Borikén Offislander

Published in The New Yorker 9/29/2003
by Alex Gregory

On February 1, 2003, the space shuttle Columbia exploded upon reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere.  The subsequent investigation found that, “that the NASA organizational culture had as much to do with the accident as the foam that struck the Orbiter on ascent.” Part of the problematic culture, it turned out, was PowerPoint.

Prior to the launch, groups of NASA engineers sat around tables, looking at PowerPoint slides like the one below, and failed to comprehend that “test data” didn’t include scenarios that the shuttle’s tiles would experience upon liftoff. Looking at the slide, how could anyone comprehend anything that the slide is trying to communicate?

”a Power-Point festival of bureaucratic hyper-rationalism.”

Five years later, another PowerPoint slide made the rounds as an example of the futility of information overload.

We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint

The slide has been cited as “an example of a military tool that has spun out of control.” Once again, the capacities of a slideshow software had been outstripped by the intent to shrink and crop a complex message into a bunch of broken phrases, none of them meaning anything. If my message still isn’t getting through to you, here are a couple of links that list the worst ways to use PowerPoint.

• The 10 Biggest PowerPoint Mistakes and How to Avoid Them
• How to Create Presentations that Don’t Suck
• How NOT to use PowerPoint

What makes a good PowerPoint presentation?  Simple: simplicity in design.

The “Look and Feel” of a PowerPoint template

There is one other BIG MISTAKE people make when creating a PowerPoint presentation: they open up a new, blank presentation and immediately start pouring and dumping content into the slides left and right, up and down, without taking a moment, or even an hour, to focus on what message is to be conveyed in their presentation. If you don’t know what you want to say, your PowerPoint slides will convey exactly that message.

Think about what your presentation is going to be about, and then ask yourself what the slides should look like without anything on them. If your answer is nothing but blank white space, think again. What color would you associated with your message? Should the text look grandiose, like something the Romans would chisel onto a marble column? Or playful cursive letters mimicking how children speak? Don’t be afraid to take some time thinking about what your background, ortemplate, should look like.

Templates include objects that will appear on each slide of your presentation. Let’s look at some examples of PowerPoint templates from the following website:

slideworld search engine

So what elements make up a PowerPoint template?  A color background, simple graphic, and text container are the basic components you should think about designing before typing in your words of wisdom and pretty pics. Let’s look at how to build these pieces into a good template.

Opening up a blank PowerPoint template

Let’s start from scratch.

1. Open up PowerPoint
2. Click on File | New, and double click on the ‘Blank Presentation’ icon.
   I strongly recommend only using the blank presentation template.
   That way you have total control over what your template will look like.
3. Create 3 blank slides, using the Ctrl-m hotkey.  You will see the slides on the left column of the PowerPoint window.
4. Again, before you start typing away, or cut-and-pasting content into your slide, begin designing your template by working with the Slide Master.
5. Right click on the first slide, select the ‘Layout’ option, and click on the ‘Title Slide’ option.  Right click on the second slide, and select the ‘Title and Content’ option.  Right click on the third slide and select the ‘Blank’ option.

THESE ARE THE ONLY LAYOUTS YOU SHOULD USE IN YOUR PRESENTATIONS!

Think about what goes on a PowerPoint slide.  Some slides are introductions about what is to come in the presentation.  These are Title Slides.  Other slides are text summaries of information you want to convey to your audience.  These are Title and Content slides.  And finally, there are slides that are predominantly graphics based, like the old 35mm Kodak Carousel slide projector shows.  These are created from Blank slides.

Now it’s time to turn those three boring black on white template slides into something more expressive of the message you want to communicate to your audience.

Color Backgrounds

Let’s start by seeing how you can add color to your slides with just a few clicks of the mouse.  When you want to make simple changes to all of your slides, the way to do it is to work with the “background” of the slide.  Let’s see how that works.

1. Right click on the Blank slide, and select the ‘Format Background’ option.
2. Click on the fill color drop down option.
3. Click on one of the Theme or Standard colors.
4. Click on the ‘Apply to All’ button.

Now, all three slides have the color you specified.  But the stupid Microsoft colors aren’t the colors you will want to use in most presentations.  So let’s get a little deeper into color models.

1. Format Background and click on the fill color drop down option again.
2. Click on ‘More Colors…’
3. You now have two tabs to work with: Standard and Custom.  Clicking on any color on the standard color map will make your background that color.  The Custom tab, the one you should use to find the exact color you desire, requires some additional explanation.

 Setting Your Font Styles

Once you have chosen the fonts you like, follow these steps to include them in your PowerPoint template.

1. Click on either the Title slide or Title and Content slide.
2. On the menu bar, click on View | Slide Master.
3. Your slide will now have the words, ‘Click to edit Master title styles.  Right click on a text box, and select the ‘Font’ option.
4. Click on the ‘Latin text-font’ drop down menu, and select the font of your choice.
5. You can also change the color of the font (remember the color palettes) by clicking on the ‘Font Color’ drop down button.
6. Once you are done editing your Slide Master, click on View | Normal to return to your regular slides.

Homework Assignment #3

1. Think about a PowerPoint presentation (4-5 slides only) you would like to do, most importantly, what message do you want your audience to come away with.
2. Visualize in your mind what you would like your slides to look like, to help communicate the message you want to give the audience.
3. Click through a bunch of the PowerPoint template links on the right side of this page, and try to find some templates that are close to the “look and feel” you want for your template.
4. Use the color palettes to find 3-4 complementary colors you would like to use for your PowerPoint template.
5. Use the font links to find 1-2 fonts you would like to use for your PowerPoint template. (These last two steps were Homework Assignment #2).
6. Upload your PowerPoint slides to your boricuablog account.

Please take some time to work out in your mind what you want your PowerPoint presentation to look like — if you make it really shiny now, you can impress your facilitator with your own presentations in colloquium, without doing more than a few touchups on the presentation you create for this homework assignment.