To use or not to use PowerPoint?

Do you live or die by PowerPoint? If your PowerPoint presentation fails, what are you going to do?

PowerPoint is a tool, and should be used as a means to enhance your presentation. Too often PowerPoint is the presentation.

When PowerPoint is the presentation, then you have nothing to offer as a speaker: everything is on the slides. So just send everyone the slides and give them all a break!

How many times have you seen someone bring up a PowerPoint slide and read off every-single-word-on-the-screen? And to make it even more painful, that person adds nothing more. No personal insight, no extra information, just what is on the screen.

PowerPoint is one of the best presentation tools currently available. Its biggest problem is that it is often misused.

Since most presenters us it, here are some tips to help make your use of PowerPoint more effective.

Don't use it! Is PowerPoint really the most effective tool for the job? Are you using it because it is the most efficient? Or are you using it because it is the one you have at hand? Or even worse, are you using it because every other presenter uses it, and you don't want to stand out? Go ahead, stand out!
For my birthday, I received a copy of The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint by Edward Tufte, an essay on the misuse of PowerPoint as an information tool. In it, he shows how PowerPoint was used by NASA engineers to analyse the shuttle Columbia accident, and how it may have been instrumental in Columbia's ultimate demise.
PowerPoint is not the only tool you have available. It's just the one that most people use, probably because they don't know any other. There are others, and maybe in a future newsletter I will have time to test them and give you feedback.
More visual, less text! PowerPoint can be very effective in certain situations. I recently saw a presentation where someone was presenting backstage work at Cirque du Soleil. She showed many of the pictures she took while working for the company. They were beautifully evocative pictures. In this situation, she used the perfect tool to convey the emotions and the visual information that were needed for her presentation.
Here presentation was short, less than 10 minutes. During that time, she must have shown more than 50 slides. I never noticed it, even though she had more than 10 times the amount of slides the average presenter would use.
Turn it off! If you are using PowerPoint and you are speaking without referring to your slides, turn off the slides. As long as your slide is on the screen, people will keep looking at it. By switching their focus between the slides and you, they miss out on some of the information you are providing.
Furthermore, if you move around when speaking, it becomes distracting for your audience when you walk in front of the projector and half of the slide is projected on the screen, while the other half is projected on you.
So, how do you turn off your slides? Use the appropriate button on your remote control (you are using a remote control, right?) or press the B key on the keyboard.

If you are accustomed to using PowerPoint for all of your presentations, I challenge you to try not to use it for your next presentation.

This will force you to be a bit more creative, in order to make sure you don't bore your audience, and yourself, to tears.

If you choose to take up my challenge, please let me know how it goes.

Use the simple tips above and stop dying by PowerPoint!

As an added bonus to this newsletter, check out the blog to see a funny standup routine about PowerPoint.