08.07.07
Want to go to B-School? Better brush up on PowerPoint!
That may be good advice for up-and-coming businesspeople, but it’s actually becoming literally a requirement. Apparently the University of Chicago is requiring Business School applicants to submit PowerPoint-Like Slides as part of their application.
“In four slides or less,” the online instructions say, “please provide readers with content that captures who you are.”
Is this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? Neither, I guess. PowerPoint is a tool, and it can be used for evil as well as good. I hope these applicants read The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte. He’s a master of visual expression and has many good points of advice and examples of bad slideshow usage.
The article goes on to say that things may not be as bad as they seem. Applicants are still retaining creativity by submitting poetry, photos, even a play. And the admissions committee says it’s more fun than reading essays.
Bad slideshows aren’t limited to business or government, though. I’ve been to many talks where sitting in the back of the room I couldn’t see the slides because the speaker had crammed so much text onto the page. When that happens, the slideshow becomes distracting.
Instead, I try to put no more than three bullet points on a page. Bullet points shouldn’t be too long; they should only give the next few topics I’m going to talk about. The actual text I want to say goes in a separate document–my notes–which I keep with me (PowerPoint does this for you in the notes pane). If I need to show my audience something more complicated, I put it in a third document–a handout–which I copy and hand out.
I use the excellent beamer class for LaTeX to produce slideshows for my classes. My students love them–it’s a nice resource to have to supplement class notes. I can’t use PowerPoint because of all the equations and mathematical notation I need to put into my slides (don’t you dare say “Equation Editor”), but with beamer I get a nice PDF that I can page through. Hyperlinks in the PDF allow me to jump back and forth, and I can even embed media (not that I have a lot of other media).
Just for laughs: here’s the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint:
technorati tags:powerpoint, beamer, gettysburg
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Westwood College Student said,
August 9, 2007 at 12:36 pm
Learning how to powerpoints is a pretty smart decisions. Almost everyone uses it now for business and school. I wonder if the University of Chicago will use this as an entrance exam or what class they should start the student in. Only time will tell.
Now for my thoughts on how to do powerpoints. I seen a few powerpoints and one person showed many of us his rule about power points. He simply called it the 10-20-30 rule.
10 Slides
20 minutes
30 point font
And it worked out beautifully. Everyone should adhere to similar standards and not try to stick all the content on the slide. If you have a presentation you are not supposed to read your slide word for word, just take the bullet points and elaborate.
leingang said,
August 9, 2007 at 3:15 pm
People love to hate PowerPoint (or computer slideshows in general) because they’ve seen so many bad ones. But at the same time, those who can do it well are really appreciated–Al Gore (who wrote a PowerPoint presentation that eventually became an Oscar-winning motion picture) and Steve Jobs come to mind. And I get lots of kudos for my beamer presentations, though perhaps only because I know how to download images off the web.
Guy Kawasaki writes about the 10-20-30 rule on his blog as well. The “rule of three,” plus or minus one, applies to sections and subsections, too, I’d say.
Sendhil Revuluri said,
August 11, 2007 at 10:13 am
A colleague recently applied for an educational grant and had to submit her group’s application as a Powerpoint file. Of course, the grantor was Microsoft, so they may have had other motivations as well
leingang said,
August 12, 2007 at 5:32 am
So that touches on other weird feeling I have about this: to me, PowerPoint is a tool for assisting presentations, the kind where you stand in front of an audience and talk to them.
What the GSB and Microsoft are requesting is some form of presenterless presentation, similar, I guess, to the kind you would put on a loop in a kiosk. There’s probably a different set of rules for those presentations, since they really are the central focus.