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What else is new?
An 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...
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Maybe that's a bit harsh. But not much.
And that applies what one might consider to be the most benign animation, the so-called "builder,"
Obvious in hindsight - one is not supposed to comment on each point. The presenter's job is to assume the audience is literate and explain the the idea behind the slide, not read to adults. You know this of course.
Having the bullet points appear one .. by .. one is going to enforce that bad habit.
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Bad powerpoint presentations are now so common I barely notice them anymore. The most annoying are the presentations filled with animations - the first bullet appears in a blaze of revolving flames, the second in a cosmic starburst, etc. etc.
I love the comparison of Bill Gates vs Steve Jobs in presentation zen (http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/the_zen_estheti.html)
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