Thursday
Mar292007
Death by PowerPoint
Thursday, March 29, 2007 at 09:02PM
Those readers who know me understand my love-hate relationship with PowerPoint. On the good side, it can enable people to make high-impact presentations -- much easier and faster than the old days of hand-drawn charts. On the down side, PowerPoint is often poorly used and in my view does more to hamper communications.
Writers trying to document business plans are forced to limit themselves to the space of a page, so restrict their writing to topic sentences and miss opportunities for better specificity. In my old days at McKinsey, there was a rule that the leave-behind document had to be more than a copy of the presentation; it had to be either an anotated version of the presentation or a separate text document.
Cliff Atkinson, with his book Beyond Bullets, does a good job of providing some good rules of the road. And I notice that Guy Kawasaki and friends have set up a presentation contest and offer links to their best advice (see Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule). I am also a follower of Edward Tufte, who provides helpful advice on graphics and also rails against abuse of powerpoint.
I long for a day when PowerPoint is used only by the experts for making presentations, and executives use other more-complete tools such as Word and Excel for every-day communication.
Writers trying to document business plans are forced to limit themselves to the space of a page, so restrict their writing to topic sentences and miss opportunities for better specificity. In my old days at McKinsey, there was a rule that the leave-behind document had to be more than a copy of the presentation; it had to be either an anotated version of the presentation or a separate text document.
Cliff Atkinson, with his book Beyond Bullets, does a good job of providing some good rules of the road. And I notice that Guy Kawasaki and friends have set up a presentation contest and offer links to their best advice (see Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule). I am also a follower of Edward Tufte, who provides helpful advice on graphics and also rails against abuse of powerpoint.
I long for a day when PowerPoint is used only by the experts for making presentations, and executives use other more-complete tools such as Word and Excel for every-day communication.
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