About TKKC

Being a public exposition of the most awful, most appalling, most boring and most overwhelming examples of poor, misguided and ridiculous use of the presentation software known as PowerPoint.

To submit examples for display on this blog please read the introduction.

Up and to the right; up and to the right is never wrong

Not exactly Don Draper

A small selection of slides from CannesLions 2011 (which is a festival for 'creative' people, i.e. the advertising and marketing industry).

This presenter just doesn't seem to have cared at all. Did they make this at 0300 while jetlagged?

Next up a presenter does some sort of wheel thing with colors and stuff.

I don't have any idea what's happening here. I think it's some sort of story.

And finally, someone saw some seaweed on the beach at Cannes.

Source: 100+ Beautiful Slides from CannesLions '11

Sedation Presentation

No, really, a presentation about sedation.

I bet you never thought you'd see the bullet point "Colonoscopy as a screening procedure gains popularity".

I'm feeling sleepy.

I guess this is something that doctors find fascinating. Also, I refuse to make a joke about the author's name being Doufas.

Pie chart. In 3D. At a bad angle. Exploded.

From: Chartered Institute of Management Accountants Insight magazine.

Safe! Fast! Painless!

Just like doing File -> Quit on PowerPoint really.

From: Heart Check America sales presentation.

Axes of Evil

In this PowerPoint slide showing reduction in forces in Iraq and their changing composition you get the impression that things are going to do down quickly. Then you take a look at the Y-axis and realize that the distance between 5 and 10 is not the same as the distance between 10 and 20. Then you look at the X-axis and realize it has no timings on it at all.

Credit: Edward Tufte discussion forum

There's nothing funny about war, but let's use Comic Sans anyway

A 100 slide PowerPresentation by the US Army entirely written using the comedy font Comic Sans.

I wish this were a joke.

Credit: Gizmodo article US Army Declares War on Vision, Aesthetics, and Sanity with 100 Slide Comic Sans Powerpoint

A National Intelligence Failure

A PowerPoint presentation from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the US got out onto the Internet. It contains many horrors.

Let's begin with an entire slide with a pie chart on it. Surely just a single number would have done here?

Also in the presentation is a wonderful slide with clip art versions of various problems:

And then the full horror is revealed. That slide may not look like much but in the actual presentation every single element on that slide is animated, using differnet animations (some sliding onto the page, some swirling in) and accompanied by sound: the sound made by the fairy Tinkerbell when she appears.

Credit: Slate article Spy Central Slip-up.

The Fog of War

No pithy comment here. This one's serious. Here's a US military slide mentioned in the New York Times article We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint:

“PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

Hat tip: tomcrowley.