A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away — the summer of 1987, to be precise, in the little village of Water Mill, New York, where I was spending the summer — I somehow found out about a small company called Forethought, which had a Mac-only product bearing the name “Powerpoint.” For someone who had just gotten his first Apple laser printer a few months earlier, and who was trying to create presentation slides without the familiar UNIX troff facility, Powerpoint was a gift from heaven. A couple years later, Forethought was acquired by Microsoft; a Windows version of Powerpoint appeared … and the rest is history.

Sometime in the mid-1990s, I recall seeing the first critical article about Powerpoint — in the Wall Street Journal, of all places. I haven’t been able to locate it in the WSJ archives, but I was amused by an anecdote in the article about kindergarten children who were bringing 40-megabyte Powerpoint presentations into school to describe their family’s summer vacation in “show and tell.” There was also an anecdote about a management consultant who lost her temper with her teenage kids, when they wouldn’t clean up their rooms or do their assigned chores. She announced that they would have to have a family meeting to discuss the problem; the teenagers howled, in unison, “Please, Mom, no Powerpoint presentations! We’ll clean our room!”

More recently, some really serious criticisms of Powerpoint have emerged; of these, perhaps the most significant is Edward Tufte’s essay, “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within.” While you’re at it, read Tufte’s essay, “Powerpoint does Rocket Science,” about the technical analysis of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. And for a more light-hearted assessment, read “How PowerPoint Is Like Melvin,” and Norvig’s spoof on how Lincoln would have used Powerpoint for the Gettysburg address. And you can get a good, comprehensive overview of the whole subject at Wikipedia’s page on Powerpoint.

So, if Powerpoint is so bad (or so vulnerable to misuse and abuse), what should we do? The most attractive alternative, in my opinion, is computer-supported mind-maps. The philosophical concept, and the graphical notation, of mind-maps has been around since the 1960s, and has been popularized by Tony Buzan, among others. And while it never required anything more than paper and pencil (take a look at Tom DeMarco’s home page for a nice example of a hand-drawn mind-map) for note-taking, it wasn’t very practical for presentations. But the world of manually drawn mind-maps really is from a time long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away. Now there are lots of computer-supported mind-mapping tools. All you need to need to do is type “mind map” into your Google search engine, and you’ll see a wide range of choices. For a more organized list of tools, check out the Wikipedia page; it lists both freeware and commercial products.

It’s one thing to use an automated tool to create a mind-map; after all, you could manage a clumsy imitation even in Powerpoint — not to mention Visio and various other drawing programs like OmniGraffle on the Mac. But if you’re going to use a mind-map for a presentation to a live audience of Powerpoint-addled zombies, you’ll need something that provides some animation and the equivalent of Powerpoint’s “build” mechanism — so you can “build” the mind-map, piece by piece, before the dazzled audience. That seems obvious, but it’s surprising to see how few of the available tools actually provide such support.

In early 2002, I found a reasonable solution: a product called ConceptDraw, from an Odessa (Ukraine)-based company with the same name. The basic product does the same thing as several other products, though it was reassuring to see that they had both a Windows and a Mac version. But what really made it attractive was a related program called ConceptDraw Presenter, which provides the aforementioned animation and “build” capabiities. Indeed, ConceptDraw provides support for MacroMedia Flash, as well as export to HTML; so it can be used to create interactive Web presentations, as well as the usual presentations before a live audience. Like all early-version products, ConceptDraw had its glitches and rough edges; and unfortunately, the company appears to have invested all of its resources in other drawing and diagramming tools; ConceptDraw Presenter has not been updated since 2002.

But now there’s another alternative — at least for us Mac enthusiasts. There’s a very nice mind-mapping tool called NovaMind, which supports both Mac and Windows; a new version came out a couple months ago, and bug-fix updates are released on almost a weekly basis.The graphics are very slick, and the output is very impressive … except for the lack of support for animation and build capabiities. NovaMind can export a mind-map to Powerpoint, but it comes across as one big, fat, bit-mapped image; you can’t really do anything useful with it in Powerpoint. However, it also exports its mind-maps into Apple’s new Keynote presentation program (including the new Keynote version-3); and that export can deconstructed into the various lines, boxes, and graphic elements of the mind-map, which can then be assigned animation and “build” properties with Keynote’s standard mechanisms.

One of the nice things about mind-maps for presentations is that they save trees: a Powerpoint presentation for, say, a one-hour presentation typically requires about 20 slides (using the rule of thumb that one slide takes three minutes to present); and I’ve seen fanatics with hundred-page presentations that they try (unsuccessfully) to cram into a manic one-hour talk. If you provide one copy of the handouts to every person in the audience, that’s a large pile of paper. It’s expensive, it’s clumsy, and it kills a lot of trees.

By contrast, a one-hour presentation with a mind-map typically takes one page; here, for example, is the mind-map that I’ve used for one-hour presentations about lawsuits associated with large software project failures (see details below on downloading the actual mind-map for this presentation). I can make a hundred copies at a modest cost, stick them into my briefcase, and everyone in the audience is happy that they don’t have to jam a large War and Peace-size document into their own briefcase. Yes, a fanatic can abuse this: most of the automated tools support “leveled” mind-maps, so you can have progressively more detailed mind-maps on separate pages. But it quickly becomes apparent that you can cram an enormous amount of detail into a mind-map on one page.

One last point: a typical 1-2 hour talk, on any technical subject, usually provides little more than an overview of the topic. There are always more details, and there’s often a long list of articles, books, and websites that can be consulted for additional information. A good speaker will typically mention this, and he/she may provide a list of such references, in textual form, in the handout document; but this is a nuisance for the audience, for they then have to retype all of those URLs into their own browser. Why not provide the lecture slides in electronic form, with the URLs embedded into the presentation? Powerpoint has supported that concept for a long time, but it basically means you have to provide the Powerpoint file to the attendees. In theory, you can’t even be sure that all attendees have access to Powerpoint (what if they’re using Linux?); and some presenters are too paranoid to distribute the Powerpoint file of what they regard as their own intellectual property.

Tools like ConceptDraw and NovaMind/Keynote provide an interesting alternative: export the presentation to a PDF file, with the hyperlinks preserved in the export. That file can be distributed to attendees, with much of the “creative” part of the presentation (especially the animation and build sequences) omitted; but the attendees can open the PDF file on their own computer (even on a Linux system!), and double-click the embedded URLs to access additional material recommended by the presenter. For example, the mind-map about software-related lawsuits, displayed above, was presented in November 2005 at the Boston chapter of the Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN); you can download the PDF file for that mind-map from here.

It would be nice if the ConceptDraw people got around to updating their ConceptDraw presenter product; in the meantime, the vintage-2002 product does work. But for the latest, slickest, sexiest software support for mind-map presentations, I heartily recommend the combination of NovaMind and Keynote. (And in case you need the reassurance, I have no commercial or business involvement with ConceptDraw, NovaMind, or Apple).

Meanwhile, sayonara Powerpoint. You were great back in 1987, and you carried me through the 1990s in reasonably good form. But things have changed, and it’s time to move on.