PowerPoint Presentation Skills: PowerPoint’s 20th Birthday

As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.