Friday Philosophy – PowerPoint Picture Pain

The title does not refer to the agony of sitting through a presentation with loads of pointless graphics and zip-all content. Rather, it encompasses the agony of trying to produce some decent graphical content for PowerPoint. Or Word or any other software-based method of presenting information. I think we generally had better presentations when we had overhead projectors or flip charts and I go “powerpoint naked” to present sometimes.

However, I do present quite often using the ubiquitous PowerPoint. I spend hours on my slides, both trying to put good textual content into them for both the actual presentation and also for anyone who downloads them later. I also spend ages trying to put together graphics as we humans are visual creatures and a good {let’s pause for a second and stress the word good} picture or diagram can help enormously. I did a little animated graphic a few years back to show how DNA is unzipped and duplicated, allowing the near perfect transmission of our DNA as cells divide. Modesty prevents me saying it was good but {drat, I just said it} but several people told me it really helped them understand something that text descriptions struggle to put across.

{Hmm, OK, I’ll see if I can get this to work. Try this how-dna-duplicates powerpoint show. It shows how the two strands of DNA are “matched”. A, C, T and G are the 4 letters of the DNA and each one is associated with its “pair” in the second strand. A to T, T to A, C to G and G to C. Split the pair into two strands and you can make each a perfect copy of the original by adding back the pairs. Understand? Oh, and there are very, very, very rare copy mistakes, in this case a C is matched to a T rather than an A. Go on, fire up the slide.}

The reality is though that most of my presentations have very average slides. When you present for the UK Oracle User group they are good enough to solicit feedback from the audience and feed it back to the presenter. You get scored on topic, content, style, slides, charisma, sex appeal… The lowest part of my score is always, Always, ALWAYS the slides. This started getting on my nerves so one year I tried really hard on the slides. It was still my weakest point.

The thing is, I have never had a graphics team (let alone a whole marketing department) to help me out. Either I have worked for a company with no such thing or I have been a lone consultant doing what I can in my spare time. It is especially frustrating as large companies that do have access to teams of graphic artists seem to present with a large number of very pretty, very well drawn slides with zip-all content and the graphics add almost nothing to understanding (and we are back to the first line of this posting). In fact, I often find that slides with lots of pretty icons representing part of the technology stack with chunky arrows sweeping across them showing flow to be {cough} pointless to my understanding. One thing I have picked up from all those pretty pictures though is that a feeling of depth and texture is very effective in altering how a slide looks.

So, I decided for my posts on Index Organised Tables I would spend some time messing around with such things in PowerPoint. My Graphic of the Thread is:

I’m quite pleased with it, especially as in doing so I found out quite a bit about how to use the gradient fills, shadowing, 3D formating and rotating of simple shapes. It is certainly better than my previous stock graphic for an index:

I think most people would agree, it is an improvement. But is it two days worth of effort improvement. Yes, that is how long I spent messing around with the image options in PowerPoint to replace a flat, uninspiring green blob with 3 lines on it to represent an index into a nicely shaped, pseudo-3D image with a tad more information. *sigh*.

I guess I can now convert other flat pictures made up of boxes, triangles and lines into something that look a bit more like a professional diagram than something knocked up by a database geezer late one evening the day before the presentation. But if it does not help me produce a diagram that aids understanding rather than just presentation fluff, like those marketing slides I’ve just wasted a lot of time.

I tell you what though, having spent so long on that diagram, I’m going to use it to death 🙂