Let’s Bring Back The Powerpoint Discussions

March 13th, 2006

The talk about Library 2.0 and it’s magical powers of bringing the library profession back to life (Were we dead?) has finally flatulated itself into, well, nothingness (typical Library 2.0 stuff I’m afraid). Thank goodness.

Last week, the DIY Librarian had an interesting post about using Powerpoint even though she hates it. Why?

“I think that PowerPoint does a good job of allowing people to quickly and easily create and display electronic “slides”. It is surely not the only method of creating digital slides, but it’s familiar to users of Word and it’s widely available. I think it does a lousy job of helping people organize and write presentations.”

She’s, of course, right. We like the familiar, we embrace it; it’s the warm fuzzy blanket that we put over our shoulder while we suck our thumb, hoping that we will never outgrow it and…change!

But, that’s the problem. Because something is familiar, easy, and widely available means that we have to use it? Remember Netscape? It was the only thing to use before IE came out. Now, more and more people are using Firefox. We changed. We moved on from IE. The numbers are showing that FF users continue to rise. Why can’t we just ditch Powerpoint?

I’ll tell you why. Have you ever seen the faces on attendees at presentations where Powerpoint is used? It’s like they have had their brain matter sucked out by a virtual vacuum, leaving nothing but empty space to be filled by bullet points and flying words (incoming!) from the top left hand corner of the screen. Powerpoint still rules because it is conference crack…

…and many presenters like it that way. They are the pushers, and the audience, the addicts.

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