Life of a Lab Rat

A while back, while our honours students were in the throes of writing up and preparing for their thesis defences, I distributed a number of links that described how to give a scientific talk. One of the points that I emphasized was that Powerpoint (spit) should be used as a tool to put your slides in front of people, not as an end in itself with pretty but distracting purple fades and those bloody annoying transitions. Leave that crap, I said, to the corporate busybodies.

It seems that I may have misjudged the corporate SS. Badly.

My spy upstairs is on his way to a Collaboration Technologies Workshop on Friday. Lucky fellow. He distributed a Powerpoint (spit) file, that claims to be

intended to support the attendees of the collaboration technologies workshop on Friday 15th December 2006.
The pack contains slides and information from various IT research services – Gartner, The Burton Group and Ovum and aims to provide a common unbiased perspective on collaboration and associated technologies.

Corporate identity-wise, I was disappointed. There's a rather tasteful rendition of the University's logo in the top left hand corner of each slide, which are framed by a thin, blue line. Nice.

Why, in the name of all that is deletable, didn't they stop there? If ever there was a lesson in how not to make slides for a seminar, this Powerpoint (spit) file is it. I have a copy of the two and a half megabyte behemoth here, and that size is not from embedded pictures, oh no: Each slide is not a figure and/or three or four points; it's a veritable thesis. No aide-mémoire this, the words on the screen are what the speaker is going to say. There is that much text there.

The figures themselves are bizarre, badly-designed and I'm at a loss to know what some of them are trying to say. I could probably read the three hundred word legend alongside to find out, but I think I'd rather rip my own eyes out. You would not want me to suffer alone, would you? Good. Let me share my favourite with you, then:

Expected penetration rates of collaboration, eh? (I think I'm permitted a 'fnar' there. Fnar). Ignore the text (215 words. Really) for now and look at that picture. Beautiful, isn't it? You can see immediately what it's saying. That's right; something gets paler from left to right. No, look closer: The percentages change. (And is it just me who thinks that YE11 is a bloody stupid way of writing 2011? It's like Y2K+1 all over again. What's the point? You lose clarity, and when you lose clarity, you lose your audience and you may as well pack up and bugger off to the pub.) This is a perfect example — medics take note — of how to use colour to obscure data. There are so many ways to make that information instantly accessible. Bar charts. Colour shading. Scatter plots. About the only thing they could have done to make it worse is to have written the numbers out instead of using digits.

It is conceivable that this really is an "information pack", and that these slides will not be projected on the wall of a hot room full of sweaty, smelly corporate IT types. The actual presentations might be clear and accessible and thoughtful in their use of red and green. I can hope so. But I suspect otherwise. Spare a thought for my spy on Friday, and if you bump into him, for God's sake buy him a drink. He'll need it.