![]() The other extreme is the infamous set of slides that underpinned the decision making surrounding the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. His efforts didn’t actually produce the final product that we see in the documentary, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. For years, Al Gore had been working on his slideshow, constantly updating and refining its sequence. There is no doubt that the storytelling and visuals used in the ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ tell a compelling story of climate change. On one hand, Al Gore won a Nobel Peace prize for his slideshow to end all slideshows, later made into the award winning documentary of the same name, “An Inconvenient Truth.” There are stories of glory and stories of disaster when it comes to PowerPoint use. Estimates suggest that PowerPoint is currently installed on 250 million computers across the globe, and is being used to generate approximately 30 million presentations per day, not counting the use of many other slideshow software packages, such as Apple Keynote, that comes with any Mac operating system. First, let’s accept that PowerPoint is an incredibly succesful software program, at least in terms of market penetration. Let’s start with some basic PowerPoint facts. I suggest PowerPoint is seductive because it makes these slideshows make it easy to confuse the sophistication of the medium with the sophistication of the message. All of this, even if the actual content has little substance. I propose that PowerPoint’s superpower is quickly making things look superficially good, make content look dense with meaning and making slides look official and busy. To make some sense of this, I think we need to work backwards from what PowerPoint presentations do, both psychologically and culturally. Understanding why PowerPoint is so seductive, may give us some sense of what we can do instead. ![]() ![]() Though it can’t be the sole cause, we’ll see that post-accident investigators place some blame for the terrible disaster of the Space Shuttle Columbia on the decision making impacts of badly made PowerPoint slides. The question of PowerPoint’s seductive power matters. But if PowerPoint is so bad, why do we find it so easy to slip back into our difficult relationship with PowerPoint? Put another way, why is PowerPoint so seductive to use? For many forms of communication and documentation, PowerPoint is often our first port-of-call. PowerPoint seems to be consistently loathed in culture, but PowerPoint slides are so easy to create that we end up making millions of them a day. Waiting for us to open up our computers, pull up PowerPoint and rapidly put together a bevy of slides, charts and, of course, the much derided bullet point.
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