rootninja

I ran across a great article on news.bbc.co.uk – The Problem With PowerPoint

I learned about the pitfalls of slide presentations in public speaking class, and I cringe in just about every presentation I have to sit through now. It seems everyone needs powerpoint slides full of bullets to make it through their talk.

The more slides you have and the more there is on each slide, the more distracting it will it be for the audience

I stopped even trying to make it look like i’m paying attention during these torture sessions.

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.

Why bother listening to the person spiral off on wild tangents when you can just read the slide and go back to checking your email on your phone?

All too often the slides are verbal crutches for the speaker, not visual aids for the audience.

If you’re going to read your slides to me, how about I skip your speech and just download your powerpoint later and read through it. I’ll get more information out that way since i’ll read it on my own without distraction.

Speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation.

While busy multitasking listening, reading slides, playing with my phone, and trying not to fall asleep, how much information do you think i’m going to soak up anyway?

We’ve known for years that audiences don’t much like wordy slides and don’t find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids.

Perhaps there should be a ban on bullet point slides without visual aids, or at least come up with a golden ratio, 2 bullet points per picture would be nice.

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.