(+) We Have Met the Enemy and He is PowerPoint

The following is a Plus Edition article written by and copyright by Dick Eastman.

General Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy, but looked more like a bowl of spaghetti.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked. You can see the slide McChrystal referred to in this article; click on the image to see a larger, but equally confusing, version. The amount of time expended on PowerPoint, the Microsoft presentation program of computer-generated charts, graphs, and bullet points, has made it a running joke in the Pentagon and even in Iraq and Afghanistan.

You can read more about PowerPoint in Iraq and Afghanistan in a New York Times article by Elisabeth Bumiller at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html

I sometimes feel the same way when at genealogy conferences. Presenter after presenter steps to the podium, fires up a computer and projector, and proceeds to display PowerPoint slides. Some of the presentations are very well done, but many of them are not.

I have seen presentation after presentation where the speaker simply crams the PowerPoint slides full of text, often in a very small font that is not readable by anyone beyond the second row. Here's a word to speakers: Do your audience a favor! Read a PowerPoint tutorial or two! There are dozens of such tutorials on the web, starting at http://tinyurl.com/289odk4.

Then again, why use PowerPoint? Or, even a better question, why do we emulate old-fashioned overhead transparencies, or "slides," anyway? Certainly we don't need $2,000 worth of hardware and software to emulate old-fashioned, 35-cent transparencies!

NOTE: You can find a number of other presentation programs, such as OpenOffice Impress, Google Presentations (part of Google Docs), Zoho Show, ThinkFree, Keynote (a Macintosh presentation program), and others. However, all of these are more or less clones of PowerPoint; all of them create "electronic slide shows" and little else.

There must be a better way to present information to an audience. Do we really need slides?

In fact, there is a better way, or at least a different way. Last week, I made a presentation to an audience at the annual convention of the National Genealogical Society. I projected accompanying information onto the screen in the conference room. I didn't use PowerPoint or any of the other products mentioned. In fact, I didn't even present "electronic slides." Instead, I used a free, slideless product that provides an interesting alternative to "electronic slides." You can even see my presentation below or else go to  http://www.eogn.com/handouts/backups

Oh My Goodness – Where’s My Data?

You won't hear my voice, but you will see the information that was projected onto the large screen in front of this audience. You will note that this presentation is slideless.

You can either display my presentation in a browser window or click on MORE and then on FULLSCREEN to see it in a full screen display as I did at the conference. The presentation can be run directly from a web browser while online. In addition, as the creator of this presentation, I also have the option of downloading it to my laptop computer and running it from a hard drive. When presenting, I used a remote "clicker" to advance from one sli... uh, screen to the next. You can also use a mouse or the keyboard to advance from screen to screen when displaying it in your web browser.

Was my choice of a presentation tool better than PowerPoint? I don't think so. "Better" is a subjective word, and I won't debate the merits of this software. In fact, the software tool that I used is considerably simpler than PowerPoint and has fewer "bells and whistles." In my mind, it is not a full-featured PowerPoint replacement.

However, I will point out that the software tool I used was DIFFERENT from what most other presenters used, and "different" was a good thing, in my opinion. The audience noticed that it was different and, therefore, I believe they paid closer attention than they would have had I used boring old PowerPoint slides. It grabbed their attention. In this case, I believe that using a "different" tool got my messages across better than using PowerPoint.

Best of all, the tool I used is available free of charge although a paid, commercial version is also available that offers additional capabilities.

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