Death by PowerPoint
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I struggle to imagine a more irritating application than Microsoft PowerPoint. I've lost count of the occasions I've had to sit through presentations created in this dreaded application. It must be a kind of torture but I've yet to find a human rights lawyer that would hear my case.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not criticising the software itself. It's perfectly adequate as applications go. I'm sure it has its faults, but in general it does what it was designed to do and it does so pretty well. And criticising a Microsoft application in a blog is too cliché even for me.
It's the way the application is used that really bothers me. It's rare for one to go into a meeting or presentation these days without at least one person having prepared a PowerPoint slideshow to subject people to. Conversations are illustrated on a projected screen with punchy bullet points and repetitive slide transitions—the latter, I'm convinced, are only there to hold the attention of the more primitive parts of our brains that are fascinated by movement (and perhaps to apologise for the otherwise tedious content).
To me, the overuse of PowerPoint suggests one of two things: either a lack of ability on behalf of the presenter, or a lack of faith in the audience's ability to grasp the topic. A good presenter will always be able to get the message across to his or her audience. A topic that isn't easily understandable by the audience either isn't being clearly presented, or is going out to the wrong people!
I do appreciate the benefits of a visual aid for a presentation or discussion. Sometimes a graphical representation is very useful to illustrate a point. However, I object to excessive amounts of bullet points. If the presenter feels the need to include bulleted lists, they're obviously already convinced that what they're saying isn't going to be understood or remembered. If I need to read a bulleted list to get the gist of the topic, chances are I'll stop listening to the presenter. Conversely, however, if the presenter is any good, I probably won't need to read the bulleted list!
I work for a company that relies on PowerPoint. Worse still, it's a culture I'm being reluctantly dragged into. As someone with a design background, I'm sometimes tasked with preparing said PowerPoint presentations for some topics in order to help explain something. And unfortunately, my exposure to and distaste for the medium has left me without the inspiration to come up with a more inspired alternative for presenting the information. Thankfully the PowerPoint slides I prepare are usually used in isolation, rather than as part of a full presentation, so I don't have the guilt of doing to others what presentations in the past have done to me.
Before I finish this entry, I should point out that I have in the past had a couple of colleagues who turned PowerPoint presentations into a kind of art form. As presenters, they were exemplary and would have done splendidly without any visual aids, but they managed to use PowerPoint in a way that actually added to their presentation rather than forming the basis of it. In short, it is possible to make good PowerPoint presentations. Most just people just chose not to.