Gadgetory

if you've ever worked an office job you've probably experienced all the typical trappings of being a corporate wage slave sitting for eight hours at a cubicle uncomfortable lunches with irritating co-workers and useless meetings which of course feature a PowerPoint presentation indeed research has shown that most workplace meetings do very little to increase productivity and just see in the first slide of a poorly executed PowerPoint intensifies this particularly mundane form of dread but despite the fact that most nine-to-five workers agree that powerpoints kind of suck as a tool to convey information we just keep right on using them what gives what's the deal well it helps to know what the point of PowerPoint originally was before we're all looking at bullet points on digital projectors workplaces had to use old fashioned contraptions such as vacation photo style slides projectors which you probably remember from high school or chalkboards but despite the fact that making presentations for these devices was time consuming hundreds of millions of presentation slides are being created every year and even though software and equipment that could show PowerPoint like presentations were around before the 1980s they were very expensive however once the personal computers started becoming widespread software developers quickly figured out that using them to show visual aids in the workplace made both giving and creating presentations much quicker and easier and since people were already used to the slides presentation paradigm programmers already had an idea for what presentation program should look like so lots of presentation programs came out for the PC in the 1980s with PowerPoint hitting the scene in 1987 and while this did make it much easier for workers at all levels to share thoughts with colleagues the problem was that no one really knew how to use it I mean think about the options most people are familiar with when creating a PowerPoint you can choose a fancy-looking background embed animations to your heart's content or even throw in some word art but while all this stuff can be flashy it often doesn't do a great job conveying information yet presentation programs tend to emphasize these bells and whistles not what's going to get the point across most effectively and even if you skip these options there are user errors too like cramming way too much information onto one slide I know we've all done it well you've probably seen this any given or meaning or college lecture this exact problem was actually implicated in the space shuttle Columbia disaster back in 2003 you see a presentation for NASA actually contain information about the defect that caused the shuttle to ultimately explode but it was buried far down on a slide which was mostly a wall of text that actually started out on a positive note meaning no one paid much attention to it but this example highlights not only that PowerPoint slides often contain too much or too little information to be helpful but that has also been roundly criticized for making people too passive with how they learn or absorb new concepts I mean it's almost as if a linear presentation where slides come out one after the other is too straightforward instead of getting viewers to engage with the material the software is fundamental paradigm seems to reward passive learning as a result of the audience being too distracted by a shoddily made slideshow while missing more important information coming from the speaker some critics have even gone as far to say that it makes people less curious and if you've ever sat through a confusing PowerPoint and you're 8 a.m. lecture that your professor put basically no thought into you might tend to agree but is there a brighter future ahead for the program we all love to hate while both PowerPoint and its rivals are incorporating features that attempt to make presentations less linear such as zoom features that allow the presenter to access different pieces of information and make the experience less predictable and torpor inducing without breaking flow important in this age of Instagram adult attention spans regardless it might be worthwhile for us all to just learn how to use PowerPoint correctly a good presentation should be a useful learning aid even after you've wrapped things up and have snuck out to an expense account lunch so make your slides informative without cramming so much stuff on to them that no one can read them use interesting visuals that help your audience understand instead of pointless clipart and stock photos of business people and don't just read off the slides for venom in my day we used to call that given a speech and speaking of powerpoints in business fresh books fresh books the small business accounting software custom-built for how you want to work the simple way to be more productive organized and to get paid quickly create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 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