Quotes & Sayings About Powerpoint

If you like overheads, you'll love PowerPoint. — Edward Tufte

PowerPoint presentations, the cesspool of data visualization that Microsoft has visited upon the earth. PowerPoint, indeed, is a cautionary tale in our emerging data literacy. It shows that tools matter: Good ones help us think well and bad ones do the opposite. Ever since it was first released in 1990, PowerPoint has become an omnipresent tool for showing charts and info during corporate presentations. — Clive Thompson

It is very telling what we don't hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: "The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president." Or: "He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure." Or: "She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day." Or: "He never made it to his kid's Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time." Or: "While she didn't have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night." Or: "His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared." Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. — Arianna Huffington

PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it. — Peter Norvig

Humans simply aren't moved to action by 'data dumps,' dense PowerPoint slides, or spreadsheets packed with figures. People are moved by emotion. The best way to emotionally connect other people to our agenda begins with Once upon a time — Jonathan Gottschall

If anything, Powerpoint, if used well, would ideally reflect the way we think. — Steven Pinker

On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they'd given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It's not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world's. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. (24) — Richard Powers

Using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table. — Peter Norvig

As we're told that 10 percent of all high school education will be computer-based by 2014 and rise to 50 percent by 2019, and as the PowerPoint throws up aphoristic bromides by the corporate heroes of the digitally driven 'global economy'
the implication being that 'great companies' know what they're doing, while most schools don't
and as we're goaded mercilessly to the conclusion that everything we are, know, and do is bound for the dustbin of history, I want to ask what kind of schooling Bill Gates and Steve Jobs had. Wasn't it at bottom the very sort of book-based, content-driven education that we declare obsolete in the name of their achievements? — Garret Keizer

It's the same thing that makes all pop music so heartbreaking. Even when Miley Cyrus sings "So I put my hands up, they're playin' my song / The butterflies fly away / I'm noddin' my head like 'Yeah!' / Movin' my hips like 'Yeah!'" in her song "Party in the U.S.A." It's that chirping mirth against a backdrop of despair, that juxtaposition of blithe optimism against all the crushing brutalities and inadequacies of life. The image of an ineffably beautiful butterfly flitting by the shattered windows of a dilapidated, abandoned factory is not so poignant because it highlights the indomitable life force. To the contrary, the butterfly (and the pop song) is like a PowerPoint cursor; it's there to whet our perception of and strengthen our affinity for what's moribund, for what's always dying before our eyes. Loving the moribund is our way of signaling the dead from this shore: "We are your kinsmen ... — Mark Leyner

There are a lot of things wrong with this particular approach to getting your girlfriend to agree to reenter a relationship with you. Probably the biggest problem is that it's a PowerPoint presentation. — Katie Heaney

occurrence - yet the rarer the event, the more confident these "scientists" involved in predicting, modeling, and using PowerPoint in conferences with equations in multicolor background have become. — Anonymous

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation. — James Gleick

Did you know that Jeff Bezos, in place of PowerPoint presentations in meetings, requires his execs to write six-page narrative memos? — Bryan Eisenberg

PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play - very loud, very slow, and very simple. — Edward Tufte

But forecasters often resist considering these out-of-sample problems. When we expand our sample to include events further apart from us in time and space, it often means that we will encounter cases in which the relationships we are studying did not hold up as well as we are accustomed to. The model will seem to be less powerful. It will look less impressive in a PowerPoint presentation (or a journal article or a blog post). We will be forced to acknowledge that we know less about the world than we thought we did. Our personal and professional incentives almost always discourage us from doing this. — Nate Silver

Launch your product or service before you have funding. See how people respond to it before you have a PowerPoint and business plan - have something people can use, and go from there. — Chad Hurley

Aw, bloody hell. Please tell me you're not making her a PowerPoint presentation. — Melissa McClone

Well-designed visuals do more than provide information; they bring order to the conversation. — Dale Ludwig

PowerPoint is like being trapped in the style of early Egyptian flatland cartoons rather than using the more effective tools of Renaissance visual representation. — Edward R. Tufte

I took Advanced PowerPoint last semester. You guys are always misunderestimating me. I'm totally ready to handle the big stuff. — Libba Bray

People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We've learned to use digital technology - laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet - as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we're at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. — Ken Robinson

Too many would-be beautiful businesses that could reinvent markets and create substantial value live only in PowerPoint documents, never to be launched. — Scott D. Anthony

Work hard, but make time for you love, family and friends. Nobody remembers powerpoint presentations on your final day — Chetan Bhagat

You wouldn't believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn't entirely human). However, this is the first time I've seen a Word document eat a man's soul. — Charles Stross

Computers thwart, contort, and befuddle us. We mess around with fonts, change screen backgrounds, slow down or increase mouse speed. We tweak and we piddle. We spend countless hours preparing PowerPoint slides that most people forget in seconds. We generate reports in duplicate and triplicate and then somw that end up serving only one function for most of the recipients - to collect dust. — Jeff Davidson

If you'd put it in a Powerpoint deck don't put it in your ad — Lee Clow

The most used program in computers and education is PowerPoint. What are you learning about the nature of the medium by knowing how do to a great PowerPoint presentation? Nothing. It certainly doesn't teach you how to think critically about living in a culture of simulation. — Sherry Turkle

