PowerPoint - the good, the bad, and the hope...

PowerPoint is the defacto standard for presentations in business and education. Each day over 3 million PPT talks are delivered worldwide. Unfortunately the vast majority of these presentations follow a mundane and ineffective formula of lists of bulleted text and/or overly complex charts and graphs.

Are we eternally doomed to boredom, by colleagues, marketers and teachers reading their bullet lists to us?

There is hope, but rethinking PowerPoint and how to use it, requires undoing of years of indoctrination that without words; lots of words, your presentation will lack substance or validity. In reality, you can create very engaging presentations that are enjoyable both as audience and presenter.

My vision for improving such presentations is to give audiences a reprieve from "death by bullet points" by making presentations much more focused on a storytelling approach, supported by simple image-oriented visuals. It's not easy to get out of the text mindset, but once you do, creativity often begins to flow. By focusing on a few key messages, supported by photography and/or video, refined by rehearsals and simplification, you can create and deliver high-impact presentations.

There are several pundits of this school of thought, including Gar Reynolds in Japan, whose blog Presentation Zen is quite inspirational. Others include Cliff Atkinson, Guy Kawasaki, Dan Pink and Edward Tufte.

There are good presentations and presenters out there. Perhaps the best collection is TED.com which stands for technology, entertainment and design. Another good resource is Alexi Kapterev's Death by PowerPoint slideshow. These individuals and websites should give you a sense of how you can become a more convincing and effective presenter, regardless of whether you are an educator, salesperson, scientist, lawyer, business person or politician.

Here's my offer to help move you along the continuum of effective communication. Send me your PPT, and I will give you a free 5-minute critique, with recommendations. I've never seen a PowerPoint talk that couldn't be improved, even my own.

David