General Disarray

Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

The main problem with PowerPoint is that, although it offers a tool in which effective, professional-looking presentations can be created, it also makes it too easy to create poorly designed presentations. A good presentation should either:

1) Use bulleted lists to outline major topics, but not present all of the information. In other words, the presentation is only a prompt for the speaker; most of the actual content is presented verbally.

2) Present complicated information one topic at a time, one slide at a time. That is, each slide should represent one point on an outline. This way, important information doesn’t get tucked under the nth subpoint way at the bottom of a slide and graphs, tables and other graphics aren’t obscured by textual information.

If your impulse is to include every single piece of information in an outline format, you want to write lecture notes, not a PowerPoint presentation. Consider writing a set of notes separately and using a presentation that follows the sketch of the notes, but doesn’t cover them point for point.