That creaking sound you hear…
…is my elderly braincells springing into action. We’re getting a new touch-screen kiosk at work that runs entirely on PowerPoint. I’ve worked on oodles and oodles of PowerPoint presentations. Like, twenty years ago.
Fortunately, I got a copy of PowerPoint with Office at home and, from what I can tell poking around, it hasn’t changed much.
In my corporate gig, back before PowerPoint came out in the late Eighties, my department made upwards of 100,000 physical 35mm slides a year. The process became more digital over time, but we still created them in the art department.
Then I remember the newly-hired fancy-pants head of IT sitting with me to work on a slideshow, telling me that my services wouldn’t be needed as soon as everyone had their copy of PowerPoint and could do their own presentations.
Hilariously, that’s not what happened.
Turns out it’s not a smart use of resources to task an elite engineer on an elite engineer’s salary to spend hours fussing about fonts and colors and transitions. I mean, they loved doing it, but it was a serious time waster and they sucked at it. Engineers are not known for their aesthetics.
I remember one Indian engineer who created all his graphs in multiple eye-raping colors. He explained cheerfully that his data was so boring, this was the only way to make his presentations bearable.
The illustration above isn’t even all of the possible slide transitions available in PowerPoint. And boy, do engineers love them some slide transitions. Every new slide skittered, slunk, faded, bounced or turned the page onto the screen. It was dizzying.
In the end, either they created an initial presentation and we polished it for them afterwards, or (what usually happened) they gave us notes and we created the whole thing. We were cheaper, faster (I did it all day long!), and (theoretically!) in better taste.
Who’d’a thunk I’d be doing PowerPoints again at my time of life.
August 7, 2024 — 6:36 pm
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