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The problem with PowerPoint

2009-08-19 10:43:44

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.