Here's something that never seems to go away - people moaning about PowerPoint. (Notice it's never Keynote they moan about - maybe Mac users never give a bad slide presentation?)
Seth Godin got stuck into PowerPoint again recently - after having written about it seven years ago, apparently. And hardly a day passes without someone criticising it or flagging up examples of bad usage.
It would be nice, for a change, to read about what constitutes a good slide presentation - if we were to see more examples of that, we might share them with other people and standards might be raised. A kind of 'best practice' trickle-down effect.
Most of us learn things like PowerPoint by example, not on a training course. Or if we do, it's likely to be your typical 'presentation skills' training course, where you're thrown a few tired rules such as 'no more than 6 bullets per slide'.
Personally I prefer Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 rule, favouring images over text. I'd go a step further and say try to avoid having ANY words to read on your slides - not always possible, but a good guiding principle. My reasoning is that people are there to listen to you, and not everyone takes in information in the same way. They may not connect with the auditory (what they hear) but a related visual (what they see) can do the trick. Combining the two can be a powerful way of embedding something in the memory. In contrast, reading bullets while while listening to the speaker can easily result in an attention clash, with neither message sinking in.
I've often been asked about something after a presentation, with specific reference to the image used. By keeping presentations short and visually exciting, people will stay with you and the time will fly by for them. It's also a wonderful thing to watch people reacting to an interesting image, rather than furiously copying down a load of information or looking at their watch.
PowerPoint and Keynote are wonderful tools - let's not blame them for the shortcomings of the presenter!
Image credit: http://colinliang.com/
