There’s Something About PowerPoint

Posted by Allen Baird, Partner on Oct 2, 2009 in communication | 4 comments

Did you know that August this year saw the 25th anniversary of Microsoft PowerPoint?  I can sense the yawns already…

To honour this great event, the BBC New Magazine knocked up a few interesting articles  by way of sharing the boredom.  The first was called The problem with PowerPoint, which contains a nine slide PowerPoint presentation – geddit? – on the history of the development of this piece of software.  It also provides a presentation guru’s perspective on the weaknesses of PowerPoint, at least in terms of how it is usually used.

There problems include:

• The screens are magnets for everyone’s eyes, negating all important eye-contact between speaker and audience
• Reading and listening distracts the audience and adds to the monotony by removing surprise
• Slides often function as notes and verbal crutches rather than visual aids
• The amount of material in an average presentation leads to information overload
• Bullet points are a poor substitute for visual aids

In the interests of fair-play, that famous BBC value (he said ironically), another article collected the thoughts of readers on Your PowerPoint highs and lows.  The worse of these was someone whose entire office was made redundant by PowerPoint, and another in which a senior executive did a stand-up turn at a Christmas dinner with every joke in bullet-point form!  The pain, the pain…

The best were the ones where presenters used cartoons and other graphics, or had one word per slide.  For my money, one of the best uses of PowerPoint I’ve seen was by a guy called Tim Lee, a former scientist who now does stand-up comedy using PPT.  See him in action here and here.

Confession time – I use PowerPoint alot and I have not always done so in the most effective way.  But I’m keen to improve, so I’m taking a course next month on ‘Advanced Presentations Using Microsoft PowerPoint’.  Hopefully I’ll get a few tips.

Here are a few articles I’ve read on PPT best practice and alternatives to it that I think are worth a read.

Steve Jobs & Guy Kawasaki – PowerPoint Best Practices

Teach Students Alternative Uses For PowerPoint

What Are The Best Fonts for Making PowerPoint Presentation Slides

PowerPoint Alternatives: Different Tools For Spicing Up Your Presentations

I’m especially interested in hearing about your experiences with PowerPoint alternatives.  Anyone?  The best one we’ve come across recently can be seen in the embedded Prezi presentation above.