Two decades of PowerPoint: Is the world a better place?

This week a Wall Street Journal article entitled PowerPoint Turns 20, As Its Creators Ponder A Dark Side to Success is getting a bit of attention. The article has a few good comments from the two creators of PowerPoint, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, who produced PowerPoint 1.0 in 1987 and then sold it later that year to Microsoft (and oy vey! the world hasn’t been the same since).

Don’t blame Microsoft
We all agree that the majority of presentations given with PowerPoint “suck rotten eggs” as Seth Godin says in his e-book. But this is largely so because people do not know (or don’t care about) the difference between a well-written document and well-designed supporting visuals. PowerPoint users usually shoot for the middle and create a slideument, a “document” that would make your third-grade English teacher apoplectic with disgust and shame that you ever attended her class, and draw scowls of disapproval from anyone who makes a living as a designer or visual communicator.

PowerPoint is not the cause of bad business presentations, but laziness and poor writing skills may be. The point is not to place more text within tiny slides intended for images and visual displays of data. The point is to first (usually) create a well-written, detailed document. Do business people still know how to write?

“A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work." 

    — Robert Gaskins in an interview with the Wall Street Journal

Visual literacy and design literacy have never been more important, and these subjects should be taught in schools. However, this does not mean that the ability to write well is any less important than it used to be, in fact good writing skills are also more important than ever. The future may belong to the designers, but it will also belong to those who can write insanely well. Sadly, I’m afraid that solid writing skills will become increasingly rare.

Can reading and writing make you a better speaker?
I became a better speaker and presenter after college in part because I majored in Philosophy, a degree that required loads and loads of reading, writing, and arguing…daily. All this reading and writing, oddly enough, made me a more articulate speaker as I learned better how to think critically, listen to opposing views, and spell out my ideas or position clearly and succinctly. I’m not against young children using PowerPoint in schools, but I hope the presentations they are making are verbal reports which are coming at the end of rigorous research and well-reasoned, detailed written reports. I fear that the “PowerPoint presentations” are often a replacement for written papers rather than an extension or augmentation of the research and written work.

“Now grade-school children turn in book reports via PowerPoint. [The PowerPoint inventors]  call that an abomination. Children, they emphatically agree, need to think and write in complete paragraphs.”
 
     — Lee Gomes, Wall Street Journal article on PowerPoint

Adults do silly things with PowerPoint too
We can’t blame the kids for making really bad PowerPoint. They learn bad habits from us. It’s all around them, and they don’t have to look far. Even (especially?) prominent U.S. politicians can produce some really bad PowerPoint. Leave it to a U.S. politician, then, to this week proudly display a PowerPoint deck that exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the way PowerPoint is used today. It's odd that anyone can look at these slides by Mitt Romney and then label the creator of such obfuscation and bad design as “Multimedia Mitt”.  (Is the PowerPoint bar really set that low?) No words are necessary from me. Enjoy the slide show with the world’s longest title.



Click slide above to see the entire PowerPoint deck (if you must).

Comments

[Guillaume Gete]

Hello Mr Reynolds,

Having worked in IT for two advertising companies (BBDO and McCann, so quite large groups), I can of course acknowledge that the average level for PowerPoint use is... hmmmm, let's say abysmal, which is sad, to say the least.

However, I don't completely agree when you say : "Don't blame Microsoft". I believe strongly that Microsoft DOES have responsibility, not because it produces the tools that everybody uses, but also because it includes its own templates with it. These are presented (no pun intended) to anyone who opens the "Project library" which bangs at your face each time you open an Office app, and are full of advice one should *not* follow.

Also, these templates are badly designed, overused, and Microsoft did not make much point to overhaul them within the last decade (when I opened PP right now, I just noticed some templates I've used about eight years ago !). Many and many times, people have not been trained to work on PowerPoint, they are just using the product because they were said so, and Microsoft should also *educate* people about the best ways to use it. It knows that there is an utterly failure lying within PowerPoint, as it is mainly not used how it should.

Even worse, as you said in this article :

Bill Gates himself uses PowerPoint without having a clue of what a presentation is : therefore, he uses it to provide "rich content" (notice that in Microsoft's world, everything MUST be rich, and by rich, it means colorful, full of text, pictures, sounds... No blank space allowed !

See : this video was made internally by some people in Microsoft who thought that there is a problem with design within Microsoft. This is well summed-up by Steve Jobs, when he says :

"The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste. They have absolutely no taste. And I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way, in the sense that they don't think of original ideas, and they don't bring much culture into their products."

