Wednesday, May 30th, 2007...10:40 pm

The PowerPoint Epiphany

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I had already made a note in my Circa today while sitting in a meeting to draft a post on PowerPoint dependency. Needless to say, I had glazed over while a co-worker was diligently attempting to hold my attention with slides jammed full of info that 1) I did not even understand, and 2) took longer than 2 minutes to read per slide.

Tonight, however, Marc Orchant posted an entry about Tim Sanders…and his PowerPoint epiphany.

He states the case better than I could.

- Jason

3 Comments

Filed under Presentations, Professional, Tools

3 Comments

  • Mark Shead
    June 3rd, 2007 at 7:21 pm

    When powerpoint is used to help accent certain parts of your talk it can be very effective. Too many people try to write all of their speech in the powerpoint slides and basically read through them. Steve Jobs’ presentations seem to be very effective and many of his slides contain less than 5 words.

  • Jason Echols
    June 4th, 2007 at 8:28 am

    @Mark

    Agreed completely. I am not disavowing PowerPoint. However, I do think that we have reached a point in business where we are too dependent upon it.

    If someone wants to put their whole speech in PP, then save me and everyone else the time, and just send it to me in an email and I will file it as a read and review material.

    PowerPoint is a great tool. However, it is designed to be a presentation supporting tool, not a communication tool. Those who understand how to use it effectively are dwindling in number. Steve Jobs is a master at using slide presentations as a supporting tool.

  • Matthew Cornell
    July 7th, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    Thanks for the pointer. I recently re-wrote my six hour personal productivity workshop to use a PowerPoint-based presentation, rather than the old-school transparencies I was using. The two books that influenced how I did this was “Beyond bullet points” and “Telling ain’t training.” As a result, the slideshow has 130 slides, and a total of five bullets (I couldn’t resist a few - they helped.)

    Every slide contains a concept expressed as a sentence (the title) plus a large graphic. That’s it. However, I have over two hours of interactive exercises (and I’m working on more), so it’s much more likely (I’ve found) to keep participants’ interest than a text-heavy show that I read from.

    Note that I’ve used the same file to create a 100 page booklet that contains all the concepts as prose, which is a nice take-away.

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