I work intentionally to try and make dense, complex things. We can move between genres and forms, from something that looks like a PowerPoint lecture to something that looks like an informercial to something that looks like a cinematic melodrama. — Elizabeth Price

Sami and I had exactly one day together in the old world. On Tuesday the jihadists came to our front door and knocked down our buildings. Our new world was hijacked planes, anthrax, and Afghanistan. Then we had snipers inside the Beltway. Then came Iraq. With every military action we were told reprisals were not just probable, but a foregone conclusion. An intelligence officer with a fancy PowerPoint briefed teachers on 'our new reality.' He called us 'targets.' He said 'get used to it.' He told our Webmaster 'get off your ass' and remove bus routes/stops from the school's website. Johnny Jihad would find that information especially helpful if he decided to plow through our kids one morning as they stood half-asleep waiting for the school bus. — Tucker Elliot

Your slides should be a billboard not a document! — Lee Jackson

Let me just say that, if you ever have the choice of putting your words in powerpoint or having them carved into 30-foot high marble, I'd say go for the marble. — Peter Norvig

In business presentations, positive impressions can help make a sale or win over an audience. — Ian Lamont

Al Gore has a hit movie called 'An Inconvenient Truth.' I have an inconvenient truth for him: you're still not the president ... This past weekend, Al Gore's movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth,' earned more per screen than any film in the country ... I dare say Gore's movie is the highest grossing PowerPoint presentation in history ... Global warming: Can we live with it? ... It is time we did something, namely resign ourselves to doing nothing [on screen: Follow Congress' Lead] ... For instance, when sea levels rise, we'll just build levees [on screen: Worked for New Orleans] — Stephen Colbert

My best advice is to not start in PowerPoint. Presentation tools force you to think through information linearly, and you really need to start by thinking of the whole instead of the individual lines. — Nancy Duarte

You cannot switch teachers on and off as if they were PowerPoint presentations. — Andy Hargreaves

Critics can say what they like about the films, but very often, there's a certain expectation of documentaries that they're supposed to be like PowerPoint presentations. I see documentaries as movies. So when I see some critics writing that we could have done without the recreations altogether - well, perhaps. — Alex Gibney

It may sound as though she wants a simple PowerPoint presentation about the business, but if she's hoping to persuade a client of something, you'll want your slides to help do that. Be clear, too, about deadlines and who needs to be looped in on the project. — Kate White

I've got a PowerPoint deck that I use for internal presentations, and there's a slide on it that asks, 'What percentage of your game is combat versus exploration versus puzzle solving versus platforming,' and I refuse to answer that question. — Warren Spector

My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. — Peter Norvig

The Software You will have to buy Microsoft Office, which contains PowerPoint, or you can download the freeware OpenOffice, which contains Impress. Once you understand the basics of how to use these programs to create the book cover, you may prefer to use some other presentation software. Both — Jimmy Clay

Way to defuse a situation. It's tough to enjoy a good bloodbath in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation. — Nina Bangs

There are many true statements about complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide. — Edward Tufte

Was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed. — Scott Anderson

I was the type of person that would show a PowerPoint presentation about why I should do something versus crying and screaming over it. — Brie Larson

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface ... — Charles Stross

PowerPoint is the Rodney Dangerfield of software. It gets no respect. — Ken Goldberg

Powerpoint presentations are a kind of theater, a kind of augmented stand-up. Too often it's a boring and tedious genre, and audiences are subjected to the bad as well as the good. — David Byrne

Once I found her sitting straight up at the dining room table with her eyes half open, staring at nothing. When I touched her shoulder, she didn't even look at me. In spite of all this, or maybe because of it, I always smiled and said hi to her in the halls. I helped her with her English Lit homework and practically did her PowerPoint presentation on the New York Stock Exchange on the morning that it was due. Even so, whenever she saw me coming, she always looked away, like she knew how much crap people gave me about it - not my real friends; I'm talking about world-class losers like Dean Whittaker and Shep Monroe, rich jerks whose Fortune 500 dads swam the icy seas of international finance looking for their next meal. None of that bothered me. — Joe Schreiber

PowerPoint makes us stupid. — James Mattis

The resistance is the voice in your head telling you to use bullets in your PowerPoint slides ... It's the voice that tells you to leave controversial ideas out of the paper you're writing, because the teacher won't like them. The resistance pushes relentlessly for you to fit in. — Seth Godin

People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint. — Walter Isaacson

Paper and digital prototypes, PowerPoint mockups, personas, filmed user testimonials, and 3D printed objects can be used to build excitement, communicate vision, and share understanding. — Alden Globe

When I was 14 -years-old, I made this PowerPoint presentation, and I invited my parents into my room and gave them popcorn. It was called 'Project Hollywood 2004' and it worked. I moved to L.A. in January of 2004. — Emma Stone

Vitellius would've given Percy an hour-long lecture on the subject, probably with a PowerPoint presentation. — Rick Riordan

PowerPoint may not be of any use for you in a presentation, but it may liberate you in another way, an artistic way. Who knows. — David Byrne

If pitches were weapons, the majority would be B-1 Lancers or Navy Seals. The B-1 pitch is up in the clouds. It features a lot of hand-waving, cool PowerPoint animations, and use of terms such as strategic, partnerships, alliances, first-mover advantage, and patented technology. Typically, it's delivered by an MBA with a finance or consulting background. — Guy Kawasaki