Anti-PowerPoint Party vows end to death by slides Everybody complains about PowerPoint presentations. But nobody does anything about them – until now. Meet Switzerland's Anti-PowerPoint Party, aka the APPP. "The APPP sees itself as the advocate of approximately 250 Million people worldwide, who, every month, are obliged to be present during boring presentations in companies, …
Essentially it is all down to the presenter (Re: my above comment, this guy is boring by the way.. he does what for a living?) and bad presenters will lean on powerpoint making the presentation worse. Then there's slide design. I recently interviewed for a pretty darned good graduate job (which I got) one of the other candidates gave a presentation with a red-blue gradient background, it was illegible... but I don't think he performed too strongly in any other aspects, presentations reflect the presenter.
Let's not forget Colonel Lawrence Sellin who spoke out against powerpoint briefings in the joint-watchamacallit thingy in Afghanida.
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/pages/Colonel-Lawrence-Sellin/155619744453235?sk=info
Working in print, design, & marketing company, we're CONSTANTLY getting '<insert expletive>' clients sending in PowerPoint files as "print ready setups".
We get business cards and all kinds of artwork supplied in PowerPoint, Word and even Excel (yea i shit you not, EXCEL)!
It gets REALLY tedious telling them that the images they've spent hours placing have been destroyed upon embedding them in the document and in order to get rid of the graininess in the print (for example), we'll have to get the 80MB+ of native images AND charge them to reset the document in something proper (usually InDesign – bash Adobe all you want but I can’t stand Quark & Corel is a joke).
You would think that given the fact that they've embedded the best part of 100MB of images and the resulting Word / PowerPoint file is 20-30MB they would realise that quality is going to suffer, but nooooooooo……...
We get these files supplied for spot colour lithographic print (when they can only produce RGB colours), full colour lithographic print (and they wonder why the colours change on CMYK conversion), and digital printing on Canon’s flagship digital press’s (well last gen IPC7000VP & IPC6000VP – retrofitted with the 7010 & 6010 upgrades - replacements due next year), expecting miracles. Publisher is the ONLY MS Office product capable of producing high quality print documents, and even then it has its own problems.
Don’t get me wrong, I actually like PowerPoint, but only when used properly, with clean, simple, uncluttered presentations, that take little time to compile.
If you need to do a job you should REALLY use the right tools. PowerPoint Is a good tool, not the best, but fairly easy to get to grips with, and once you’ve got the basics (resisting the shitty “multimedia” clipart), it can be a very quick path to effective on-screen layout.
P.S. IF you insist on using PowerPoint to layout documents intended for print MAKE SURE YOU CHANGE THE SLIDE SIZE TO MATCH YOUR INTENDED OUTPUT SIZE (A4 / A3 etc), BEFORE YOU START WORKING ON IT! ON-SCREEN SHOW 4:3 / 16:9 / 16:10 SLIDES DO NOT SCALE TO STANDARD PAPER SIZES PROPERLY!
Reading the article, their beef is mostly with "town hall" style meetings that happen regularly in big blue chip companies. Lecturers, teachers, students and people that have never worked for a big corporation can't really appreciate what these are, explaining some comments saying that the issue is with presenters, etc. (although a good presenter can at least brighten them up occasionally).
These things are often truly wrist slitting soul destroying, PowerPoint or not (I've even seen them done as stand-up meetings, I kid not) and even worse when they get done as "away days" (I.e you get a whole day of them).
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