So, in this regard, because Bill Gates is Microsoft's so-called Software Architect, and because he does not know what graphic design and art of presentation is, he and his teams have a responsibility for providing a tool which could be good, but that is not used in a good way by too many people. Sites as yours or books like Beyond Bullet Points are a testament that something IS wrong with Microsoft too, not only with how people use PowerPoint.

Also, there is another issue, which is how MS left PP rotting for years, as it did not have any use to enhance its then concurrence-crushing software (a bit in the same way that IE was not upgraded for five years on Windows, because there was no use to enhance a product installed on 95% of the market). In this regard, that Apple launched Keynote was a signal that someone (Jobs :-) ) was really pissed at this situation. This is what Apple always lived for : to be able to produce a better world, with better design. This is true for its own products (even if sometimes Jobs himself makes some mistakes, as you noticed with his 3D-pie charts). It is also sad to see that the open source movement in its copies of Office (OpenOffice, NeoOffice & co) don't try to work on this point, instead of copying the same mistakes that Microsoft made.

So, I don't blame Microsoft for selling its product to lazy customers, but I blame it for not showing them the right way as soon as they double-click on it.

Thanks again for your awesome site !

[Kim U]

Initially, I thought the Romney presentation was going to be okay, with lots of visuals - but the graphics weren't well done, there were tons of slides were super tiny text, and it seemed overall as long winded as the title. Couldn't they pay someone to create some decent visuals for them?

Re: Keynote vs Powerpoint - Keynote might be easier to use (which I do honestly think, it's well made software) but it can be mis-used every bit as egregiously as Powerpoint. From my point of view, it's not about the presentation tool you use, it's _how_ you use it that creates a good or bad presentation.

[Allan White]

You would think that politicos would learn something from the recent success of Gore's Inconvenient Truth presentations/movie - the value of a strong message with, well, beautiful evidence (I should say 'beautifully constructed evidence').

Perhaps Mitt thinks there's nothing to be learned across the aisle? I wonder - are other Dems ignoring these lessons (indicating a blind spot for polits everywhere)?

I'm no Al Gore fanboi, but at least the man can write as well as present.

[Allan White]

One more thing - this conversation (at least regarding Romney's PPT online) could be referred back to one of the other posts here about ways to put the presentation online. There's obvious flaws in the design, and if he had taken good presentation design concepts to heart, we might see a nice handout or supporting essays with more imagery or maps.

There's potential in his ideas (at least he's articulating some views on national defense strategy - I digress...) but it's really hard to see what his plan is from bullet points.

[Ivan]

Guillaume had some good points in blaming Microsoft. I agree that Microsoft may need to work on the interface and documentation to get users aware of how to use powerpoint. Beyond Bullet Points is actually a book by Microsoft Press, so Microsoft is trying to educate users but they could do more.

The thing that scares me is the pervasiveness of WebEx, especially in my business. I have to go to WebEx sessions all the time for "training" with people that have pre-canned powerpoint presentations that are niether informative or useful. There used to be this great thing called hands-on instruction and I miss it.

[Olivier Germain]

After such an abysmal title slide and so negative comments, I was positively surprised by the actual presentation - although I did not watch the actual live one, I just looked at the deck following Garry's link. This is the benefit of low expectations I guess, but if you look closely, you will notice that at least one slide is quite decent, showing the proper zen spirit. This is the bumper sticker slide. (Note that I am not looking at the photographic quality of the slides, as it may have been degraded with the posting process). And he has other few than show promises - one bar chart that is not too overcrowded, and interesting maps of the world that probably show points that are not explicited, but may have been so by the presenter. So altogether, not such a bad presentation: 11 slides that are not bad out of 31 in total. When you consider how many atrocious ones we have all seen, this is not such a bad ratio. But of course, he fell into the slidument problem, and most of the slides are neither fish nor fowl.

[Paul Hashemi]

You raise good points. My only quibble is that the laziness and illiteracy are not always (or even usually) faults of the writer - they often come from the presumptive audience. I am a management consultant, and often senior executives at client firms would flat-out reject a true "document", even one no longer than a typical email; but put it in landscape and slap on a colorful title page, and they'll read it. Not necessarily sit through a presentation of it, but they'll read it. The Lessig method? Seth Godin's "six words per slide" approach? Not a chance. If you have a sit-down presentation to begin with, it's usually more of a discussion with the slides playing a backup role.

