Power(less) Point(less) Presentations

PowerPoint presentations have become a necessary evil. Any serious presenter or speaker knows that PowerPoint can do as much harm as it can aid a good talk. I came across this brilliant case study by Edward Tufte on what can go wrong with PowerPoint. He highlights a seriously flawed presentation of the analysis done by Boeing of the Columbia space shuttle disaster. Some of the highlights from the study are:

1. PowerPoint is a highly inadequate tool for scientific and technical work. The attempt to fit single ideas into one slide can result in highly edited, ambiguous and misleading statements. PowerPoint does not do well at displaying scientific notation and units of measurements. All serious and technically detailed work must be presented using formal documentation such as word processing software.
   
2. The use of PowerPoint exclusively for reports, proposals and white papers (instead of formal reports) is highly frustrating to the consumer of that information and is to be strongly advised against. This is a good point. I used to think that the ability to present an entire report in PowerPoint, as the big 4 consulting firms often do, was accepted practice. I think Word, and even Excel offers far better reporting capabilities than does PowerPoint.
3. Information tends to get filtered and presented in relation to the bureaucratic heirarchy of the consumer of the information. For instance, as reports travel from middle to senior management, important information could get filtered. Or it could be pushed lower down PowerPoint's slide and bullet heirarchy to the extent where the original meaning of the message is lost.
4. It is easy to present contradictory ideas in the same slide. The title of one such slide that Tufte uses to illustrate this point is in almost complete contradiction to the bullet points made lower down in the same slide.
5. Slide overkill is almost unethical. When you begin making your entire talk into PowerPoint slides, you often lose the essence of what you are trying to say. I don't know which is sadder - presenting a 100+ slide talk or sitting through one. I guess the only exception is training programs, where the slides serve also as study material. In this case also, the best option would be training material as handouts and PowerPoint slides.

It's worth reading through the entire article and the comments that follow.

Another good article on PowerPoint presentations is Guy Kawasaki's 30/20/10 rule. One of the best sites of them all on presentation is Garr Reynolds' Presentation Zen.