PowerPoint Debate #3

The first article is by Garr Reynolds and is titled "The Sound of One Room Napping". His first point is conference organizers often try to create an average PowerPoint and risk having a bad presentation that is different than most. He also talks about how these PowerPoints are typical and are not enough to make an impact because facts presented in bullet points are not enough to make that desired impact. Another bad thing most people do when using PowerPoint is having "slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts [which] makes for bad visuals and bad documentation."

The second article is by Cliff Atkinson and is titled "A Broken Powerpoint Culture". Atkinson first talks about how a PowerPoint may may have contributed to the space shuttle Coumbia's crash. He also syas that teachers are finding that instead of PowerPoint keeping interest in the classroom i tinstead puts students to sleep and companies are finding that PowerPoint is hindering them with finance presentations. If PowerPoint is used badly it can lead to "lost productivity, diminished creativity and evaporating intellectual assets."

The last article is also written by Cliff Atkinson and is titled "Bullet Points Kill (Effective Communication)". He starts with a really good point that bullet points effectively condense lots of information but in a PowerPoint the slides should be a visual aid not condensed information. He says that in a Microsoft Word Document you use portrait orientation which is good for putting lots of information in easy to read columns. However PowerPoint is in landscape orientation which like a TV is useful for pictures and visual objects. Bullet points do not make PowerPoint easier to understand it makes it harder to absorb.