I've just finished the second draft of a poster I'm presenting to the British Society of Proteomic Research in a few weeks. This afternoon, I need to finish more powerpoint slides for a research proposal for an EU-funded grant and then, all of tomorrow, I need to sort through a few hundred powerpoint slides for the presentation I'm giving in Poland.
Have I mentioned just how much I hate powerpoint? I blame it for dumbing down audiences and completely destroying what skills I had at business writing.
While I was hunting around for an eastern European plug adaptop, I got caught up in a discussion about data submissions to large databases, such as PRIDE, IntAct, SwissProt and EMBL nucleotide. My conclusions, from purely personal experience, are:
– Even with the best documentation you can give them, people will not use it, or find ways to make a square peg fit a round hole. You need to say in excruciating detail what you need, and still then, be aware there's a high likelihood you won't get it. Or only partially. But the wrong parts.
– The best way to get data from people is to give them a document template, preferably in some sort of microsoft flavour. Everybody loves excel, even if it is evil. If you give them a tool they need to install, they won't. If you give them a complicated tool to use, they won't. People love spreadsheets, even if 3/4 of the information in it is redundant. Copy-paste is the best method to extract water from a stone.
Hiho, Hiho, it's off to powerpoint I go!