2010 1099-g State Of Illinois

Abuse PowerPoint and caricatured reality

The debate on the use and abuse of PowerPoint is in the spotlight. A recent article in The New York Times about how Power Point hinders U.S. military operations him again recalled. The article has been mentioned briefly and forcefully by Seth Godin in his post "PowerPoint Makes us stupid" - these bullets can kill, and a more extensive and descriptive blog Alt1040 About the (ab) use of PowerPoint: reduced vision in a complex world .

The idea of \u200b\u200bturning the article is that PowerPoint has created a culture of synthesis, to reduce the information to a minimum, a handful of points, that the discussion of issues, critical thinking and decision- decision has been impoverished by not looking at reality as a whole with all its complegidad. As the general HRMcMaster [PowerPoint] is dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. "

In my view, the problem lies in two vices that we have acquired to use PowerPoint. The first is that when we use it as a paper support, we intend to play slide summarized the speaker's speech. Attendees are so tempted to concentrate on reading the slides ignoring the speaker and his speech is where the nuances. A good presentation should support the speech, but never stealing role.

The second and pernicious habit is to use PowerPoint presentations and deliverables, as independent documents. And in this case two things can happen. Or that the slides are so simple that only show synthetic ideas, which we lose sight the issue in all its magnitude. Or seeking to describe in detail the issue at emulating a text document. And for this are much better text editors, both in regard to the productivity of the author, as in the final presentation of the document. Descraciadamente 2.0 tools as popular as SlideShare and the like, encourage the use of PowerPoint, thus spreading the acquisition of that bad habit.

These services are widespread even in sectors such as consulting, which are particularly dangerous because they penalize one of the core competencies of the consultant: the ability to transmit information and knowledge either in writing or orally.