What else is new?
Jun. 16th, 2009 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpAn article at ars technica refers to a study published in an academic journal suggesting that animations in PowerPoint presentations actually hinder audience comprehension.
And that applies what one might consider to be the most benign animation, the so-called "builder," in which some number of points related to a topic can be made to appear on a slide one at a time, one below the other, allowing the presenter to comment on each point before going on to the next. (That it applies to presentations where the originator took, as a design requirement, the need to use at least four different animation effects per slide should not even be open to discussion. :^)
It also reminded me of a horrendous job from some time ago, involving PowerPoint, where you couldn't actually see most of the presentation unless you ran the bloody thing, because a hefty percentage of slides relied on animations that built several slides worth of information into a heap on one slide that sort of made sense when viewed in presentation mode (the same result could have been achieved by breaking each such slide into the requisite number of "ordinary" slides), but which was untranslatable without a huge amount of dismantlement and reassembly.
But what am I going on about? I just completed my first pass through a job that will linger in my memory for some time, associated with a word that starts with the letter "s" (and that word ain't "shiny," let me tell you).
PowerPoint is evil.
Cheers...
And that applies what one might consider to be the most benign animation, the so-called "builder," in which some number of points related to a topic can be made to appear on a slide one at a time, one below the other, allowing the presenter to comment on each point before going on to the next. (That it applies to presentations where the originator took, as a design requirement, the need to use at least four different animation effects per slide should not even be open to discussion. :^)
It also reminded me of a horrendous job from some time ago, involving PowerPoint, where you couldn't actually see most of the presentation unless you ran the bloody thing, because a hefty percentage of slides relied on animations that built several slides worth of information into a heap on one slide that sort of made sense when viewed in presentation mode (the same result could have been achieved by breaking each such slide into the requisite number of "ordinary" slides), but which was untranslatable without a huge amount of dismantlement and reassembly.
But what am I going on about? I just completed my first pass through a job that will linger in my memory for some time, associated with a word that starts with the letter "s" (and that word ain't "shiny," let me tell you).
PowerPoint is evil.
Cheers...
