When asked what it was, the comment was usually, “I don’t know what I want, just go fix it and bring me back what I want”.  On a humorous note, one time we brought back version one as a ruse and she commented now that is what I really wanted to begin with, why didn’t you bring me this to start with?  Go figure.

THE HUMAN PROBLEM

A big problem with PowerPoint is that it rarely could tell the story on its own, and that it depends on the human presenting it.  My favorite observation during analyst briefings was the game that they played to try to get the executives off their slides and onto a tangent.  It was my job to get them to stay on topic, but for fun I let it stray…even nodding to the analyst to let them know I knew what the game was.

Also, everyone goes to the page count to see the torture they will be put through.  That in itself is an indicator of its usefulness.  At one meeting, there were 137 charts by the GM of our group.  There was a collective groan by all, and a cheer when it got interrupted by a fire drill.  Hardly anyone returned for the finish.

So basically as a tool it is deficient and a serious time suck.  It also is held up as the idol of meeting communications similar to how executives fret over a press release as if it was what anybody actually read or re-quoted.  I’ve got news for you guys, we could actually do without both.

A GENERATION OF SLACKERS

What also chaffed my behind was that those held up as PowerPoint experts created a job niche that in reality was a re-cycle exercise.  Once you knew the executive, you could re-use their charts with minor changes and act like it was some big production….then kick back and act like it was a Renoir.

IF YOU HADN’T NOTICED…..

I loathe PowerPoint.  I have been working with office suites since the introduction of Visicalc.  I’ve always been able to master them down to a coding level, but I rank PowerPoint at the bottom of my list of usefulness.  Worse than this were knock-offs like Symphony that even the company that created it wouldn’t use it except for the division responsible for it.

I’ve always been far more engaged by a speaker who could tell a story in words and be effective.  Ahead of that is a genuine discussion without the high school drama of charts. You always have to send documentation after a meeting anyway, so dispensing with this for an engagement tool always mirrored the way people have interacted over the years.  In reality, it wasn’t the next best thing.

Is Excel the Bane of Our Existance?

Dilbert.com

Microsoft office is mine.

Before I get to Excel, let me say how much of a time waster PowerPoint is. The executives I work with obsess over the charts ad nauseum only to have the analysts tear them apart. Some of our execs can only think in .ppt which in itself is a disease.

Now to excel.

It has many flaws, especially in very complicated or linked spreadsheets. Unfortunately, many company’s run their business off of it and I wonder how many have made fatal mistakes?

Gartner of all companies sums it up:

Excel hell is not an evil Microsoft plot, or some sort of madness that descends upon otherwise sane managers and knowledge workers when they open the PC.  It is the fault of enterprise software failing to provide an alternative.

Most of the users who use your software for a significant part of their day do so because they have to if they want to get paid: accounts payable experts, call centre agents, payroll administrators and returns clerks, for instance. They can’t get up in the morning and say, “Today, I’ll use Lawson or Oracle, because I didn’t really like the feel of the SAP application I used to process those invoices yesterday.”  Admin users are in an arranged marriage. On some rare occasions, love blossoms, especially in the payroll department. Most of the time though, they seethe with quiet loathing.

Most employees in an organization are voluntary users for the vast majority of processes. They don’t have to log onto the employee skills dashboard every week to check if their team is on track for their development goals. If once a year they log on to the HR application, complete the appraisals as fast as they can, and get out of there, they will. Many top sales people spend as little time as they possibility can in CRM systems. Many poor salespeople spend considerable time logged onto CRM applications.

Now you can draw up long valid lists of reasons why enterprise applications are better for business processes than Excel (an ideal use for Excel). You can deliver fire and brimstone warnings about the damnation that is Excel hell (use Facebook to attract others to your cause).

Gary Barnett of Bathwick makes an even stronger case

Excel-madness

We’ve all seen this – that faintly crazed look in a colleague’s eyes when they’re challenged on a point of data – You can see that they just want to shout “The number is 54.56% because the @$%$ spreadsheet says so!”. Who the hell are you to challenge the contents of cell 4987MP, What sort of messed up anarchist would challenge 4987MP?

If you look closer – into that person’s eyes – you will see their hidden desire to stab you in yours with their biro.

Question this number at your perilQuestion this number at your peril

And let’s face it – who the hell are you to challenge  this – Did you spend 110 hours over the last 7 days rushing to produce this analysis for the meeting? Did you grapple with the two dozen spreadsheets that have been linked and interlinked in order to get to this number?

This number is the truth, because the spreadsheet (which as the dweebs amongst you will have noted is OpenOffice Calc) says it is.

As John Mihalec tweeted to me in response to my tweet about writing this blog:

@thinkovation Because 2 + 2 is so obviously 4 that it lulls us into complacency re whether either 2 is even 2 at all.

Many key decisions (many of which have a profound effect on our lives) are made on the basis of data that is simply garbage

Computer Science 101 taught us “Garbage in, Garbage out” – and we’ve been collecting, polishing and re-packaging garbage ever since. But this stuff is different – Our retirement funds, savings, economic stability, even our understanding of climate change all depend on knowing the right things.

The financial crisis was caused by many many things – and I’m not discounting either “greed” or “stupidity” as major causal factors – but the absolutely tippy-top of the list cause of the crisis was the failure of pretty much everyone (except Warren Buffet and a small number of others) to appreciate the level of risk that was associated with all of the various financial instruments that were flying about.

The reason for that failure to understand the true level of risk lies in the way in which both the instruments themselves, and the tools people used to assess their risk, wrapped and wrapped the risk under layers and layers of complexity – It was a giant game of pass the parcel – with the outer wrappings  so numerous and shiny and neat,that the smell from the final parcel of dog do0-do0 was completely overlooked.

If you allow something to become en-mired in many layers of obfuscation, you have to accept that the “system” you create is going to become increasingly chaotic. If you can’t track the journey taken by a simple number through the myriad sections, tabs and linked files – You have to be prepared to factor in “chaos”.

The image below is hypothetical – but it’s not an exaggeration – there really are figures sloshing around that are derived from inter-linked hierarchies of spreadsheets that are a lot more complex than this one.

A simplified map of the spreadsheets involved in an analysisA simplified map of the spreadsheets involved in an analysis

Take this image as an example. Item A is the output spreadsheet – which combines the results from B, C and D – which each in turn depend on one or more “child” spreadsheets. Here are some boring questions one might ask –

  • How long ago was the data in J refreshed?
  • Has anyone audited the assumptions made in H?
  • Is there anyone in the organisation who could explain to an Actuary how come the number is 54.56%?

If you can’t provide sensible answers to these questions – then, it’s time to take your life in your hands and tell your excel-crazed, sleep deprived colleague that they may as well have arrived at that number using a lab-rat and a roulette wheel.

Incidentally – someone has trained rats to trade, and reckons his rodents can do at least as well as the majority of the top fund managers – check it out here

To sum it up, they are good tools for simple applications, but they have done more to ruin productivity and correctness than most other softwared.

Disclaimer: I hate powerpoint presentations more than a root canal.  It is time for a new paradigm of software that works better and stinks less.