…has NOTHING to do with PowerPoint.
Oh the agonising sessions I’ve been to! I once had to sit through a presentation of 82 slides! 82! Madness. Boring and irritating.
I’m thinking about good old PowerPoint because of Cromley – who points out that people sometimes get PowerPoint confused with Word.
Well that would explain some of the text heavy slides I’ve seen in my time.
It seems to me that PowerPoint has made us lazy. We don’t have to learn our speeches off by heart any more. We don’t have to think of ways to “entertain” our audience.
And because speakers are so focussed on their slides they don’t see the eye rolls, the yawns, the snores… those glazed looks when people just have their eyes pointed in the right direction but are not actually seeing anything.
When Groover worked for GE Capital a hundred years ago, they had a corporate policy on PowerPoint: Only ONE slide per presentation. One!
So you had to make it a good one.
Maybe that’s a little extreme – but then, maybe the MD like me had been bored mental by Powerpoint presentations.
Personally I think if you are going to have slides they need to offer something that you can’t in your speech. A graph. An image. A video. A groovy animation – which PowerPoint is quite good at making.
One speaker I saw who used it very effectively had an automatic presentation with a soundscape running behind it. He used images which just smoothly changed from one to the other. At the most there was maybe three words, if any at all, on the slide. He just told his story and the slides ran in the background. He didn’t talk “to” his slides at all.
Do you use PowerPoint? How do you use it effectively?
Update: If you enjoyed this article you might want to read my article on public speaking.
{ 5 comments }
I agree with the one slide per presentation rule.
Powerpoint presos drive me crazy. One should only put on the screen that which you cannot effectively show with your voice ie. a map, a pertinent photograph.
Remember before PowerPoint we had overhead transparencies. And we were just as bad with those. I was a dab hand at the overloaded transparency.
I admit many of us got around the 1-Slide rule by using “Four Blockers” effectively four slides on on one page highlighting the key issues.
But the discipline was a good one.
82 slides is not information for the audience, it’s speaker’s notes.
“Death by PowerPoint” is one of the major corporate human rights abuses!
You’ve been watching The Hollowmen haven’t you??
haha – I have but I’d forgotten about those guys… maybe I absorbed it subliminally…
Abso.bloody.lutely.
And I too have seen a beautiful PPP, where the images were timed with words which were not printed for all to see, but eminated from a caring speaker’s mouth.
Twas almost bliss.