Office apps as killer apps - part 2: Powerpoint

As a follow up to the post about spreadsheets I now turn to Powerpoint.

If spreadsheets was the Killer App for knowledge sharing, Powerpoint is sometimes the Killer App for presentations. And again, in a negative way.

How many times have you attended a presentation where the presenter simply read statements from slides?

If you haven't seen this video, have a look (and if you've seen it before, it is worth watching again). It highlights a common way to use Powerpoint, using that common way... This might be the only presentation where it is suitable to use Powerpoint in this way!


Don McMillan has a website here.

Now, there's a number of reasons for this. We tend to use Powerpoint for different purposes.

1. As background for a speach
   To simply serve as a background, highlighting parts of the speach. In this case you probably are best of using as few, and more important simple, slides as possible. The message shall come from you and not from the slides.
   However on many occations people tend to use slidesets which have a different purpose to highlight a speach. This is probably the main reason for Powerpoint being percieved as a speach killer.
   
2. As stand-alone reading material
   This is when Powerpoints are sent around to serve as a reading material. People tend to create slides rather than to write documents, which is fine. Compare with reading a comic book rather than a novel. It is easier to browse through in some cases, and the threshold to create the material might be percieved as lower.
   You can pack more details into the presentation. More text to guide the reader is also good. Just think twice before using such a presentation to present something.
   
3. More fact based presentations
   This is the tricky area. Should you or the slides speak?
   Most often people let the slides speak. Slides packed with text (and in this context the definition of a "packed" slide has a low threshold).
   I suggest that you consider to speak yourself. Perhaps with a few slides. Distribute a more detailed presentation (before or after) to enable the audience to dig deeper and repeat the information.
   If you include a Q&A part have the detailed presentation handy, so you can bring up specific slides to address the questions.

You can probably define other usages as well. Any suggestions?

And of course there is always exceptions to this. Due to the topic, audience or speaker.

Finally I include two other videos worth watching. Both for the presentation style and for the content of the presentation.

First out is Dick Hardt, speaking about Identity 2.0. He uses many slides. A lot of slides. But it works. At least in this format (video) where Dick acts more like a narrator to the slides. I would love to see a presentation like this live to find out if it works as good when in a live audience.


The second one is from TED, where Larry Lessig speaks about the current copyright laws and argues why these are outdated in the digital age. It is an interesting message, a good disposition of the talk and a nice exampel of a speach where the balance between the slides and the speaker is kept.

Office apps as killer apps - part 1: Spreadsheets

"There's no killer app - only a killer attitude" - but evidently there has been a few "traditional" killer apps around.

I will make a couple of post on some office applications that has turned into real negative killer apps. At least partly.

The first area is spreadsheets.

VisiCalc was one of the first spreadsheet programs around. It was a traditional "Killer App.", since all of a sudden there was a good reason to put a PC on every desk in the office.

Spreadsheets really innovated the way people dealt with calculation. No more calculators with a paper roll for long calculations. Instead you got a multidimensional view that was easliy updated.

Today everyone in an office environment are using Excel every now and then. For various purposes. both for calculations and for more database like purposes (see this post for one view of this).

Enter Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Management. Suddenly we have some issues!

Even if it is possible to share Excel sheets as a multiuser application still a majority of spreadsheets are kept as individual files. Mostly on your own hard disk. Sometime as a file on the LAN. In both cases we have a problem.

All of these spreadsheets contains information. Information that is valuable to the whole organisation if it is turned into Knowledge.

The standard way to turn this information into knowledge is to pass a copy of the spreadsheet around.

What happens?

You get a copy of a spreadsheet. Filled with information from someone. This information is now part of your knowledge.

You add your information to the spreadsheet. Creating another version. Eventually you pass it around, making it part of someones knowledge.

It doesn't take many rounds to end up with many versions of the original spreadsheet. All with some parts of the truth. Not good.

Of course this is not really a technical problem, as solutions exists. Either using a multi-user environment with Excel or another tool.

It is more a cultural problem. People do what they always have done.


How does you and your organisation approach this issue. Or is it not an issue for you?

(And don't get me wrong. I believe Excel and spreadsheets are great.
But in some cases you need a different approach, especially if the spreadsheet and its content may be of interest to others than yourself. Here's another article on the subject)