'Ditch PowerPoint, it's a disaster' [BT broadband office]

'Ditch PowerPoint, it's a disaster'

Posted 19 April 2007 at 8:33AM by Simon Dickson in Email and communications

Is there anything worse than sitting through a bad PowerPoint presentation? There's a growing consensus among experts in design and communication that PowerPoint - or more accurately, the way most people end up using it - is actually a bad thing for meetings and messages.

The latest to speak out is Australian education professor John Sweller. Quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald, he made the provocative pronouncement:

The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched.

Sweller, whose main area of research is in 'designing instruction to facilitate learning and problem solving', says it puts too much load on the mind when a speaker shows words - such as bullet points - on a screen, and then proceeds to read them aloud. It isn't just tedious; according to Prof Sweller, it actually 'decreases your ability to understand what is being presented'.

Don't go looking for the 'Uninstall' button just yet, though; it's the use of PowerPoint he's attacking, rather than the tool itself. Presentation expert Garr Reynolds hits the nail on the head:

Is it finally time to ditch PowerPoint? Hardly, but it is long past time to ditch the use of the ubiquitous bulleted-list templates.

Like a lot of specialists these days (including Seth Godin, whom I mentioned last week), Garr recommends a much more abstract approach to slides: 'if your presentation visuals can be perfectly and completely understood without your narration, then it begs the question: why are you there?'

Tags: bullet points, powerpoint, templates

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Comments

1. At April 19, 2007 9:45 PM, Simon Raybould wrote:

Good points!

I spend a large chunk of my presentation skills training courses encouraging people to think about whether they need PowerPoint and - if they do - how to use it. A friend of mine recently pointed out that the problem seemed often to be that the slides were there for the benefit of the presenter, not for audience. I'm with him in a big way on this one.

You comment that it's the use of PowerPoint that's the issue, not the software itself, but that's only true up to a point - the defaults in PowerPoint are bad (such as the wrong choice of font for goodness' sake!) and unless people know better they'll accept the defaults.

An analogy I've used in the past is that PPT is a bit like a gun: not evil in itself and - used right - can be a force for 'good'. More often however........

2. At April 20, 2007 3:12 PM, Michael Ward wrote:

I would like to defend the use of PowerPoint, having used it for a number of years & received lots of positive feed back, both orally & written. In the right hands it is a fantastic tool.

I've also sat through PowerPoint presentations given by under 11's which were exciting, good fun & very professional put together. I'm sure the teaching profession would agree that it helps students young & old.

3. At April 20, 2007 3:18 PM, Maria O'Dea wrote:

I have sent this blog page to our teaching staff as a reminder that Power Point can in fact mean the kiss of death to a learning experience.

Unless Power Point is used intelligently as a tool in presentations and training sessions and not as THE session itself - it's an absolute waste of the delegates time. May as well read a text book!

4. At April 23, 2007 9:34 AM, Paul Thomas wrote:

I work for a large worldwide organisation where the main sales focus is on presenting Power point to customers so they understand the products and solutions we provide. It is a great tool to use and we don't spend a lot of money with brochures to give out. If I did not have Power point then I would struggle to explain the product. What would be an alternative ?

5. At April 24, 2007 8:18 AM, Alan Robertson wrote:

Oh Dear - Anybody who has been involved in producing computer slides could have told you about this fifteen years ago! This is the difference between getting your secretary to fling something together and paying a professional company to make the slides for you. Originally when Powerpoint ver 3 was around it was aimed specifically for designers, then Microsoft worked out that if they changed direction from design houses to in-house wizard driven Powerpoint that they would make more money. The result is bland, same looking presentations (to your competitor - not in house) and terrible layout of text and graphics.

Don't believe me - okay. Take the "Pepsi" style challenge. Go and look out old presentations (early nineties) and compare them to the rubbish you are looking at now! Now do you see what I'm on about.

People forget that a bad looking presentation reflects on the products and services they are selling - it under values it.

We moved away from providing these services in the mid nineties because of the lack of profit in doing design in Powerpoint because most people were happy to cut corners by getting their secretaries to do it. Don't get me wrong though, the move was a good one into large format printing and is still profitable. What we discovered that although the time taken to produce a slide may take up to an hour to produce and seemed expensive to our customers because the slide was small in size, the minute you take the same length of time to produce a poster allowed you to charge a lot more purely because a poster is bigger than slide!! How stupid is that?

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