Archives for August 2004

– lovingly referred to by many as simply “PPT” after its Windows file extension – has come under withering scorn as people decry the “new-biz-school” reality in which slides take the place of scholarly talks and bullet points take the place of well-formed sentences and paragraphs. Presuming one has the choice – and in many situations there effectively is no choice – many suggest that we shouldn’t use tools like Powerpoint at all. That’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, however. Powerpoint may be a bear to work with (it really is kludgy in many ways), but nevertheless it is a decent tool if used correctly. Trouble is, most people use it very badly.

So, with that in mind, here are a few super-quick tips to help you use Powerpoint well when the time comes (and it will) that you have to give a presentation with slides. If you want the definitive site for information and advice on Powerpoint, go to Cliff Atkinson’s Beyond Bullets weblog.

• Use a light background (white or off-white) with dark (black) text. The blue background/yellow text thing is very difficult to read and only exists as an option because it’s what people had to use in the days of 35mm film slides. [Cliff Atkinson gives the long version in White is the new blue.
• Graphs and other simple graphics are good if – and only if – you have a good reason to use them.
• Verdana is a good font to use – it’s very readable on screens. The letters take most of the space of the x-height and the width of most letters, which helps to accomplish this quality. There are other good fonts to use in presentations, and none of them have “Times” or “Arial” in the name.
• Don’t use cheesy cartoons to punctuate between sections.
• Please, no crap flying around. No animations or weird transitions (from one slide to the next) either.
• Communicating clearly in general is a goal that takes a lot of effort to reach. Spend most of your time on that, and your visual-aid needs will be much easier to manage.
• It’s not a script. The slides should go along with what you’re going to talk about, not act as a script. Never read slides.
• A slideshow will never have as much information as a paper or an article will. If a slide show is all you have to say on a subject (and all you have prepared), you probably shouldn’t be discussing it at all, at least in public. Insist on distributing prose text, not slides. Slides are nothing but a presentation tool.
• Two interesting links: PowerPoint is evil by Edward Tufte, and Don Norman on PowerPoint (in reaction to Tufte).