Introduction
As part of the Microsoft
Office suite,
PowerPoint is familiar to a large percentage of the population as a
widely used visual aid to presentations. Anyone who has
attended
a University lecture or business seminar, proposal, or budget will have
seen what PowerPoint is capable of, and most people will have used it
to assist their own talks at some point in time. Subsequently
it’s capabilities are fairly well known. It is a
program
that generates slides to reinforce the points that the speaker is
making and complement the speech with the use of photos, illustrations,
graphs, tables and diagrams. It is the diagram element that
is of
particular use to information architects – although the
presentation aspect cannot be disregarded, as information architects
still have to sell their services.
Microsoft’s PowerPoint is generally regarded as a
presentation
tool, rather than an Information Architecture tool, yet it is quite
clearly listed by Morville and Rosenfeld (2007, p. 359) as a form of
diagramming software. Their rationale for this is that it is
a
“visual communication tool that information architects use to
create work products and deliverables, particularly blueprints and
wireframes”.
The official Power Point website, to a certain degree, reinforces the
perception of the software as a presentation device. The
first
headlined section of the page listing the features of the product is
devoted to the ability to create dynamic presentations, including the
claim in the second paragraph that users can “easily create
relationship, workflow, or hierarchy diagrams”
(“Microsoft
Office PowerPoint 2007 product overview”, 2008).
Continue
reading, and further down the page an image is shown displaying
evidence that the new formatting tools can create more powerful
diagrams. Bearing in mind that this website is designed to
sell
the product, it still makes a good case for using PowerPoint for visual
aids such as those required by information architects.
Like any other type of software, there are pros and cons for using
PowerPoint, which even it’s creator will admit. In
an
interview, Robert Gaskins maintains that a “PowerPoint
presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick
summary of something longer and better thought
out”.
(Gomes, 2007) He goes on to suggest that within the business
world, many people don’t prepare the full documentation
required
anymore, but instead, simply put together a PowerPoint presentation,
which misses a lot of the detail.
Uses of PowerPoint in Information Architecture
"A study conducted
by the
Information Architecture Institute in
2006
has proven that PowerPoint is indeed used as a presentation tool by
information architects. The study also found that 8 % of
information architects used PowerPoint to perform information
architecture work, with 7.1 % using PowerPoint as a diagramming tool.
(Information Architecture Institute, 2006)
The survey results are supported by Dan Brown (2002), who maintains
that there are two ways for information architects to use
PowerPoint. These are:
- For short reports
- For simple website documentation
In each instance he advises using a minimum number of slides to illustrate the point being made. If writing a short report, he advises keeping the text simple and concise. For website documentation he suggests that PowerPoint is best used for small datasets and when low cost is a factor.
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