Powerpoint is Evil But What Can You Do?
Posted on April 26th, 2006 in Usability | 5 Comments »
There’s a ton of great advice on how to create great PowerPoint charts. There’s also plenty on how to fix charts that are broken. There’s also plenty of good advice on how to create create presentations; How to Be Like Jobs.
But, there’s a problem with all of this. Most presentations are internally driven. Corporations force PowerPoint slides and most folks have no control whatsoever. That is, most cube slaves are consumers of slides, not producers. Where’s the advice on how to tolerate presentations?
Are you stuck in a sinking cage in shark infested waters? Even if you break out, will you get eaten or beaten by corporate policy?
5 Responses
PowerPoint is the (current) tool of choice, but even if people started using OpenOffice or KOffice or any other tool, I still think that we’d see the same problems.
I’ve noticed that instead of learning how to create good presentations, people seem to focus on:
(a) fancy graphics
(b) loads of animation
(c) too much content
(d) any combination of the above
Mostly, I’ve come across people who are more interested in making a presentation look good than in making the content interesting. To them, I want to say, It’s the content, dodo.
PS: It’ll be interesting to figure out how the whole PowerPoint craze got started.
Hello John
I saw some of your readers coming to my site from one of the links above, so I thought I would stop by and say hello.
You’re absolutely right about presentations being mandated at the corporate level. We provide our employees with a Powerpoint template that we tell them they MUST use. There is actually a good reason for this. A corporation needs to present a consistent theme in its communication with the outside world, and not having a corporate presentation template means that no two presentations will be recognizable as coming from the same company. In addition, we have found over the years that, unfortunately, most employees are not that interested in investing the time that is required to create an outstanding design. Most of them are thrilled when we give them a template, it actually allows them to concentrate on content.
We don’t, however, dictate how they present their material. We love to see those presentations where an employee has brought some thought and creativity to their talk. I agree completely with the previous comment, it’s not Powerpoint that is evil, the same content would be there regardless of the software that is used.
Bottom line is that very few people are born with the ability to give great presentations. The rest of us have to learn how, and the medium is so new (relatively speaking) that there are precious few teachers. It’s just going to be a long, painful process, but as long as we keep working at it things will improve.
Thanks for the link,
David
David, thanks for stopping by. Appreciate the comment.
For some reason, I laughed when I read this: “I agree completely with the previous comment, it’s not Powerpoint that is evil, the same content would be there regardless of the software that is used.”
It made me think … PowerPoint doesn’t kill people, people kill people.
People like good stories and engaging speakers. Its less about the powerpoint deck and more about the person presenting. Sometimes I will put more in the slide deck so people can have a take away, but many of the best presentations I have seen use pictures to help convey a meaning or story.
I can certainly agree with the need to present a consistent corporate image outside of the company. My own feeling is that a library should be provided though, so that individuals *can* utilise some stock images, featues, and colour palletes to ensure consistency.
The greatest problem, I find, is internal presentations that are written as half-presentation/half-reference material, and end up being pretty shoddy at both: slides full of bullet points only partially explained.