Death by .ppt!

[picklesuit]

My goal as the newly minted GSO is to never be the deliverer of a .ppt brief...I'm not holding my breath...but dammit I'll try!

 

[BACONATOR]

In HSC land circa 2007, "tactical" briefs were done with a whiteboard. Which later changed to a single Powerpoint slide instead of information on the whiteboard. Which then changed to having a couple extra slides on the ppt to "illustrate the situation." Before I left in late '09, this had ballooned to 100+ slide behemoths for a two-hour, two-ship hop.

It's like mission creep - as soon as you agree to extra, people start shoehorning in all kinds of crap.

Yeah, the few level 3 briefs I sat in on and got to see were around 75 slides. It's almost masochism because if it's anything less, there will be a LOT of debrief from the IPs, but it's painful to sit through an hour of straight PPT.

 

[Schnugg]

Spaghetti brief in question....I dare you to make sense of this mess...

 

[BACONATOR]

My eyes are bleeding.

 

[UF_ME]

and here I thought that the military had color vision requirements for signaling and navigation purposes...

 

[nittany03]

Spaghetti brief in question....I dare you to make sense of this mess...

Or the quote from GEN McChrystal to the effect of "once we understand that slide, we've won the war."

 

[zippy]

remember deploying without computers?...coupla boxes of Navflirs, MAFS, and viola!
end reminiscence...resume adult beverage consumption...

Today its:

OOMA, SHARP entry, ASAP, PQS electronic grade sheets, PQS electronic tracker, Tactical reports, QMcubed etc etc etc...

 

[ea6bflyr]

Must be an ARMY slide. Those guys tend to OVERCROWD their PPT slide. UHG!!

-ea6bflyr

 

[phrogpilot73]

White boards, dry erase markers, and briefing from memory. Learn it, live it, be more knowledgeable for it.

Can I hug you?

I HATE the movement towards PPT for flight briefs. I blame MAWTS-1. When I was a youngin' coming up, we used overhead projectors and flip charts. Now I use a map and the whiteboard.

 

[CWJones411]

Spaghetti brief in question....I dare you to make sense of this mess...

It looks like a chart of ocean currents.

 

[LazersGoPEWPEW]

You mean your senior officer briefs sucked so bad the XO and Skipper were falling asleep? :mischievo

And I read the article. It sounds like a lot of people suck at PPT. I like to use it for visuals only and leave the info to my voice. But I had that hammered into my by an old boss at GE.

We never did senior officer briefs. Go figure.

 

[CommodoreMid]

Is using PPT standard in most places for flight briefs, tracoms too? In the VTs we just used white boards (except for the intermediate guys, who I'm pretty sure just used PPT to highlight turnpoints on VNAV routes, but I figure that's acceptable) and in VP-30 land we read off our checklists. Really not looking forward to putting the NAVCOMM brief on a slide if that's how it works in the fleet...

 

[zippy]

Is using PPT standard in most places for flight briefs, tracoms too? In the VTs we just used white boards (except for the intermediate guys, who I'm pretty sure just used PPT to highlight turnpoints on VNAV routes, but I figure that's acceptable) and in VP-30 land we read off our checklists. Really not looking forward to putting the NAVCOMM brief on a slide if that's how it works in the fleet...

It's not... plan on arriving to the brief 2 hours early to write everything on the board for your upgrading flights.

 

[SynixMan]

We never did senior officer briefs. Go figure.

Weak. Shamelessly stolen from my buddy in spy (intel) school: This is my PPT. I must master it as I must master my life. My PPT, without me, stands on its own, actually. Without my PPT, I am useless. I must brief true. I must brief louder than the audience is snoring at me. I will....

 

[NavAir42]

I'm glad that powerpoint isn't something that's caught on, at least around my squadron. A white board for the TACCO, a brief checklist for when you start out (it aint all that hard to memorize after you've done a few) and you're good to go. Maybe we not "tactical" enough to need to ignore 100 powerpoint slides.