Sweating Bullets

Albeit it could use some editing and a more refined narrative, Sweating Bullets is a well-told memoir of the invention of PowerPoint. The framing is an excellent start-up success story with all the troubles and missteps which are to be expected. Where PowerPoint is today almost synonymous with “slide presentations”, the program had its humble beginnings as a tool for making overheads.

Gaskins should be admired for the clarity of his thoughts regarding what PowerPoint is, despite the fact that his peers did not see the viability of something like PowerPoint, when it was pitched. It is hard to articulate what this essence is, since the paradigm which PowerPoint popularized is so ubiquitous now. To give the right context, Gaskins lays out the landscape of creating and delivering presentations in the years before PowerPoint. This part alone makes the book worthwhile for appreciating how laborious slideshows were — and how widely used they were despite the effort required. It is with this insider knowledge that Gaskins distills the requirements of PowerPoint: 1. create overheads, 2. create 35 mm slides, 3. create video presentations. And doing so in a direct manipulation graphical interface where each slide is an individual “page” to lay out.

The end of the book briefly discusses the legacy of PowerPoint. The most illuminating point here is that Gaskins is very much in agreement with Edward Tufte’s scathing critique, albeit shifting the blame from PowerPoint to the presentations themselves. Gaskin argues that the ubiquity of “video” presentations has robbed us from the distinct purposes of the former modes of presentation.