![]() ![]() I've made and sat through tons of Powerpoint presentations and I have to admit that even my own can be pretty boring. ![]() Max Atkinson is the author of Speech-making & Presentation Made Easy. If more presenters took advantage of that, inspiring PowerPoint presentations might become the norm, rather than the exception. What does surprise me is that so many of the program's standard templates invite users to produce lists of bullet points, when the program's main benefits lie in the creation of images. This didn't surprise me at all, because we've known for years that audiences don't much like wordy slides and don't find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids. The trouble is that PowerPoint makes it so easy to put detailed written and numerical information on slides that it leads presenters into the mistaken belief that all the detail will be successfully transmitted through the air into the brains of the audience.Ī Microsoft executive recently said that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he'd ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them. But the ability to write meant that vast amounts of knowledge could be communicated at previously unimagined levels of detail. Before writing, the amount of information that could be passed on to others was severely limited by what could be communicated in purely oral form (ie not much). In fact, the invention of writing was arguably the most important landmark in the history of information technology. At the heart of this is a widespread failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally different from writing and reading. This highlights the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is that speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation. ![]() This looks a fairly interesting visual aid ![]()
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