by John J. Walters
I ran across the best PowerPoint presentation I have ever seen today about the evil among us that is known as PowerPoint. This is a bit of a curiosity. While others are content to make lists such as “Top 10 Reasons Your Presentation Sucks!†(there are actually two of these on the same site, each with their own helpful hints on how to stop the suckage), this man boldly made a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates his point: that most PowerPoint presentations are horrible.
Here is the link to the presentation, which was prepared by Alexei Kapterev four years ago. I highly suggest flipping through it. If nothing else, it’s a good work-time diversion and a break from the monotony. But take a moment to appreciate that — a PowerPoint presentation that you actually want to see? Now there is a rare thing.
Of course, I’ve seen some pretty interesting PowerPoint presentations. Usually they’re the ones that people make as parodies of real presentations and then upload them to YouTube with funny voices and inappropriate pictures. Yet this one is a real presentation, with real information. Moreover, it’s 61 slides long, and yet you can breeze through it in five minutes and still learn a thing or two. Truly, a rare thing indeed.
I’d like to point out a couple things that make Kapterev’s presentation so exemplary:
- It reads very quickly.
- It has plenty of information.
- It breaks this info up so you’re not reading one slide for very long.
- It works on its own but obviously could be supplemented by a good speaker.
- It introduces, explains, and then reiterates its main points to reinforce them.
- It is scalable, meaning it can be read through in five minutes or expanded.
- It makes good use of imagery to keep you interested but the focus is on the text.
- It doesn’t use any gimmicky transitions or sound effects to distract from the message.
I’m not a huge fan of PowerPoint, but I do recognize it has a place in the corporate world as the standard method for conveying information to a room full of professionals. The trick is not to let this become a crutch so that you don’t have to work on making your presentation worthwhile. It should, instead, be used as a supplement to your talk — a way to keep the audience interested and to illustrate the information that you are sharing.
If you want, you can even “supplement the supplement†with a handout that includes both the slides and your speaker notes so that people will have something to use as a reference later on. But be careful: if you can’t think of a good reason why they would want to reference your presentation after it’s over, perhaps you should be taking everything back to the drawing board. After all, your meeting will still be a waste of time if you didn’t have a good reason for calling it, no matter how well you prepared.