Presentation Pet Peeves

Have you heard the term “PowerPoint poisoning“?

I have come to dread presentations especially those that involve PowerPoint: this fear has developed over the years mostly due to sitting through way too many terrible presentations.  Here are several trends I have noticed in these painful presentations.

• Reading the slides to the audience.

  This is my number one complaint, most people can read faster than they can talk yet most presenters fall into the trap of reading their slides to their audience.  I read pretty fast, so I am usually finished reading the slide way before the presenter is finished reading the contents of the current slide.  I would rather be emailed the presentation so I could read it myself than have to sit through someone else reading it out to me without any extra embellishment.

• PowerPoint encourages bullet point lists.

  The large text size, overuse of team or corporate logos and stylised templates encourages the use of bullet point lists.  Bullet points list in presentations are terrible as the text size prevents any sort of length or detail.  This means that the information has to be condensed to the point of being almost worthless.

• Lack of hand outs.

  Most presenters don’t give out hand outs: they expect the PowerPoint slide deck to be all the audience requires for future reference on the presentation, most are not even aware of the note feature built into PowerPoint for generating printed hand outs.  If you are giving any sort of technical presentation a handout that is more in depth than the presentation is a must.

• Slide layouts & logos.

  To a lot of presenters it would seem that having a fancy PowerPoint template complete with corporate or team logo is more important than the actual content of their presentation.  I suspect that more time has been spent on the layout and logos of a lot of the presentations I have seen than the actual content.  Which is a disaster as the content is what is going to keep the audience engaged, not some fancy slide template or moving text.

• Lack of pictures.

  You see very little eye candy in most presentations, but having images gives your audience something to look at other than text.  We all know the phrase ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ yet the content of most presentations is mostly text not images.  This makes no sense as images are one of the most effective tools for the communication of ideas and concepts.

I’d highly recommend reading this brief article which also talks about the pain of PowerPoint usage in particular and recommends a general product recall.  I think a lot of the issues I’ve outlined above about presentations can be traced to the assumption made by most presenters that they are just delivering information: this is false as merely delivering information is not enough.  You must teach your audience the content of your presentation, not throw the information at them and hope it just sticks (it won’t).