PowerPoint Palsy
By Graham Davies

PowerPoint encourages exhaustive detail that in turn causes audiences to twitch with exhaustion. There is always just one more bullet that you can add on to that slide…and always a few more slides that you can create.

The feeling is seductive: “I’ve created loads of slides, with loads of words on them, so I must have prepared properly. In fact, that is all I have to do. The exact words that I need to say will just come to me when I am actually speaking.”

Some presenters are actually proud of their reputation for length and detail. They wear the mark of the serial PowerPoint criminal as a badge of honour. They feel it is the fault of the audience if they can’t quite find the message inside the maze of slides. This type of presenter is quite happy to facilitate the tyranny of PowerPoint: a one party state where Big Brother Is Boring You.

This is submission to software. The presenter is surrendering his central role to the words on screen. He is abdicating from his role as a leader.

A presentation only works where human-to-human contact is maximised. Slideware can get in the way.

I once saw a presentation delivered by a high ranking IBM executive. Some technical foul-up occurred just before he started, so that he was forced to present Commando (i.e. without slides). Mysteriously, his laptop started working again about a minute before he finished. Showing remarkable mental agility, he managed to immediately access and display his summary slide. This acted as a superb overview, bringing together and focusing everything that he had said in the previous 15 minutes.

He then experienced an audio-visual epiphany. He paused, looked at his laptop, looked at the audience, looked at the screen, back at the audience, paused again and said, in a dramatic whisper:

“Maybe that’s the only slide I needed in the first place.”

I managed to restrain the urge to leap up from my seat and shout, “Hallelujah! Amen, brother!”

In the bar that night, his was the only presentation that people were talking about. The previous eight presenters had used over 150 slides and about 700 bullet points between them. I asked some of the people in the bar which of the day’s slides they could remember. And they could only remember the IBM guy’s 3-point summary slide.

This is the best way to use bullet-point slides: just one notch above total disappearance.