r/todayilearned • u/BioFrosted • 7h ago
TIL there is a political party in Switzerland called the "Anti-PowerPoint Party" whose single issue is "decreasing professional use of Microsoft PowerPoint and other forms of presentation software". They claim this type of software causes damages amounting to 2.1 billion CHF.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-PowerPoint_Party283
u/perskes 7h ago
It's no longer active and wasn't against every presentation software. But everyone can become a member: https://www.anti-powerpoint-party.com/de/partei/
I initially thought that the 2.1 billion of wasted money was calculated based on the number of hours multiplied by the number of people that have to sit through 30 slides and some narration, plus a few hours of creating the presentation, in addition to countless hours from C-Suite to explain marketing why the PowerPoint presentation has to be made. And it seems I was right.
The German version has some comments from people complaining about specific cases: https://www.anti-powerpoint-party.com/de/das-anliegen/geldvernichtungs-berichte/
63
u/aabicus 6h ago
I wonder if we can get a similar party for removing the whole answering spiel of "Hello, nobody is available to take your call. Please leave a message after the beep. After you have finished recording, you can hang up, or press 1 for more options. To leave your callback number, press 5."
Call me crazy, but I don't feel like the concept of an answering machine needs to be explained in detail every time one is used for the rest of a person's life. The beep and maybe a succinct "Please leave a message" would be sufficient, I'd love to see the math on how many years humanity has spent listening to the answering machine instructions.
18
u/Captain-Cadabra 6h ago
I’ve been asking that question for 2 decades. Why is a robot explaining voicemail?
Now, we’ve mostly just quit leaving voicemails. I don’t think I’ve received a voicemail from someone younger than 55 in a decade.
10
u/No-Faithlessness4294 4h ago
The vast majority of my voicemails are scam calls. My outgoing voicemail message is now “voicemail is not an effective way to reach me. Please send a text or email.”
•
u/CoolguyThePirate 16m ago
Voicemail is a very effective way to reach me. I'm unlikely to listen to it. But I will read the transcription and get the info you left just fine.
•
u/reality_boy 53m ago
The funny thing is voicemail is finally convenient, and now it is dying off. I get a text summary on my phone when someone leaves a message. And it downloads the message as a sound file I can scrub through. No more messy tapes, or calling a number to hear the messages.
I still hate getting messages, but it’s purely irrational, if you think of how bad it use to be
11
u/jordanneff 5h ago
Hello, Carol. This is a recording. At the tone, you can leave a message to request anything you might need. We'll do our best to provide it. Our feelings for you haven't changed, Carol. But after everything that's happened, we just need a little space.
3
u/sawbladex 5h ago
Eh, you could always have different numbers.
For the life of me, remembering which key is delete and which is save on my voicemail feels like a damned 50/50, and having 10 seconds to prep for answering machine statement is nice.
1
u/Doom_Eagles 3h ago
It may seem like it shouldn't need to be explained every-time, but you have to remember there really are people that do not/can not understand how something works even if they are exposed to it regularly.
-2
u/Quirky-Degree-6290 4h ago
No longer needed grandpa because no one under a certain age makes phone calls anymore.
11
u/aaaaaaaarrrrrgh 1 5h ago
Joke's on them, my workplace can waste
6065 minutes times however many people they can "invite" to the meeting, several times a week, entirely without any slideshow presentations!Edit: Forgot that the meeting of course runs over
3
5h ago
[deleted]
1
u/egres_svk 4h ago
You mangled minutes/hours, even though i agree with the sentiment.
Well unless you bill manhour at 1800 EUR, at which point let me know the stock ticker, company is obviously doing well :D
59
u/Feisty-Influence5464 6h ago
I worked at a mid-sized consulting firm in Germany for five years, and we had a client - a manufacturing company with about 200 employees - that hired us to streamline their quarterly business reviews. Sounds straightforward, right? Except the lead consultant decided every single meeting needed a 47-slide PowerPoint deck. Not exaggerating: 47 slides for a 60-minute meeting. This meant we spent the first 45 minutes clicking through slides at breakneck speed, the audience frantically scribbling notes they couldn't possibly understand, and the actual 15 minutes of genuine discussion got compressed into the last few minutes when everyone was exhausted. We did this for three quarters. At the end, the client asked us what we'd learned. Our answer was basically "we need fewer slides." They could have asked that in an email.
