PowerPoint – the most misused tool in the world!
Death by PowerPoint – we’ve all experienced it: the dreadful, visually jarring, over-complex, long, boring PowerPoint presentation… Why is this amazing tool so horribly misused? I think there are 3 reasons that probably all come into play in varying degrees. This is a rant. Be warned!
Reason 1
People don’t take the time to learn how to use the tool properly. It’s a reasonably complex piece of software. There’s a certain learning curve involved in getting to know how to use it. People who make bad PowerPoint presentations are often those who don’t know how to use the tool properly in the first place, and aren’t really interested in learning… So why are they using it at all? Because they are also making the mistake in Reason 2 (q.v.)… But before we get there, if you don’t know how to drive, don’t get behind the wheel… A good spoken presentation with no visual supports is far better than a bad PowerPoint presentation!
Reason 2
People think that what’s on screen is the heart of the presentation. This is a guaranteed way to make weak and boring presentations. PowerPoint is a visual support for a spoken presentation. If the power goes out, the projector stops working or your laptop explodes you should be able to do the presentation anyway! Your presentation even with the visuals should work for people in the audience who are visually impaired. Sure, it might be less impressive, but the point is, the presentation is you speaking, the visuals are just there to provide support. If you have it the other way round, you are definitely heading into Death by PowerPoint territory….
One thing that really irks me when I am called upon to deliver a multimedia presentation is to be asked “Can we get a PDF?” No you bloody can’t! If my presentation worked as a printed document, then I would have just emailed it to you! My presentation is a spoken presentation with visual supports! Furthermore I take full advantage of PowerPoint’s features to assure what I call visual continuity (which I might explain in another post) which means things move. A PDF version of my presentation would be a meaningless series of unconnected static images, and would be missing most of the content, which is spoken.
If you can make a PDF of your PowerPoint, and that PDF works as a standalone printed document, then your presentation is boring and you are wasting everybody’s time by forcing them to sit there while you read it out (most likely with your back to the audience… another no-no). Email the thing as a document – that’s all it is. It’s not a presentation and has no business pretending to be one!
Reason 3
People who are mistaking the screen as the centre of the presentation then easily take the next step of cramming too much stuff onscreen. Too many words! The absolute worst version is filling the screen with text and then just reading it out! Kill me!
If you want me to read 10 pages of bullet points, send them to me in a document. I can read! And when I need to read something, I don’t project it on a screen and then squint at it from 4 meters away while someone else reads it out at a different speed! I have never understood what makes people think that doing this is anything other than an utterly ridiculous and insulting waste of everyone’s time!
So why use it at all?
That’s a really good question, which everyone should ask themselves before firing up PowerPoint in the first place! You don’t need it. People have stood up and conveyed information by speaking for thousands of years without multimedia supports.
So what’s the use of PowerPoint? Well, when well used, it can add a powerful additional visual dimension to a good presentation. We are a visually-dominated species: fully 1/3 of a sighted person’s brain is devoted to vision. Visual stimuli are evocative and memorable.
But text isn’t.
Text is visually pretty drab. PowerPoint gives you the opportunity to explore any kind of visual stimulus that you can trap in the small rectangle of screen real estate that you have to play with. You are already delivering the linguistic content by speaking it! Why waste your precious screen real estate by repeating those words up there in writing?? Makes no sense at all!
How engaging would Star Wars have been if George Lucas just projected the printed text of his screenplay page after page (and stood with his back to the audience reading it out)?? That’s what Death by PowerPoint is like.
Sure, a couple of key words on screen can be useful in focussing people’s thoughts and attention. But put too much up there, and your audience will either (a) ignore it, in which case you have wasted your screen space for nothing, and might as well not have used it at all, or (b) read it, in which case they are not listening to you, so you speaking has become redundant, and your whole “presentation” is in fact just a written document that you could have emailed and saved everyone the bother.
The takeaway: how to check if your PowerPoint is boring…
Ask yourself the following questions:
If the projector/screen stops working, will that prevent me from doing the presentation?
Will I have to look at the same screen as my audience in order to deliver my presentation?
Is everything I intend to say also written on screen?
Can I convert my presentation into a PDF file that would make sense on its own?
If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, then I’m not coming to your Death by Powerpoint! Just send me the PDF!