– 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).
Bill says
Is this in response to my post yesterday? :D
Michael says
Ha! No I hadn’t read that yet. In fact I posted that elsewhere and a friend asked me to put it somewhere stable so that he could send people the link.
aj says
I think people wrongly decry the tool when they should be more worried about a general lack of writing, design and speaking skills in the workplace. I was lucky to go to a high school where Speech was a mandatory class; I can’t tell you how many presentations I’ve gone to where people still recite off the slide, or read their speakers’ notes in that-stilted-way-little-children-on-Peanuts-tv-specials have.
Ideally there would be no PowerPoint at all; you’d get everyone in a circle and tell your story in tribal fashion, and you’d be judged on your rhetoric and oratorial skills.
That being said, PowerPoint is just a tool; its real weakness is its designers’ insistence on forcing you into a title-bar-and-bullets template. I prefer to start with a blank screen myself – when you think of it as an exercise in illustration and occasional motion graphics, instead of lists-of-things, it works much better. I have Apple Keynote and I need to learn it a bit better, because it supports all the stuff I always wished PowerPoint could do (minus path-based animation as PowerPoint 2004 now has)
At my old job I designed all the brand identity stuff so I did come up with stock presentations and templates, but I did make a point in the brand manual of showing an example of a pictures-only presentation I had done and explaining why this was a better ideal. But of course there will always be someone who insists on teal boxes around type in all-caps Zapf Chancery (!) and putting 1000-word essays on each screen…
blork says
Bingo! Powerpoint goes wrong when (among other things), people think of the slides as a presentation and the speaker as just and adjunct to the slides. It oughta be the other way around. The speaker should speak, and the slides should be an adjuct to that. Bullet points are good for introducing topics in the speech, and PPT can provide illustrations of what the speaker is saying, but that’s it. Powerpoint is not the presentation!
blork says
Oh, look at that! I didn’t even realize there was a “more” section to this post until I commented.
Can I stray from the topic for a moment? I FRICKIN’ HATE THE “MORE” MODEL OF BLOG POSTING! If I don’t want to read “more” I simply won’t. But if I do want to read more, I resent having to make another click in order to do so! Also, I don’t know how many times I’ve MISSED that a post is longer because I didn’t see the “More” link!
BAN THE “MORE!”
Bill says
I used PowerPoint to make a product demo; it was a great way to show future functionality via sequenced “screen caps”, and was also very useful when showing the backend processes in sequence. It was really made as more of a standalone that could be watched by anyone without benefit of a presenter – more of a flsh concept – but without requiring any knowledge of flash on my part.
Michael says
AJ – did you see the “more” part? I think that’s one of the main points I was trying to make there.
Ed – I always agreed with you but thought I’d try it out for a while. The alternative (for my site, which generally features shorter posts, or has done recently) was to put it in my “Words” site, which is generally unused. What if I put longer pieces there and then blogged them on the main page? Would that be better?
Bill – I really like that use for ppt and have used it often in the past. Using the hyperlinks you can also do some super quick mockups, though anything too complex and ppt gets beyond itself.
blork says
Michael, why don’t you just fire your editor and post a long post when you feel like it? What, are people going to stop coming here because you post a long one every month or so?
blork says
… I realize that you’ve imposed a kind of editorial structure on this site, but from the visitor’s point of view it’s pretty moot. I’ll bet the vast majority (indeed, the totality) of visitors here come in with no sense of your structure — they’re simply popping in to see what you have to say today.
The exception would be long editorial things, which I agree are better off in “Words,” but this is a pure and classic “blog” post, and it isn’t even very long, really.
Bill says
I’m with Blork, by the way. I hate the More and have used it only once or twice, and both times just to hide the punchline of a joke when seeing it would have ruined the effect.
aj says
Michael — yeah, I saw the More part – and if I repeated what was in them, it just proves my point about PowerPoint slides, namely, that long, closely linespaced, small bullet points are hard to read and the eye glosses over them :)
Ed — The ‘more’ button is useful if you don’t want a single long post, unbroken by images or other layout niceties, to eat up your whole index page, forcing people to read it when they were really looking for your risotto recipe.
As an aside, not everyone has the patience (or the eyesight) to read long things online either; it’s hard to find the “sweet spot” of interesting title, lead paragraph, and teaser paragraph etc. I find looooong posts anywhere really tiring (I have something approaching -5000 vision in one eye) and actually welcome Salon-like “page jumps” at the end of a screen-page’s worth of text.
Print (which effectively has infinite resolution compared to a screen!) evolved its traditions over the past few millenia and there is now a basic repertoire of text divisions – pages, sidebars, footnotes and the like – which could be argued to be part of the written language itself. We no longer write novels on 200-foot long scrolls, but that’s paradoxically what we ask people to do online. The web is not print – in many ways goes beyond print – but I think it still has a lot to learn from print in terms of easy-to-use information architecture and presentation.