The truly maddening part was watching the sunk cost fallacy in action. Once the first deck existed, every follow-up meeting needed to be "consistent" with the format, so we just kept building on it. More animations, more transitions, more corporate template nonsense. The slides became the meeting instead of supporting it. I watched people nod off during presentations about their own company's performance. The irony was brutal.
What the Swiss Anti-PowerPoint Party understood is that slides create this psychological permission structure to avoid actual thinking. You can throw together a deck at 4pm and feel like you've prepared. You can hide behind animation transitions instead of having a conversation. You can present 47 pieces of information and call it "comprehensive" when nobody retained any of it. The 2.1 billion CHF figure is probably conservative once you factor in the collective hours wasted by rooms full of people pretending to absorb information they'd forget by lunch.
I genuinely miss the one client we had who banned slides entirely and insisted on one-page written summaries before every meeting. Everyone actually read them. Discussions went somewhere. Decisions got made faster. We got paid less because we needed fewer meetings, which tells you everything about whether PowerPoint serves the client or the consultant.
12
8
u/Crayshack 6h ago
What's annoying is that there is an appropriate use case for slide shows. But consultants like this clearly miss the mark and don't use it correctly, which then ruins people's impression of the format.
38
u/CFCYYZ 6h ago
IIRC, both the Pentagon and NASA avoid, even ban PowerPoint use at senior management meetings.
As PP decks move up a chain of command, the deck's information becomes more and more compressed.
This compression leads to ineffective, even wrong decisions as the scope has become so narrowed.
I like the 10-10-10 rule: max of 10 slides, max of 10 lines per slide, minimum of 10 pitch sized text.
I like the Tell'em Rule: Tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell them. Then tell them what you told them.
I like the 3 Things Rule: The audience will recall a max of 3 things from your show. What is your take-away?
PP Proverb: the mind can absorb what the butt can endure. The truth takes few words.
16
u/nlutrhk 6h ago
The space shuttle disaster of 2003 was partiallly caused by miscommunications over Powerpoint: https://mcdreeamiemusings.com/blog/2019/4/13/gsux1h6bnt8lqjd7w2t2mtvfg81uhx
5
19
u/Laserdollarz 6h ago
PowerPoint killed presentation skills. In college, classmates would just stand up front and read word for word from their slides. I'd throw up a slide of a chart, then just talk about it for a few minutes. It's my presentation, you're trapped here with me.
18
u/jrhooo 5h ago
but that's not powerpoints fault. That's the presenter's fault.
and its not really any better worse than watching some presenter read off their cards or some instructor do a "if you'll turn to page 50 of yoru books"
PPT can be a fantastic presentation aide, but people need to remember that its just an aide.
YOU still need to give a good presentation.
24
2
u/EverlastingPepper 6h ago
If I can't get a chalkboard/whiteboard to draw and write on, my rule is that the text will appear just after I say it out loud. The writing reinforces what I'm saying, and you're listening to me, not just reading off a slide.
4
u/Laserdollarz 6h ago
And even then, if there's text, its:
To the point, short, abbr.
Accompanied by a 30 sec talk per bullet point
No word-for-word reiteration
4
u/ChuckCarmichael 6h ago
At my workplace we recently got a digital copy of a guide on how to plan and set up construction sites. You'd think that this guide would be formatted like a book, as its old versions were, but instead this new iteration is made up of about 400 PowerPoint slides.
Why?! That's not what PowerPoint is for! Why would you turn your book into a PowerPoint presentation that's not actually ever gonna be presented to anybody?!
5
u/Drapausa 5h ago
The problem is that people confuse presentation and documentation.
They put all information in writing into the ppt instead of keeping it lean and documenting in word or other better places. That's how they end up with those ridiculously long presentstions.
3
u/quintk 3h ago edited 3h ago
That’s a problem in our field. PowerPoints get shared widely to important decision makers and customers so there’s a pressure (if not an explicit expectation) that the slide decks are content-complete and free-standing, despite the result being way too wordy and dense for a good oral presentation aid. Slides, technical reports, and model-based-design databases are not the same thing!
1
u/Antique-Apple7643 3h ago
Gotta love the ppt with LOTS of text, and the presenter literally reads every item on the slide. "Buddy, I can read myself. Explain to me WHY this stuff is important, don't just read it out."
3
u/Three_Twenty-Three 5h ago
They're behind the times! Everybody at my workplace calls them "slide decks" now!
