Love this article from the Wall Street Journal...especially the last part about civility having self-interest. In other words, you tolerate the PowerPoints because, after all, next time they'll be seeing you use them!

I was recently at a conference where a renowned professor was presenting her research results, from a Carnegie study, to a group of academics. As she presented, using PowerPoints, she was saying how her research showed that students are really hating PowerPoint. "I should talk!" she said.

I entirely agree with this. I was at some press presentations last week at the World Travel Market which were so bad in this respect that, after one of them (for Croatia), I went to the organiser afterwards and asked her, "Did you see any people in the audience with white sticks and guide dogs?" And on receiving her negative reply I then asked, "So, if none of the audience was blind, why did the presenter read out every one of his PowerPoint slides, word for word? Several of the journalists, knowing that the content would in any case be in the press packs, simply walked out because they were so bored or irritated.

I did tell the lady that I would be happy to run some public speaking courses for their persenters; sadly I have found many times that few people are prepared to admit that they are dreadful presenters, preferring to excercise the right they believe they have, of boring their audience to tears or worse.

And yet it doesn't have to be like that. In spite of John Falck's colourful analogy "...Fear of public speaking ranks slightly below night-landing a plane on an aircraft carrier during a storm..." it is quite possible, with proper training, to become highly skilled at public speaking and to enjoy it. I myself find public speaking one of the most exhilerating and enjoyable experiences I know - and I can tell you that I know of many others who share my view.

I agree. I have to sit through a number of Powerpoint presentations and almost without fail the speaker will:

1. hand out printouts from Powerpoint of the slides;
2. fiddle about trying to get the laptop/projector working properly;
3. read out the slides, word for word.

As many of you know I've just completed a Certificate of Education. This is a course that teaches you how to teach.

One of the lecturers set a great example by doing just this - producing a power point presntation, handing out printouts of it and reading it word for word. Fine example. I thought.

In my MBA program, many of the professors used the canned PowerPoints provided to them by the textbook publishers with the text. Most of these same professors would require that for any classroom presentation, we students also should use PowerPoints as part of our reports. These were fun to put together, but it took some doing to stay away from following them line by line as you were talking. The best classes involved open discussion and debate with none of this wooden repetition. I wouldn't ban them entirely, but all the best advice I've ever heard says to pass the copies out after the presentation is over.

WM

My old boss Peter Norvig (now a Google bazillionaire) created this PowerPoint version of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address

Neveu, that is priceless. Zmj had sent it to me once, and I have sent it to all my colleagues.

I agree with wordmatic that they shouldn't be thrown out altogether. I have started, for example, to find great pictures (often images from the Web) that depict my points. One of them made such a hit that other speakers referred to the "goldfish jumping from one bowl to another." I think that helps. Also, using fewer words is important...and certainly not reading the text!

However, there are certain presentations, such as pure research, where you need something for the audience to refer to. It just doesn't have to be done the same way every single time.

Pictures, especially photographs that are really relevant, are far,far better than graphics.

In a selling seminar I have run for the past few years at the World Travel Market, I tell a story of a visit I made to a car showroom where the dealer dismissed my enquiry about a Rolls-Royce as frivolous, simply because I was casually dressed and didn't look like a potential customer to his eyes.

I then show a slide that I introduce before revealing it as "a shot of my wife and I out for a drive". Then I reveal a photograph of the two of us, leaning against my Rolls-Royce.

This makes the learning point that salespeople pre-judge enquirers at their peril - and it has far more impact than it would have been simply for me to have said something like, "...and in the end I did buy a Rolls-Royce, but not from him..."

Only last week I met by chance a person who had been in the audience a year ago and she said to me, "...Do you still have your Rolls-Royce? You know, I still remember that story when I get a 'Saturday morning' customer..."

I use PP presentations quite often, but, as I advise my co-presentors, they are a simple outline for what we're really talking about (even when we're with an audience that perhaps could NOT read them for themselves).

