Thomas James points out this little article from Government Executive:

The biggest lesson, Roe said, is to curb the practice of "PowerPoint engineering." The Columbia report chided NASA engineers for their reliance on bulleted presentations. In the four studies, the inspectors came to agree that PowerPoint slides are not a good tool for providing substantive documentation of results. "We think it's important to go back to the basics," Roe said. "We're making it a point with the agency that engineering organizations need to go back to writing engineering reports."

Thomas wonders if there will be slides available of the report...

This is not just a problem for NASA--in my recent experience of the past couple years (in which I've fallen off the "recovering engineer" wagon and done some consulting for both large and small companies), it's endemic in industry as well (partly because contractors come to reflect their customer's culture). Back in the olden days, when I was a technical supervisor, I was a stickler for well-written technical memoranda. Now they don't even seem to exist, let alone exist in a useful form, and few engineers seem to know how to write any more.

I absolutely agree that this is a major problem in the industry, but it's not going to change until upper management decides to make it happen, and unfortunately, being upper management, they'll probably remain addicted to briefing charts, and not even understand the problem. We've forgotten how to write, and they've forgotten how to read.

As a new hire at TRW I wrote some good reports, some of which I still have around as references. I couldn't get anyone to read them. Finally I gave up. The guy who inherited my role after I transferred out of there has a pile of powerpoint slides with excel spreadsheets containing the raw data and analysis. Plus my new phone number. I wish him luck.

I swear by all that I hold Good and Holy, if I ever reach a position where I can, I _will_ ban the use of PowerPoint in my organization.

Yea this is problem for helpdesk support training also. One department develops and implements a new peice of software. Its then laid on the laps of the helpdesk to support. So naturally the helpdesk techs asks for the relevant technical details and a training meeting or two about the application so the support technicians can fix it when it breaks. More often than not the only training that occurs is in the form of a powerpoint presentation with some screen shots and nifty little descriptions that fly in from off the edge of the slide.

Powerpoint is to technical writing as email is to personal correspondence.

The problem I have is, the alternative (Word) is infinitely worse. I've been using Word for over six years now, and it's still a rare occasion when I work with it and don't end up in a screaming fit of rage. For all the flaws in how people choose to use it, at least Powerpoint behaves itself.

I work at JSC and we just had an all day class on Friday by Edward Tufte from Yale to teach us how to present data.

His points were interesting, but I agree that the folks up top determine what kind of content shows up during briefings.

Of course, it doesn't matter what form your thoughts are captured in, if you haven't really thought something through.

My two cents,
Mike

T.L. James
"The problem I have is, the alternative (Word) is infinitely worse. I've been using Word for over six years now, and it's still a rare occasion when I work with it and don't end up in a screaming fit of rage. For all the flaws in how people choose to use it, at least Powerpoint behaves itself."

But that's _not_ the only alternative to PowerPoint. I've had good luck using a simple outlining tool for some technical briefings.

If you need to draft text, I know guys who use EMACS, LaTEX and so on. Screaming fits are optional.

Theres actually a strong case to be made against WYSIWYG text editing like Word.
http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/wp.html#tth_sEc2.2

Powerpoint is a much over used tool. I personally prefer a limited number of slides and a more "chalk and talk" approach to presentations (I work in consultancy services sales for a major wireless IT company). *But*, sadly the customer often dictates this and a powerpoint "meme" has grown up. Even to the extend that I'm being asked for Business Proposals done entirely in Powerpoint.

For a complex project that's just not adequate. Still, it beats printing transparencies and using an OHP.

When I worked with engineers the thing that disturbed me is that secretary became a dirty word. Instead engineers wasted time with word processing and became their own secretaries. A huge mistake it seems to me.

Content and presentation are two very different things.

Please note that gender is not relavent to the above.

...engineers wasted time with word processing and became their own secretaries...

"Wasted time with word processing"? I'm sorry, Ken, but that's absurd, at least for someone who, like me, types sixty plus words a minute.

No, what would have been a waste of time was to laboriously write something out in indecipherable long hand, with associated writer's cramp, hand it to the secretary, wait for her to get around to typing it up, red line it for corrections, hand it back, etc.

I did that for the very early part of my career, and I was extremely unproductive. If I hadn't gotten a word processor (bought my first computer myself and got permission to bring it into the plant), I would have had much less success in my career as an engineer. I'd certainly not be able to write as much as I do. When I have to write by hand, the medium gets in the way of the message, but when I have a keyboard, my thoughts just appear on the screen with no effort.

Ken Anthony
"When I worked with engineers the thing that disturbed me is that secretary became a dirty word."

Two issues at play here.

1. Costs. Aministrative staff are usually seen as excess when budgets are tight.

2. Automation. A great deal of what a secretary did in the past can be done better and cheaper using automated tools - word processing, presentation graphics etc, as Rand noted. I doubt we could go back to the days of the 'typing pool' nor would we want to.

Unfortunately, in large system engineering projects (like the space program and missile defense), the Word documents end up being literally *thousands* of pages. The 'executive summary' will be dozens and dozens of pages. Everyone up the food chain wants actionable decision material RIGHT NOW. (As if, in a program that will inevitably stretch over a number of years, anything could possibly be that urgent...) In many cases they can't even be bothered to look at the bullets, they just want to hit the 'take away' point that the bottom of the chart. And the engineers have to turn right around and do yet another slight variation of some calculation they've done ad nauseum already. (Even though many of these repeats are due to some head cheese -- that's a combo head-honcho and big-cheese -- took a single chart, put it into another briefing where the chart was without context, got chewed out for 'bad analysis', and reams the engineers for their 'flawed analysis'.) Anyway, the engineers often don't even have time to produce charts w/ facing page text, much less do a proper job of writing their results up in a format that forces them to seriously think about what it is they are doing, and why, and how best to convey it. As a physicist trapped in a system engineering environment, it frustrates me to no end to hear the engineers complain about the quality of the product the managers make them produce (now that I'm in a cube farm, I see that Dilbert is painfully accurate), but yet when I displayed the referenced article, all roundly denounced it. Apparently they see no other alternative to convey detailed information.

- Eric.

A .PPT can contain lots of detailed information. I've done some with the equations, elaborate graphs, and (if the graph was an embedded .xls) the raw data. Those were the slides that got cut from the presentation for being "too detailed."

The boss gets all the technical data he asks for. If he doesn't want any he won't get any. Powerpoint is a symptom.

someone has said that "documentation is like sex. when it's good, it's very good, and when it's bad, it's better than nothing."

powerpoint is a tool that allows someone to prepare and use one type of documentation for communicating with a larger audience than the few people who might read an entire design document.

someone remarked here on a preference for "chalk and talk." how much can be written on the board? what can be written on the board that cannot be typed into powerpoint beforehand?

someone else has remarked here that "powerpoint is a symptom." i would modify that remark to say that "bad powerpoint is a symptom."

powerpoint is a tool that can be used to communicate almost any conceivable information. that communication can be done badly or it can be done well. the same thing can be said of the technical memorandum.

in my classrooms, where i teach orbital mechanics, attitude dynamics and control, and spacecraft design, i use a combination of chalkboard, transparencies, handouts, text, and, yes, powerpoint. these tools complement one another nicely, and powerpoint has some significant advantages over the others, especially its reusability.

my $0.02