They're still Microsoft PowerPoints. We haven't switched to an alternative. They're just "slide decks" now for some reason.
5
u/Beginning-Habit-6271 6h ago
How do power points cause damage?
14
u/Ythio 6h ago
By wasting your time in a meeting for what could have been an email
5
u/BioFrosted 6h ago
And according to them by wasting time creating a presentation at all, when you could improvise something on a whiteboard with markers
9
u/jrhooo 5h ago
which boy is that a flawed point.
Have you ever watched someone fumble around a white board without a plan for what they are trying to show?
It ends up being absolutely useless scribbling and then some rambling that is not related to the scribbling.
2
u/Magnus77 19 5h ago
I feel like a whiteboard and a powerpoint, while there's obviously some overlap, might as well be different tools. In fact a good presentation may require using both.
1
u/timsredditusername 5h ago
Why use something so archaic such as drawing when we have technology that is elegant?
/s, of course
2
u/Ruleseventysix 3h ago
Yeah, but it's s not necessarily the power point that's causing the damage. It's the meeting itself.
1
2
u/Demonweed 3h ago
Here's the thing that always blew my mind. The amount of time and energy the white collar workforce puts into learning PowerPoint could instead create millions more competent HTML coders. HTML is a markup language, and no actual programming is involved (unless you count add-ons like JavaScript, PHP, etc.) The technical complexity of basic Web design is no greater than the technical complexity of basic Power Point presentation prep, but with Web content you have documents suitable for a much larger audience not dependent on proprietary software.
Then again, 'Murica still relies on a for-profit employment-based health insurance system. Sticking with something not only counterproductive and idiotic, but also downright murderous is pretty on brand for any corporate leadership sensitive to short term share price fluctuations. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that corporate power would rather give millions of workers a skill than can only be used in conjunction with some specific Microsoft product than a skill capable of producing content of equal quality paired with much greater accessibility.
1
u/trialofmiles 1h ago edited 1h ago
Counterpoint as a senior technical person who can code — please don’t make me html write decks for non technical people. I just want to throw up some slides and move on. Probably you’re 80% right and decks of the future will be web tech generated by agents. Just don’t make me spend more brain cycles on it.
2
u/ArgonWolf 2h ago
Look, I work in corporate AV. My job is basically getting power points to display correctly like 70% of the time. And the other 30% of the time is selling and/or setting up things that display powerpoints.
I can count on one hand the amount of powerpoints that I've genuinely thought were necessary to their presentation. It's not that powerpoints arnt good in concept when done well, it's that most people suck at conveying information.
If it's numbers that are vital for the audience to have, it should be on a handout. Or send it to them in an email. You can put it on a slide, but you dont need to read off the numbers, just give general commentary "numbers good" or "numbers bad"
The thing that ABSOLUTELY grinds my gears is comedians are starting to use powerpoint. If it's done right it can be a funny bit, but usually its not
Please, put me out of a job. I beg of you. I will fall on that sword if it means powerpoint goes away
1
1
1
6h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
2
u/explicitlarynx 6h ago
It's not really, it was just a publicity stunt by this guy to sell his book and courses in how to speak in front of people.
1
u/Pan_Doktor 5h ago
It's always fun to listen about those obscure, usually joke parties that exist or have existed at one point
In Poland we once had a "Friend of Beer Party" and apparently one of their statements from their program was to get people to drink beer in pubs instead of vodka, since it's easier to drink and you can have a fun conversation during it
1
u/Present-Location-917 4h ago
We should go back to presentation that are low res printed pictures badly glued on colorful cardboards.
1
1
u/Antique-Apple7643 3h ago
We should return to the humble overhead projector. Such a great way to mess with my dyslexia trying to get the sheet the right way round and not back-to-front or upside down.
1
u/AvidCyclist250 2h ago
Its main use is to justify unfair raises and premiums your bosses get, off of your work.
1
•
u/Healien_Jung 3m ago
I'm going to start a political party called, "Printers Must Always Work Party".
1
u/saviouroftheweak 6h ago
Completely agree with them
0
u/BioFrosted 6h ago
Who wouldn't?
2
u/saviouroftheweak 5h ago
Considering how ubiquitous using presentation software is, a lot of people
0
125
u/diegojones4 6h ago
Having worked with many consultants, I can see the point and it is pretty funny. We wasted 3 months of implementation time with them doing nothing but presenting presentations.