sisemen - fixed especially for you. ;)

I am one of those "Powerpoint Rangers", in an office full of other PPR, serving in HQ in Afghanistan for 6 months. Never a more accurate article - we spend every day putting slides together, absolutely tedious and dull. Most of our work is either unused, or flicked up on screen for seconds. Truely appalling waste of resources, but if you are not making slides then you're not working.

The only amusing angle is costing our time and working out how much each slide/bullet costs. Not a bad rate of pay somedays - room full of SO2s working on a handful of slides...

When my grandchildren ask me 'what did you do in the war', it will be too embarrassing to admit the truth... I'll just say I was a cook, that way at least I did something worthwhile. :ugh::ugh::ugh:

Ahhh sideways, we could be fellow PPRs. Although I have taken a vow to try and produce the absolute minimum number of PPoints possible on this tour. So far I have got it down to 1 in the last 2 months. Not a bad effort all things considered. Especially as the motto of my HQ seems to be "If in doubt, make a PPoint".

And apologies for getting the size of the graphics wrong, I couldn't even get the graphic to show up for the first half hour of trying. I am working here honest - I just chose to spend the time I should be making PPoints doing something more constructive.

Powerpoint is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less.

(As it happens, I think its a buggy piece of junk, but that is nothing much to do with this thread.)

Learning how to select and use Visual Aids is a key skill for instructional or briefing technique. But the idea that powerpoint is 'automatically bad' is as stupid as automatically using it for everything.

You can provide someone with graphics tools, that doesn't make them an artist. You can provide them with presentation software, that doesn't make them an effective presenter either.

In a way this thread is a microcosm of a problem permeating society, namely that undue importance is attached to that which is easy to quantify.

And you thought it was just your generation that uses it - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j2pJDReQnk

This didn't just happen - its been going on for at least 15 years!
As soon as I see any slide featuring that man in the glasses shrugging his shoulders, the duck hitting a computer with a mallet (wtf?) or as soon as any presenter (usually a Chief) spends 10 minutes wiring up the speakers so he can demonstrate the .wav file he found of a gun going off, I immediately start hoping that I can go into a coma for the next hour. Why are you people wasting my life like this?! Die!!

But, of course. :ok: :ok:

Just put the word 'Synergy' in your PP presentation, the whole room will be asleep in seconds. Guarenteed.

From Hong Kong's Sunday Morning Post, 2 May.

http://i210.photobucket.com/albums/b...powerpoint.jpg