Microsoft PowerPoint: Difference between revisions
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[[PowerPoint]] is an application for fools and dilettantes. Serious people have no truck with it. | Microsoft [[PowerPoint]] is an application for fools and dilettantes. Serious people have no truck with it. | ||
No novel in history, no play, no acerbic letter — no creative thought of any substance at all — has ever first put its squealing voice in the cupped ear of the world only but for the ministrations of | No novel in history, no play, no acerbic letter — no creative thought of any substance at all — has ever first put its squealing voice in the cupped ear of the world only but for the ministrations of [[PowerPoint]]. | ||
PowerPoint is the market-standard software package for dressing up fatuous ideas with profundity. On it, one generates “[[deck]]s” — animated presentations one inflicts on powerless underlings in order to promise much and deliver little. | PowerPoint is the market-standard software package for dressing up fatuous ideas with profundity. On it, one generates “[[deck]]s” — animated presentations one inflicts on powerless underlings, in order to promise much and deliver little, and to guileless superiors, in order to deceive them into believing you have something useful to add to the organisation. The collective delusions PowerPoint can create are quite pervasive. | ||
In the hands of an individual gifted in | In the hands of an individual gifted in [[middle management]], [[PowerPoint]] can turn base metal into fool’s gold. | ||
But you knew that already. More interesting is PowerPoint’s central role in the development of the modern business dialect, [[management speak]]. PowerPoint’s linguistic foundation comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but a supplemental lexicon of wingdings, pull-outs, bullets and animated transitions through which one can communicate in ways previously alien to the Indo-European tradition. This makes [[management speak]] a sort of base sixteen to ordinary English’s decimal; an illegitimate off-spring of our historical linguistic traditions and perhaps the first genuinely new dialect to emerge since the Latin five thousand years ago. | But you knew that already. More interesting is PowerPoint’s central role in the development of the modern business dialect, [[management speak]]. PowerPoint’s linguistic foundation comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but a supplemental lexicon of wingdings, pull-outs, bullets and animated transitions through which one can communicate in ways previously alien to the Indo-European tradition. This makes [[management speak]] a sort of base sixteen to ordinary English’s decimal; an illegitimate off-spring of our historical linguistic traditions and perhaps the first genuinely new dialect to emerge since the Latin five thousand years ago. | ||
Revision as of 14:46, 17 May 2017
Microsoft PowerPoint is an application for fools and dilettantes. Serious people have no truck with it.
No novel in history, no play, no acerbic letter — no creative thought of any substance at all — has ever first put its squealing voice in the cupped ear of the world only but for the ministrations of PowerPoint.
PowerPoint is the market-standard software package for dressing up fatuous ideas with profundity. On it, one generates “decks” — animated presentations one inflicts on powerless underlings, in order to promise much and deliver little, and to guileless superiors, in order to deceive them into believing you have something useful to add to the organisation. The collective delusions PowerPoint can create are quite pervasive.
In the hands of an individual gifted in middle management, PowerPoint can turn base metal into fool’s gold.
But you knew that already. More interesting is PowerPoint’s central role in the development of the modern business dialect, management speak. PowerPoint’s linguistic foundation comprises not just the traditional Roman alphabet but a supplemental lexicon of wingdings, pull-outs, bullets and animated transitions through which one can communicate in ways previously alien to the Indo-European tradition. This makes management speak a sort of base sixteen to ordinary English’s decimal; an illegitimate off-spring of our historical linguistic traditions and perhaps the first genuinely new dialect to emerge since the Latin five thousand years ago.
Adeptness at PowerPoint, the willingness to tinker around to get snappy slide transitions and the like, is a core skill of an aspiring middle manager (and a quick way to pick up the fundamental syntax of this new idiom).