TR Forums

NovusBogus wrote:

I'm kind of curious to know more about this strange alternate dimension where the locals don't use PowerPoint. Corporations love it, academia loves it, governments love it, and the military *really* loves it. What am I overlooking here?

I was going to say. I mean, I don't use it often, but it's still a great tool for reinforcing the info communicated during a presentation. Like any tool, the effectiveness depends on who is swinging it.

Now, if you're distributing a PowerPoint for reference later, then I sure hope you converted to PDF first. Sending out a raw .ppt or .pptx to someone who has no need of editing it just begs disaster (and nobody cares about all your fancy animations that are lost as a result, those were just distracting in the first place).

Yeah, it's one of those tools that crosses over into the domain of the "average user", and has all the unfortunate side effects which often go with that. At my last job I ended up hating the phase "powerpoint deck", because it seemed much too sophisticated a term for what was usually amorphous blobs of empty and useless information. I have seen other presenters use it though which do a better job.

ozzuneoj wrote:

I haven't even seen anyone use PowerPoint since I was in highschool 13 years ago.

What rock are you living under? PP is useless crap, but any sizable business or organization of note has (too many) meetings with slides. Some of them tried to curb or even ban it, but its an incurable disease.

Bauxite wrote:

ozzuneoj wrote:

I haven't even seen anyone use PowerPoint since I was in highschool 13 years ago.

What rock are you living under? PP is useless crap, but any sizable business or organization of note has (too many) meetings with slides. Some of them tried to curb or even ban it, but its an incurable disease.

This. Even infants school kids here (4-7 y.o.) are required to use it, as are teachers obviously. This means I need a 3 seat licence at home Can't use LibreOffice, unacceptable to the users due to real risk of looking stupid in front of 25+ under 12's...

TwistedKestrel wrote:

2010 is under extended support, anything before that is 100% EOL'ed.

Not yet, 2007 is in support until October's Patch Tuesday. /dayjob

Sorry, we don't all work in the tech industry, despite this being a tech site, and my child is only 3 so hasn't yet had to use it.

BRB, gotta return to the damp, worm riddled dirt beneath the rock that apparently shields me from things like PowerPoint.

ozzuneoj wrote:

BRB, gotta return to the damp, worm riddled dirt beneath the rock that apparently shields me from things like PowerPoint.

Lol. Though surely the set of non-users of Microsoft Office is made up of the probably less worm-riddled?