RIP Microsoft Clip Art – now you can fill your slides with web cat pics Anyone who has sat through as many biz presentations as the average Reg hack will have come to loathe clip art – as so many PHBs think adding a few duff images to a boring PowerPoint shows how hip they are with technology. Now Microsoft has announced it's binning the clip art collection at the heart of this mediocrity. And the …
I think clip art is a good thing for PowerPoint presentations. Yes, it is almost always utterly naff but it has the benefit of generally reducing the amount of space on the slide that is available to cover in text and bullet points.
In practice, you often just get a fuller page but the urge to add stick figures and handshakes and 8-bit signs and symbols sometimes results in breaking up what would otherwise be a wall of text.
Of course, it would be better if people just designed their slides better in the first place . . .
Except you just know instead they'll be replaced by poorly copied/cropped images which also now have strange and mysterious water-marks across them if you look closely enough.
Still I suppose such water-mark spotting and guessing where the images were ripped from could be a whole new PowerPoint game...
Just think of the man-hours that would be saved, first by the PHB's admins creating the stuff and then those that have to sit through 2 hours of slides for what would otherwise be a 10 minute meeting. And think of all the storage space that wouldn't be needed to store old PP slides.
But presumably it works for them - £800 million profit in 2013!
PowerPoint may well be the wrong tool; but sometimes using the "wrong" tool is better in terms of actual results. Have you ever tried to use actual project planning software? An utter nightmare unless you have a degree in project management.
It's the same principle as the reason a vast percentage of businesses run on Excel sheets for everything - it works as far as they need and doesn't have a million features they don't.
Slides done well - and yes, it's possible to do them well using Powerpoint, though arguments can be made for other tools - can be very useful and appealing. The problem isn't the tool; it's the people using it, who are generally untrained (and often foolish in the bargain), and don't devote sufficient time to the problem.
Getting rid of slide-presentation applications like Powerpoint wouldn't improve presentations. There are plenty of terrible speakers capable of droning on for a couple of hours without the assistance of visual aids.
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