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We spent the weekend on the road, and there was never a good time to write.

And so, as last week’s column was about how to seem more literate, it seemed only reasonable to move from writing to PowerPointing. Luckily enough, the column that follows, first published late in 2006, covers the ground quite nicely.

– Bob

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Question: Since people have been stupid as long as there have been people, why do so many of us blame PowerPoint? When someone writes stupid sentences, do we blame MS Word?

PowerPoint is no different from speaking — if someone’s point is foolish, either will make the fact more public. So the first rule of good PowerPointing is the same as the first rule of speech: First, think.

Many bytes have been expended providing other PowerPoint guidelines. Some have provided marvelous self-referential warnings — dull and poorly constructed presentations explaining how to avoid creating dull and poorly constructed presentations.

Most of the “rules” are, by the way, contextual. For example:

PowerPoint Rule: Never use anything smaller than a 16 point font. It’s terrific advice, when you’re building a presentation that will (a) be projected in a large room, (b) to an audience that has not received printed copies of the presentation, and (c) won’t have access to a version that can be scrutinized later on.

Let’s start over. PowerPoint and its competitors are more than packages for developing presentations that will be projected in a large room. They’re general-purpose communications tools. Presentation software and word processing software differ in one important respect: Presentation software enforces a discipline of telling a complete story on each page.

That, in fact, is the only hard-and-fast rule of using presentation software correctly: Make each page tell a story.

A few other thoughts and notions:

Respect the tool. Presentation packages provide sophisticated facilities for helping you achieve consistent formatting. Take advantage of them. Use the Title placeholder to contain slide titles, the built-in, automated slide numbering feature instead of manually placing slide numbers at the bottom of each slide, and tab stops or separate text boxes instead of the space bar for fine positioning. Among the advantages: When you change templates, your slides will require less clean-up.

Don’t use clip art to liven up slides. Inserting clip art of a detective with a magnifying glass onto a slide whose title is “A closer look,” is something less than highly original. It was hokey the first time and hasn’t improved since.

Do use illustrations to tell your story, instead of simple bulleted lists. A list of bullets is a fine way to present a handful of parallel ideas. A graphic gives you the opportunity to show their interrelationships as well.If, for example, your bullets present the sequence of seven steps you’ll follow to complete an assignment, place seven boxes on the screen, positioned diagonally from upper left to lower right. Connect them with arrows — right-angled ones that descend from the bottom mid-point of each box to the left-side mid-point of the next one. Label each box with one of the steps.

Have too much to say about each step for this format to work? Create a row of seven block arrows across the top of the slide and label those as the steps. Below each position a rectangle and put bullets in each to explain the specifics for each.

Use small fonts for fine points. Complex slides will sometimes require 10-point type. That’s okay, so long as you provide print-outs to your audience. They can read the big-fonted labels on the screen to keep track, and the fine-pointed details on the printed page.

Don’t just read your slides, except when you do. When a slide contains more than three bullets, say, “I want to focus your attention on a few points on this slide,” and then do so. If it contains a complex graphic, all of which matters, say, “This slide is complicated. Let me walk you through it.”

Sometimes, stop referring to your slides altogether and just talk to your audience. Your presentation is there to assist you, not to imprison you.

Use agenda slides. The first occurrence lets your audience know what to expect. Repeat it at transitions, bolding the upcoming topic. Doing so helps your audience keep track.

Never, ever apologize for your slides. If a slide contains a typographical error, your audience might find it mildly distracting. By apologizing you interrupt yourself, which is much more distracting.

Here’s what matters most: Excellent PowerPoint presentations are, before anything else, storytelling. Good presentations have a narrative flow. Each slide follows naturally from the one that precedes it and leads naturally to the next one.

It’s like any other form of communication. If you want to be effective, don’t just blurt — plan.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

 

What should we do when the experts change their minds?

Last week, KJR talked about NIST changing (or is it “updating”?) its recommendation regarding its longstanding advice to change passwords frequently.

The question of the hour is, does NIST changing its recommendation make it a more trustworthy source of expertise, or less?

The two obvious and most popular answers boil down to:

More worthwhile: I’d rather take advice from someone who’s constantly learning more about their field, than from someone who learned something once and decided that’s all they need to know.

Less worthwhile: Why should I rely on advice that’s constantly changing? I’d rather rely on positions that don’t change with the time of day, phase of the moon, and the sun’s position in the zodiac.

Before continuing down this path on the information security front, let’s explore a better-known subject of ongoing controversy — the role of dietary fat in personal health.

There’s been a lot written on all sides of this question, so much so that it’s easy to figure that with no medical consensus, what the hell, I’m in the mood for a cheeseburger!

Me, I take a different position: I’m in the mood for a cheeseburger! Isn’t that what pills are for?

No, say the skeptics. There’s published research showing that statins don’t provide much medical benefit and, for that matter, that saturated fats aren’t at all toxic.

As my pre-statin LDLs were way out of whack, I have a personal stake in this, and so here are my personal guidelines for making sense of personal health, information security, or pretty much any other highly technical subject:

Ignore the divisive. Divisive language is easy to spot. Phrases like “The x crowd,” with x = a position you disagree with (“The first amendment crowd,” or, adding 1, “The second amendment crowd” are easy examples.

This sort of ridicule might be fun (strike that — it is fun) but it isn’t illuminating. Quite the opposite, it’s one of the many ways of dividing the world into us and them, and defining the “right answer” as the one “we” endorse.

Fools vs the informed vs experts. Fools believe what’s convenient. The informed read widely. Experts read original sources.

Fools … perhaps a better designation would be “the easily fooled” … have made confirmation bias a lifestyle choice. Faced with two opposing points of view they’ll accept without question the one they find agreeable while nitpicking the opposing perspective to death.

Those of us who try to remain informed read widely. We choose sources without obvious and extreme biases; that go beyond quoting experts to explaining the evidence and logic they cite; and that provide links or citations to the original sources they drew on.

Especially, we deliberately counter our own confirmation biases by looking skeptically at any material that tells us what we want to believe.

Experts? They don’t form opinions from secondary sources. They read and evaluate the original works to understand their quality and reliability in detail.

There’s always an expert. Want to believe the earth is flat? There’s an “expert” out there with impressive credentials who will attest to it. Likewise the proposition that cigarettes are good for you, and, for that matter, that Wisconsin has jurisdiction over the moon on the grounds that the moon is made of cheese.

Just because someone is able to cite a lone expert is no reason to accept nonsense … see “confirmation bias,” above.

Preliminary studies are interesting, not definitive. For research purposes, statistical significance at the .05 level is sufficient for publication. But statistically, one in every 20 results significant at that level is due to random chance.

Desire to learn vs fondness for squirrels. Ignoring new ideas and information is a sign of ossification, not expertise. But being distracted by every squirrel — changing metaphors, jumping on every new bandwagon because it’s new and exciting — isn’t all that smart either. Automatic rejection and bandwagoning have a lot in common, especially when the rejection or bandwagon appeals to your … yes, you know what’s coming … confirmation bias.

Ignoring changing conditions. No matter what opinion you hold and what policies you advocate, they’re contextual. Situations change. When they do they make the answers we worked so hard to master wrong.

The world has no shortage of people who refuse to acknowledge change because of this. But relying on answers designed for the world as it used to be leads to the well-known military mistake known as “fighting the last war.”

Except that nobody ever fights the last war. They prepare to fight the last war. That’s why they lose the next war.

These are my guidelines. Use them as you like, but please remember:

I’m no expert.

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