The cult of PowerPoint, episode 2

The cult of PowerPoint, episode 2

Date:	October 17, 2008 / year-entry #343
Tags:	email;non-computer
Orig Link:	https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20081017-00/?p=20533
Comments:	14
Summary:	PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message. No, I don't mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email. I mean...

PowerPoint is a fine presentation tool, but some people have elevated it to the level of a cult. The most recent member of the PowerPoint cult was a customer who decided to use PowerPoint in an email message.

No, I don't mean that the customer attached a bad PowerPoint presentation to the email. I mean that the customer's email was itself a three-slide PowerPoint presentation.

Well, not quite.

What they actually did was create a three-slide presentation, then take screenshots of each slide and embed them in the email.

Well, not quite.

The screenshots were shrunk to save size. Each page from the PowerPoint presentation contained about 50 words of text. Which were very hard to read because the screenshots were shrunk.

The PowerPoint presentation itself was a shortened form of your typical boring PowerPoint slide presentation. The first slide was an introduction to the program they were using. The second slide was a statement of the problem they were having. The third slide was a call to action for Microsoft to assist in determining why the program was having the problem.

Thank goodness it didn't have a concluding "Any questions?" slide.

Comments (14)

Karellen says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:06 am

Wow. All that’s missing from that is a wooden table!

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Web_0_0x2e_1.aspx
Tom says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:16 am

Oh.

My.

God.

There really are some people who should not be allowed near computers.
Ian G says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:20 am

Maybe they thought http://www.neopoleon.com/home/blogs/neo/archive/2003/09/29/5458.aspx was best practice.
Pi says:

October 17, 2008 at 10:24 am

Thank God for the internet. It exposes me to things like this and I feel more intelligent with each passing day.
yeah yeah says:

October 17, 2008 at 11:16 am

Does anyone mind if I have a little cry?
Sohail says:

October 17, 2008 at 1:17 pm

Hey, I like the "Any Questions" slide!

In fact, my LaTeX slide template automagically puts it in as the last slide.

Grrr.
fred says:

October 18, 2008 at 1:01 am

David Byrne did some interesting artwork using PowerPoint a while back. Worth a look: http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/index.php
peetm says:

October 18, 2008 at 4:43 pm

All power corrupts, but PowerPoint corrupts corrupts absolutely.
Duke of New York says:

October 19, 2008 at 1:07 am

Spotted at Microsoft’s meeting area in Second Life (yes, there is one):

http://img206.imageshack.us/my.php?image=powerpoint001gk7.png
Gwyn says:

October 19, 2008 at 3:15 am

You should get your secretary to print that out for you – then the stupidity cycle would be complete
BMathew says:

October 19, 2008 at 10:41 pm

Anyone remember David Bryne’s "I Heart Powerpoint" work? I attended the lecture at UW in 2005, I thought he was sort of taking the mickey..

http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/
CMC says:

October 20, 2008 at 8:30 am

<User ICanReadPreviousComments="false" />
Anonymuos says:

October 22, 2008 at 4:36 am

PowerPoint was good for its days in the 90s and should long have been rewritten in WPF or native code WPF or Direct3D. Remember it’s Windows PRESENTATION foundation? StandOut from ERain Inc. gets presentations right.
Matt says:

October 22, 2008 at 12:24 pm

This is kind of off-topic, but there’s a new book on creating good PowerPoint slide shows, written by the designer of Al Gore’s "An Inconvenient Truth" slide show.

http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_10768637

Comments are closed.

*DISCLAIMER: I DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. If you are the owner and would like it removed, please contact me. The content herein is an archived reproduction of entries from Raymond Chen's "Old New Thing" Blog (most recent link is here). It may have slight formatting modifications for consistency and to improve readability.

WHY DID I DUPLICATE THIS CONTENT HERE? Let me first say this site has never had anything to sell and has never shown ads of any kind. I have nothing monetarily to gain by duplicating content here. Because I had made my own local copy of this content throughout the years, for ease of using tools like grep, I decided to put it online after I discovered some of the original content previously and publicly available, had disappeared approximately early to mid 2019. At the same time, I present the content in an easily accessible theme-agnostic way.

The information provided by Raymond's blog is, for all practical purposes, more authoritative on Windows Development than Microsoft's own MSDN documentation and should be considered supplemental reading to that documentation. The wealth of missing details provided by this blog that Microsoft could not or did not document about Windows over the years is vital enough, many would agree an online "backup" of these details is a necessary endeavor. Specifics include:

A "redesign" after 2019 erased thousands of user's comments from previous years. As many have stated, the comments are nearly as important as the postings themselves. The archived copies of the postings contained here retain the original comments.
The blog has changed domains many times and the urls have otherwise been under constant change since 2003. Even when proper redirection has been set up for those links, redirection only works for a limited period of time. For example, all of the internal blog links that were valid in early 2019, were broken by 2020 without proper redirection.
The blog has been under constant re-design and re-theming since its inception. It is downright irritating to deal with a bogged-down site experience as the result of the latest visual themes designed for cell-phone browsers. As of this writing, it is cumbersome to navigate titles with only 10 entries per page. While it is nice that the official site has a search feature, searching using this index (with all titles on a single page) is much quicker (CTRL-F in most browsers).

<-- Back to Old New Thing Archive Index