Don't Make Your PowerPoint Pointless

By Mark Nelson

PowerPoint presentations are so ubiquitous in today's business world that I have difficulty remembering the last time I attended a live or online event where the speaker (or speakers) did not click through a deck of computerized slides overflowing with information, charts, graphs, diagrams, photos or illustrations.

The original PowerPoint was developed for Macintosh computers and called "Presenter." It was renamed PowerPoint in 1987 and its developers sold it for $14 million to Microsoft, which launched it three years later. Businesses worldwide quickly embraced it and used it to create computerized presentations that replaced clear plastic "foils" that were shown on overhead projectors.

Some speakers can't let go of their PowerPoints. A former colleague once announced his candidacy for Congress via PowerPoint. His friends joked that he probably would propose by PowerPoint.

I'm sure you have suffered through 60-slide presentations delivered in machine-gun style by speakers who attempt to cram an encyclopedia of information into their allotted 15 minutes, or worse, the hour-long presentation, usually delivered right after lunch in a darkened hotel conference room.

Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert," calls this "PowerPoint Poisoning." Others refer to it as "Death by PowerPoint." No matter. The result is the same — bored audiences yearning to be free. It's no wonder that some military officers have banned the use of PowerPoint presentations, so prevalent in some parts of the services that a Russian told an American peacekeeper in Bosnia in 1996, "If we ever had a war, while you are working on your PowerPoint, we would be killing you."

Earlier this year, Dave Paradi, a Canadian communications consultant, conducted a survey to identify the most annoying characteristics of bad PowerPoint presentations. Here are the top five annoyances along with the percentage of respondents that selected them as one of their top three:

• The speaker read the slides to us — 74%
• Full sentences instead of bullet points — 52%
• The text was so small I couldn't read it — 48%
• Slides hard to see because of color choice — 34%
• Overly complex diagrams or charts — 26%

The prison road gang boss in the movie "Cool Hand Luke" summed up the situation perfectly when he said, "What we have here is a failure to communicate." If you are guilty of any of the above PowerPoint annoyances, it's time to rethink how, and why, you use the presentation tool.

Good presentations start with good outlines. Organize your thoughts and make sure they are presented in a logical sequence. Pay attention to the annoyances in the Paradi survey, especially regarding font size and graphics. Although flashy animation didn't make the list, I'd bet it wasn't far behind. Just because you can animate slides doesn't mean you should. Include more graphics — assuming they are large and easy to read — and less text. Rehearse and rehearse again so you are comfortable with the material. Focus on the audience, not the slides. After all, you want to engage the people you are presenting to so don't stare at the screen and read the slides.

Follow these tips and you won't be accused of delivering pointless PowerPoint presentations.

Mark Nelson, LeapFrog Solutions Senior Communications Manager and author of this article, was a communications executive at IBM Corporation and the Boeing Company where he created and delivered scores of PowerPoint presentations.

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