For some reason, "PowerPoint documents" - not actual written documents, and not PowerPoint presentations - are the lingua franca of the consulting trade. Those bullet points are viewed as a quicker way to summarize what should probably be printed material, and they are a very common way that PowerPoint is misused.

[Michael]

As far as government PowerPoint goes, those slides weren't half bad.

[tartle]

Kranzberg’s First Law
“Technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.”
We still need a vision, a story to tell and the skills to communicate it.

[tartle]

Just read the other comments... my take on presentations is that they reflect the culture of the organisation that consume them so introducing something radically different can result in rejection (learning anxiety in Lewin's change theory!)

[Bruce Pilgrim]

Before PowerPoint and other presentation software systems, presenters used 35 mm slides to bore people beyond all reason. Slides were expensive to produce, awkward to use and to revise, and the opposite of durable. It was very easy to insert slides upside down, backwards, cockeyed, and out of order. Slides would often get jammed and mutilated. Plus, you had to drag around carousels and ridiculously heavy slide projectors in order to give a presentation.

Looking back, the upside of slide shows was that their use was relatively limited because they were such a pain to create. Little did we realize back then how PP would one day ruin our lives.

Today, anybody with a PC and a lack of training, talent, and imagination can whip up a stultifyingly awful presentation in minutes.

It’s similar to what happened when word processing was first loosed unto an innocent, unsuspecting world. Armed with an endless variety of fonts and colors, astonishing uncreative people inflicted nightmarishly ugly flyers and brochures on blameless audiences. With PowerPoint, these same cretins can now take garishness to new lows, adding “fly-ins” and “builds,” incorporating sound and video clips, and creating what can only be called multi-tedia presentations.

We were once slightly amused by the clueless presenter who would try to show us entire pages of information in 6 point type in a PP slideshow. He had only recently discovered slideware after many years of scratching out notes on overhead transparencies, another relic from those halcyon days of bore.

Today, we almost miss that guy because he has been replaced by MBAs who use PP to bludgeon us into submission. By the time these expert time-consumers are finished presenting, we are anxious to surrender and be put out of our misery. “Yes!” we want to scream, “You can have anything you want! Just make the slides stop!”

One of the worst abuses of PP in modern memory was Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's justification for invading Iraq with his famous PowellPoint presentation at the UN.

Yet, my biggest peeve is the folks who do nothing more than read aloud every bullet point on their slides. If they are not just lazy or stupid, they may be laboring under the impression that this repetition will help them drive their points home.

According to a recent article in Australia's Sidney Morning Herald, that technique not only boring, but also counter-productive. It actually makes it more difficult for your victims to retain the information.

The April 4, 2007 Herald article by Anna Patty begins by saying "If you have ever wondered why your eyes start glazing over as you read those dot points on the screen, as the same words are being spoken, take heart in knowing there is a scientific explanation. It is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you in the written and spoken form at the same time."

Patty's article says that researchers at the University of New South Wales "shows the human brain processes and retains more information if it is digested in either its verbal or written form, but not both at the same time."

The article notes that "The findings show there are limits on the brain's capacity to process and retain information in short-term memory." The author of the study cited in the article, Professor John Sweller, is credited with developing the "cognitive load theory" and believes that "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster" and should be "ditched."

While I can sympathize with Professor Sweller's point of view, it is going to be impossible to ban PowerPoint. I propose, instead, some guidelines:

1. You may not use more than 12 slides.

2. All type on each slide must be at least 36 points high.

3. You must write and use a script in which you explain each point on each slide in a series of complete sentences, building a comprehensible narrative that is actually printed in the "notes" section of each slide.

4. A full set of printed notes pages must be provided to each victim in your audience, ideally at the beginning of the presentation, so they can get up and leave in order to do more important things instead of listening to you blather on and on.

5. If you choose to hand out the notes pages at the end of your presentation, please announce your intention to do so at the outset, relieving the audience from the need to pay attention and giving them the chance to consult their Blackberries or handheld games while you blunder through your slides.

6. You will get bonus points if you e-mail the entire presentation to each of us before the meeting, and then cancel the meeting because it is, after all, pointless.

If you fail to adhere to any of the above rules, your PowerPoint license will be revoked, the software will be removed from any computer to which you have access, and you will be required to sit in a small darkened windowless room in which Colin Powell's presentation will be shown to you on a continuous loop until you promise never to create a slideshow ever again.

