Powerpoint: Classic Or Dud?

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Really, is anyone in the whole world any good with this cuntish program? I seem to spend half my working life wrestling with it and what I produce always ends up looking godawful.

― Tom (Groke), Monday, 30 September 2002 14:55 (twenty-three years ago)

it's arse. all presentations done with it are arse. the people who do fiddly animations with it are arse.

arse

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 30 September 2002 14:56 (twenty-three years ago)

Dud dud dud dud it is for cockfarmers (and I do not understand it either). But luckily all my wrestling with nonsense is done on Access these days. Can I have ANY information on how to use this thing please? No just make databases on it. GRRRRRRR.

― Sarah (starry), Monday, 30 September 2002 14:56 (twenty-three years ago)

But you can spend HOURS deciding which direction and at what speed you would like the bullet points to fly in from in your boss's presentations! Therefore it is classic!

Thank God it's home time.

― Emma, Monday, 30 September 2002 14:57 (twenty-three years ago)

Emma, wave/fly in bullet points if you are an arse.

Can we have a sweep on how long it takes for "Excel: classic or dud" etc to appear in new answers?

― Alan (Alan), Monday, 30 September 2002 14:59 (twenty-three years ago)

is anyone in the whole world any good with this cuntish program?

I am. I agree it's dud, though.

― Sean (Sean), Monday, 30 September 2002 15:00 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't get it either. What you trying to do in access Sarah?

― Graham (graham), Monday, 30 September 2002 15:01 (twenty-three years ago)

Produce reports on a cockfarming database that doesn't record all the information we need anyway! Oh and change colours'n'ting. I hate Access.

HEY I found a book in our front garden recycling box today it is Atari ST BASIC to C! It tells you C equivalents of BASIC programmes! It is for people in 1988, which is where my programming skillz0r end! FAB.

― Sarah (starry), Monday, 30 September 2002 15:06 (twenty-three years ago)

starting your own presentation from scratch = dud
nicking someone else's and just replacing the text with your own = classic!
also, what Emma said

― Jeff W, Monday, 30 September 2002 15:08 (twenty-three years ago)

The biggest of all possible duds. It makes what could have been interesting lectures or speeches into useless "presentations", and isn't even coded properly. I gave a lecture about the Sarbanes-Oxley Act without this useless electronic crutch recently (I phoned in to London from Frankfurt) -- that it went well pleased me, that people were SURPRISED that it went well, surprised that they weren't bored to death because of a lack of flying bullet points, pissed me off.

― Colin Meeder (Mert), Monday, 30 September 2002 15:41 (twenty-three years ago)

Dud -- I used to use an older version of it as a poor man's Photoshop; the new version has been so radically changed that I can't figure out how to do anything.

― j.lu (j.lu), Monday, 30 September 2002 15:49 (twenty-three years ago)

it's always struck me as kind of pointless.

― jel -- (jel), Monday, 30 September 2002 16:04 (twenty-three years ago)

Thank you God, at least I'm not alone in that! No matter how much time I spend to try and learn it, I get nowhere. Question is: why does every job listing I read highlight it as being so damn important;>?

― Nichole Graham, Monday, 30 September 2002 16:59 (twenty-three years ago)

I recall a fairly interesting article in the New Yorker a while ago about the prevalence of Powerpoint -- buncha linguists arguing that the presentation style actually limits reasoning processes into a sort of Powerpoint-think. (I was surprised by that suggestion because I always thought that was the point of the software: no no it's not to clarify ideas, it's to reduce every idea to a clearly-delineated bam-bam bullet-head business-ready game-plan.)

― nabisco (nabisco), Monday, 30 September 2002 17:26 (twenty-three years ago)

What nabisco said.

What about talking, making an argument stand up. Let it flow. etc etc. How many powerpoint presentations have you seen weher if you remove the statements of the fucking obvious have little meat to them. It's a padders wet dream of a work obfuscation tool; makes it look like loads has been done when very little has.

Bring back slides.

― Dave B (daveb), Monday, 30 September 2002 17:34 (twenty-three years ago)

Yes, it does replace thinking, and it tempts people into horrid animations of text to no purpose (except irritation). On the other hand, it doesn't have to be abused, and it can be used as a decent tool, and it doesn't force you to have bright red text zooming across a saturated blue and green background.

As for Access, my lovely music database was built in that - it's what I'd worked in professionally most, a few years ago. I'd offer a hand, Sarah, if it wasn't work - they can pay for an expert!

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Monday, 30 September 2002 18:49 (twenty-three years ago)

I've been offered a months work on it updating photos in presentations, so just a little classic.

― chris (chris), Monday, 30 September 2002 19:21 (twenty-three years ago)

eleven years pass...

makes it look like loads has been done when very little has.

wait...isn't this a good thing?

― Kornblud (admrl), Tuesday, 18 February 2014 17:15 (twelve years ago)

one year passes...

Ques: Your have a PowerPoint presentation (PPT, PPTX or PPS) that contains lot of pictures embedded in the slides. Is there an easy method to save these images out of the presentation ?

Ans: As an example, let's take the above PowerPoint presentation that contains unseen aerial photographs of the World Trade Center captured by a military chopper on 9-11.

― pplains, Thursday, 29 October 2015 14:48 (ten years ago)

I mean, after 14 years, I'm pretty desensitized to those images, but for god's sake, I'm just trying to extract an image from a ppt on a mac. A powerpoint presentation of circus balloons would've worked just as well.

― pplains, Thursday, 29 October 2015 14:48 (ten years ago)

five years pass...

they don't pay me enough to use Powerpoint.

― koogs, Friday, 19 February 2021 10:54 (five years ago)

how true
But for anyone wanting an answer to the previous q, change the pptx suffix to zip, unzip it and look in the media folder inside

― assert (MatthewK), Friday, 19 February 2021 12:26 (five years ago)

text wouldn't fill the box, would resize itself rather than use the bottom 1cm of the box. turns out the bottom margin was set. and changing this meant realising that the box was actually a 'shape' and using the shape menu.

standard work template has too much space at the top, uses top third for headings and logo etc seriously restricting the height for content. also, bottom two thirds of the screen is mostly obscured by heads during presentations, back when we used actual meeting rooms for actual meetings.

― koogs, Saturday, 20 February 2021 08:57 (five years ago)

Like so much Microsoft product, a cruft built on a hack built on a bodge built on a ripoff of someone else’s idea.

― assert (MatthewK), Saturday, 20 February 2021 10:34 (five years ago)

one year passes...

Really nice piece on a pre-powerpoint
world

https://dirt.substack.com/p/dirt-big-pictures

― xyzzzz__, Monday, 26 December 2022 11:28 (three years ago)

fascinating! i've encountered scholarship on what i guess is the early phases of this, Ray and Charles Eames' work for corporate and government world's fair presentations in maybe the mid-60s...? iirc those would have maybe five or six projectors going, idk but feels like they must belong to the timeline...

― Doctor Casino, Monday, 26 December 2022 13:22 (three years ago)

very cool

― not too strange just bad audio (brimstead), Monday, 26 December 2022 17:48 (three years ago)

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