The PP is also, as RE says, a great way to share a few perfect pictures that illustrate what we're saying and, for me, they are a great venue for making sure all of the finer points of my presentation get into the hands of the participants, even if I don't say them specifically. I hand the print-outs to my folks before I speak so they know they don't have to take notes on the PP, they can just sit and enjoy the books I'm demonstrating and play with the puppets we're sharing and get involved.

Another pet peeve of mine is when someone will use a PP to demonstrate how a new website works . . . especially when they have the capability of showing us with a live feed. Of course, the way things work, it's good to have those slides handy for when (not if) the system bogs down.

As RE points out, though, a well-told story will still carry more impact than a hundred slides.

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1. hand out printouts from Powerpoint of the slides;
2. fiddle about trying to get the laptop/projector working properly;
3. read out the slides, word for word.

I agree with 3. However, I do like to get the printout of the slides so that I have a record of the presentation. I have also found that there is a lot less "fiddling" now that people know more about them. Just recently I gave a PowerPoint while I was on a panel. The jerk before me clicked off my whole presentation when she left. Fortunately it was my computer we were using, so I casually found it another way, making a joke while I did it. Had this been even a year ago, I would have fiddled and probably called IT!

CW, why don't you like PowerPoint to demonstrate a new Web site? I like it when people do that; the presentation becomes more interactive.

I collate the comments from attendees of our conferences. I didn't attend this conference, but my colleagues told me that one speaker gave an excellent, dynamic presentation for an hour without using PowerPoint. Wonderful, huh? Not so fast...her evaluations were scathing. People stated, "In this day and age everyone should use PowerPoint. She just wasn't professional!" Go figure.

quote:

People stated, "In this day and age everyone should use PowerPoint. She just wasn't professional!" Go figure.

I wonder what propertion of the audience said that? And I would certainly be suspicious of anyone who made such a comment without giving examples of how, and why, PowerPoint should have been used to improve the presentation.

"Good speakers use PowerPoint to improve their presentations; great speakers just use their voices properly."

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CW, why don't you like PowerPoint to demonstrate a new Web site? I like it when people do that; the presentation becomes more interactive.

It is much better, when possible, to simply connect to the web and demo the site live. Then you can actually interact with the website and take spontaneous suggestions and questions. With slides you're just showing screen shots and not really showing the live interaction with the site.

But that's what I do. I have a live link on my PowerPoint, and I then go to the Web site, making it an interactive experience. Am I not understanding you?

quote:

But that's what I do. I have a live link on my PowerPoint, and I then go to the Web site, making it an interactive experience. Am I not understanding you?

Then you're not really using PowerPoint as a presentation aid, you are using it as a projection device. You don't even need PowerPoint software to do that - any interface driver that takes the web page and converts it to a signal for the projector would do the job.

The PP itself is just the slide show . . . the live feed you're using takes you off the PP and right onto the net, which is prefered. I like the idea of couching the internet, though. I might use it!

When I use PowerPoint, I use it mainly as an outline of the talk which I present. I may have a web browser, set up earlier to display web pages in different tabs, running concurrently. Since I usually demo other kinds of software, I may have them set up, too. It's rather easy to switch back and forth between PowerPoint (actually these days I use the slide presentation application in OpenOffice) and these other programs, using Alt-Tab under Windows and other key combinations under other OSes. If I were discussing something like the overall navigational architecture of a web site, I might do that with an abstract illustration and some discussion in the slides themselves, but if I wished to show the actual site I'd switch over to a web browser. But then I tend to use software as an aid to any presentation which I give. What I don't do is read the content of the slides to the audience verbatim. It's only a aide-mémoire to keep me on subject and within the allotted time.

A good watchword for any visual aid is you ask yourself, before designing it, "What do I want to SHOW the audience?" If you want to TELL the audience something then a visual aid is usually inappropriate.