Presentation Zen [4]
PowerPoint became popular in the 1990s, and by the year 2000 the use of the application was ubiquitous in businesses and schools across the globe. But all was not good. It was around this time, in fact, that the term “Death by PowerPoint” began to be tossed around. In 2001, marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin—who’s seen more bad presentations than any man should be subjected to—had had enough. Seth decided he’d try to make a difference. So he wrote a 10-page e-book called Really Bad PowerPoint that he sold on Amazon for $2 (money went to charity), and it became the best-selling e-book of the year.
“PowerPoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer, but it’s not,” Seth said. “It’s actually a dismal failure. Almost every PowerPoint presentation sucks rotten eggs.” Visual communications guru Edward Tufte, who has written some wonderful books on the proper ways to display quantitative information, such as Beautiful Evidence and Visual Explanations (Graphics Press), joined the chorus of those deriding the PowerPoint tool in a September 2003 Wired Magazine article simply titled “PowerPoint Is Evil.” “At a minimum,” says Tufte, “a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play—very loud, very slow, and very simple.”
Millions of presentations are now given every day with the aid of PowerPoint or other slideware.* Yet, most presentations remain mind-numbingly dull, something to be endured by both presenter and audience alike. Presentations are generally ineffective, not because presenters lack intelligence or creativity, but because they have learned bad habits and lack awareness and knowledge about what makes for a great presentation (and what does not). The typical slide presentation of today consists of a speaker presenting streams of information to slides with general titles, clip art, and bulleted list after bulleted list in the all-too familiar topic/subtopic hierarchical format. Presenting with slides is so much apart of our culture now that people can hardly imagine preparing for a meeting and presenting at that meeting without slides.
* Slideware is a term, which to my knowledge, originated with Edward Tufte to describe PowerPoint and similar applications, such as Keynote.
The Scourge of the Deck
Conferences also have perpetuated the bullet-filled deck by asking presenters to follow a “standard slide format.” Kathy Sierra, co-author of Head First Java (O’Reilly Media), as well as the Creating Passionate Users weblog, has attended and presented at a lot of conferences. Here’s what she said on her website in 2005 in a post entitled “Stop your presentation before it kills again”: “Given how many people hate slide presentations,” Sierra says, “why is it universally assumed that where there is ‘a talk,’ there’s PowerPoint (or its much cooler cousin, Apple’s Keynote)? Conference coordinators rarely ask speakers if they’ll be projecting slides. They send out the slide templates, then start demanding your slides several weeks before the show. Saying you don’t have slides is like saying you’ll give your talk naked.” And what kind of “visuals” are people using to support their conference talks? “Visuals are more memorable than words, but bullet points are still the prevailing content of most slides, and they usually add nothing,” says Sierra.
Is It Finally Time to Ditch PowerPoint?
In the spring of 2007, The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article entitled “Researcher points finger at PowerPoint,” by Anna Patty, which generated quite a stir. The article highlighted findings by researchers from the University