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If you have worked in an office in the Western world in the past 25 years, you
will probably have sat through a PowerPoint presentation. But there's a
problem. They're often boring, writes presentation expert Max Atkinson.
In the past 25 years, I've asked hundreds of people how many PowerPoint
presentations they've seen that came across as really inspiring and
enthusiastic.
Most struggle to come up with a single example, and the most optimistic answer
I've heard was "two".
So what are the main problems?
SCREENS ARE MAGNETS FOR EVERYONE'S EYES
Beware of anyone who says that they're "just going to talk to some slides" -
because that's exactly what they'll do - without realising that they're
spending most of their time with their backs to the audience.
Yet eye contact plays such a fundamental part in holding an audience's
attention that even as brilliant a speaker as Barack Obama depends on an
autocue to simulate it.
So remember that the more slides you have and the more there is on each slide,
the more distracting it will it be for the audience - whereas the fewer and
simpler the slides are, the easier it will be to keep them listening.
READING AND LISTENING DISTRACTS AUDIENCES
If there's nothing but text on the screen, people will try to read and listen
at the same time - and won't succeed in doing either very well.
If the print is too small to read, they'll get irritated at being expected to
do the impossible. Nor does it help when speakers say "as you can see", or the
equally annoying "you probably won't be able to read this".
SLIDES SHOULDN'T JUST BE NOTES
Few speakers are willing to open their mouths until they have their first slide
safely in place. But all too often the slides are verbal crutches for the
speaker, not visual aids for the audience.
Projecting one slide after another might make it look as though you've prepared
the presentation. But if you haven't planned exactly what you're going to say,
you'll have to ad lib and, if you start rambling, the audience will switch off.
To avoid this requires careful planning. Do this before thinking about slides
and you won't need as many of them - and the ones that you do decide to use are
more likely to help to clarify things for the audience, rather than just remind
you of what to say next.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD
You think bullet points make information more digestible? Think again. A dozen
slides with five bullet points on each assumes that people are mentally capable
of taking in a list of 60 points. If it's a 30-minute presentation, that's a
rate of two-per-minute.
This highlights the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is
that speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across
than is actually possible in a presentation. At the heart of this is a
widespread failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally
different from writing and reading.
In fact, the invention of writing was arguably the most important landmark in
the history of information technology. Before writing, the amount of
information that could be passed on to others was severely limited by what
could be communicated in purely oral form (ie not much). But the ability to
write meant that vast amounts of knowledge could be communicated at previously
unimagined levels of detail.
The trouble is that PowerPoint makes it so easy to put detailed written and
numerical information on slides that it leads presenters into the mistaken
belief that all the detail will be successfully transmitted through the air
into the brains of the audience.
THE BULLET POINT PROBLEM
A Microsoft executive recently said that one of the best PowerPoint
presentations he'd ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them. This
didn't surprise me at all, because we've known for years that audiences don't
much like wordy slides and don't find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids.
What does surprise me is that so many of the program's standard templates
invite users to produce lists of bullet points, when the program's main
benefits lie in the creation of images. If more presenters took advantage of
that, inspiring PowerPoint presentations might become the norm, rather than the
exception.
Max Atkinson is the author of Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy.