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1 Sep 2009 PowerPoint is 25! Should we Celebrate or Curse the Day?

As 'chief' designer here at Rapport HQ (a self-proclaimed title I must point out!), there are few things which transform me from the usually serene, friendly and helpful guy I am to the monstrously difficult, moody and downright grumpy designer I'm often associated as being, than the requirement to produce anything PowerPoint related.

At first, I thought this was a personal thing. 'Maybe I'm just being snobby?' I asked oneself, 'It can't be that bad, after all you've only tried it once yourself' I persuaded myself. However, after speaking with many fellow graphic designers from various corners of the creative industry, I realise I'm not alone in my disdain for a program originally aimed at "managers, professionals, knowledge-workers and salespeople". It turns out that virtually every creative has bad blood towards a program which - through it's 'jazzy' fades and abundance of drop shadows - turns every PA or secretary in the land into a graphic designer. And it's not just graphic designers who try to divert people away from the use (or to be fairer - the misuse) of PowerPoint. My colleagues here at Rapport working on the event-focused projects, share my opinion it seems. Often heard using the now popular term 'death-by-PowerPoint' in their pitches, they themselves are frequently asked to incorporate some badly thought-out sideshow into an event. Of course, it wouldn't be so bad if we didn't think that the addition of such a 'presentation' was being used not for the benefit of the audience but rather as a aid for the presenter himself (herself).

Anyhow, all this talk of old 'PPT' is beginning to make me grumpy, so why not read BBC's recent article 'celebrating' PowerPoint's 25th birthday by Max Atkinson, author of 'Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy'? It's well worth a look, especially if your in the business of communicating to audiences via presentations or events. For those of you who don't have the time, we've copied and pasted it's contents below in order to help next time you're putting together a slide-based presentation.

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.

Even Barack Obama needs an autocue on occasion. 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.

Paul Rose

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