Breaking the PowerPoint Shackles
Category: Tech...
Posted Tuesday, November 30, 2004 at 02:33 PM [GMT-6]

I volunteered (Note to self: idiot!) to give a presentation on wireless home networks at our next Mac users group meeting in January. Even though the meeting is a couple of months away, I've decided to try a new approach and prepare something in advance, instead of using my normal routine of become increasingly worried about it until a day or two beforehand, then working fiendishly to pull something together. While that system actually seems to have been effective through the years, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there's a better way to complete a presentation than through sheer panic.

Anyway, my usual approach to creating a new presentation is to outline it very roughly in my head, then to create an actual written outline, which I then use to create a <gasp> PowerPoint slideshow. That's right; I've got PowerPoint and I know how to use it. Or do I?

As this post by author Jeffrey Veen points out, most PowerPoint shows are, well, crap. Not only are they often too text-dense, but they are also used by presenters as tools of autocratic power over their audiences. At worst, PowerPoint presentations have served to, as Veen puts it, automate lazy thought.

I think we've all seen presentations where the slide shows were used as crutches by the speakers. Very rarely does one encounter a speaker confident enough to use PowerPoint graphics to simply illustrate or illuminate key points, rather than quote them with complete specificity. I confess to having bullet-pointed audiences into submission, although my motives were benign: I thought it was good for them. And, in no small part, I thought it was what was expected.

As it turns out, perhaps I need to expect more from my audience, just as they need to demand more from me.

Admittedly, the last couple of presentations I've made have been much less dependent on the slides (and it's a good thing, too, considering the mess a minor technical difficulty with a laptop or projector can make of a talk that lives or dies by the slide), and I've been quite generous with my notes in the form of handouts following the talk. And Veen's article has given me some ideas (and courage) to try something even more graphical, using photos of equipment and screenshots of software configurations, rather than a bulleted series of text-based steps to follow.

So, now that I've got this strategy percolating in my mind, I guess I'm safe in letting things slide a bit...four or five weeks, perhaps, but no longer than six. Or seven at the very most.

[Update: One of the comments to Veen's post, left after I completed this entry, refers to Beyond Bullets, which looks like a collection of useful tips for using PowerPoint more effectively.]