Opinion: building a talk around the type of slide show common in most PowerPoint presentations is a profoundly bad idea
There are probably people who have never sat through a PowerPoint presentation, and have no idea how blessed they are. Most business meetings, classroom presentations and the like are built around a speaker who will project a series of images on the screen, often long bullet-point lists of information or data and drone on about what these slides have to say. The worst presenters will post large chunks of text and read them to you, but even very good presenters will bore you into a state of near somnambulance with their presentations.
One of the main culprits is the ubiquitous piece of software called PowerPoint. There are competitors to this Microsoft product (such as Apple's Keynote presentation software), but all usually have the same features that make a PowerPoint presentation about as popular as a visit to the dentist for a root canal.
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From The Office, when PowerPoint goes bad
PowerPoint is part of the Microsoft Office suite of software that includes word processing and spreadsheet programs (Word and Excel), and often the Outlook email program. PowerPoint, Excel and Word dominate the market so thoroughly that it is almost certain that you will have used at least one of these programs if you use a computer for work or school. Originally developed by the software company Forethought Inc. in 1987, PowerPoint represented Microsoft’s first major acquisition.
Originally, it was used to produce overhead transparencies and its second version could produce 35mm slides. By 1992, PowerPoint could be used with both Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems to produce wholly digital presentations and the world has unfortunately not looked back since.
So what is the problem with PowerPoint presentations? It's not the software. PowerPoint and its competitors do what they are designed to do well. The problem is that building a talk around the type of slide show common in most PowerPoint presentations is a profoundly bad idea.
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From TEDxStockholmSalon, David JP Phillips on how to avoid death by PowerPoint
First of all, a talk built around a set of slides will take on a structure that inhibits learning and breeds boredom. Most presenters do a spectacularly bad job of assembling PowerPoint presentations because they follow templates and examples that encourage a method of presentation that just does not work. Any type of slide show is likely to channel presentations into a particular structure, where information is divided into discrete bits and where there is a strict linear follow from point to point.
There are two problems with this type of presentation. First, this linear, point-by-point style of presenting information is grossly inefficient, and it has little to do with how we process and learn new information. At its worst, a PowerPoint presentation can turn a cogent argument into a deeply boring and disconnected set of slides; the reworking of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a PowerPoint presentation is unforgettably depressing. Second, this type of presentation is deeply boring in part because of its strict linear structure. Like a bad movie, a bad PowerPoint presentation is highly predictable, and audience members find themselves thinking "just get on with it" throughout the presentation.
The structural problems with building a presentation around a slide show are compounded by the fact that so many people do such a bad job preparing PowerPoint presentations. If you type "worst powerpoint slides ever" into a search bar, you will open a gold mine of bad ideas and, worse, good ideas presented badly.
From Rachel Willis, 5 tips for delivering a great online presentation
The list of ways PowerPoint slides can go wrong is long, but the usual problems include too much text, choices of colors for fonts and backgrounds that make it very difficult to read the text, superimposing text over images in ways that make both hard to process and overdoing animation. The task of presenting complex ideas, such as the timeline for a project, seems to bring out the worst in PowerPoint presenters, who allow silly or irrelevant artwork to dominate their slides.
Edward Tufte, the wizard of visualisation has strongly criticised PowerPoint for the way it channels thinking and stifles curiosity, but he has also suggested many ways of improving these presentations. First, kill the bullet points; where this is not possible, minimize them. Second, let the visuals tell the story. Consider Charles Joseph Minard's masterful depiction of Napoleon’s invasion of and retreat from Russia. The size of the invading army is shown in brown, and its losses as it progresses toward Moscow are apparent. The diminishing size of the retreating army is shown in black; the comparison between the starting and ending points of this campaign are stark and heartbreaking
Third, keep slides simple and visually interesting and informative. Tufte's books and papers show numerous examples of "chartjunk", irrelevant artwork that distracts rather than illuminating. Finally, if at all possible, turn off the projector. If you cannot do a clear and compelling talk without showing slides, that is often a sign that it will not be clear and compelling with slides. To be sure, a picture or two can sometimes help but, once you have learned to do without PowerPoint slides, you will wonder why you ever used them.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