[John Saremba]

People have raised some very good points in their comments to this blog post. I too have grown increasingly frustrated and concerned with most PowerPoint presentations. I have thought a great deal about the underlying barriers to making a good presentation or conducting an effective training session. I have no firm conclusions about such barriers, but have a few ideas:

1. Many staff are seldom given the time to properly design and plan a presentation, in large part because their supervisors or managers fail to realize the amount of time to create an effective and engaging presentation. This time constraints may force them to focus on the content rather than the process of presenting.

2. Most people, even those who have learned how to use PowerPoint as a software program, have likely not received training in the design and deliver of an effective presentation. In taking a computer software training course, few if any deal with the design and delivery of engaging presentations.

3. In general, despite information to the contrary, many groups and organizations seem to give people using PowerPoint a free ride. Have we come to almost expect boring presentations? It would seem that we have lowered our expectations to assume that most presentations with visual aids will provide us with bullet-laden text slides that are used as an electronic teleprompter. Is so, I wonder why we continue to accept such presentations, even at major conferences?

4. Perhaps PowerPoint comprises a crutch for many people that have concerns about speaking in public, much like the full-written version of a speech was before visual aids. People were reading entire presentations from their notes long before PowerPoint became prevalent in the workplace. This may explain why many so presentations are presenter-centered, rather than audience-centered; otherwise, we would have much more engaging presentations.

5. In terms of improving presentations, particularly those with PowerPoint, one of the most powerful techniques that presenters can and should use involves the use of stories or business narrative to rely their information to audiences. However, once again, how many people have been trained or understand the value and keys to relating stories to their content in delivering engaging presentations.

Stories combined with dynamic images and suitable learning activities are a superb way to engage audiences, hold their attention, and increase learning retention.

What surprises me is that with the increased popularity of digital cameras and cellphone cameras, people have direct access to create their own dynamic images to form the basis of stories.

In summary, it would seem that the work in thinking about how to deliver content in terms of stories, metaphors, analogies, case studies, scenarios, may appear like too much work for just a "presentation". Why go to all that work, when one can just fire up PowerPoint, type in some key points about one's content and the job is done. Well, the simple answer to that question can be expressed in three words: why go to all that trouble – "For the Audience".

I have offered to assist presenters in doing a PowerPoint make-over, complete with dynamic images, hyperlinks to enhance navigation, interactive learning activities, interactive handouts rather than copies of the PowerPoint slides, etc. And much to my surprise, these presenters were not interested in receiving assistance, even on a complementary basis. Why, I wondered, would they choose not to try and improve their presentation and enhance their profile? I can only guess that people feel that the effort is not worth the energy to change their approach.

A colleague of mine, Ken Bellemare, had a really good suggestion for overcoming resistance to change one's approach to PowerPoint. Presenters should take encouraged to "baby steps" in changing their presentation, i.e., change only three slides in their presentation. The difference may be inspiring!

[simonr - Curved Vision Presentations]

I've had the same experience as John - we train people to make presentations and (in desperation!) we offer to do free work because it's actually less painful to do the work than to sit through the presentations as they currently are!

Take-up is more or less zero.

People seem to think that it's okay to make bad presentations - perhaps because everyone else is!

[Graham Chastney]

I have a huge issue with the Robert Gaskins' quote you use:

“A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work."

In my experience this is completely the wrong way areound.

“A lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don't like the intellectual rigor of actually READING A DOCUMENT."

Why bother wrtiing a rigourous document if you know that it is never going to get read. Why bother writing the detail if all it does is take up space...

[Rajan R]

Guillaume Gete: I largely agree with you, however I have seen God-awful Keynote presentations. While aesthetically more pleasing than Microsoft templates and clipart, many of the same pitfalls still occur - 3D bar charts, tiny text - heck, once, I saw a slide with *16* bullet points (they all appeared at the same time, and were all full sentences, so I didn't really listen).

And perhaps it is the people. I know someone who *bought* Keynote and decided to stop using it because he couldn't make complicated graphs with multiple variables. Maybe, just maybe, the problem is with the complicated graphs with multiple variables than the software.

I, for one, look forward to getting my first Mac. Once you stop using templates, PowerPoint becomes a pain to use - there is no aligning, for example.

BTW, Office 2007 came with a bunch of new templates. I think most of it were badly designed - plus someone in Microsoft missed the design lesson on San Serif vs Serif and decided to invert it throughout Office. With most templates using difficult to read Serif fonts for most of the text, the future looks bleak.

And Office 2007 makes it quite difficult to break out of the defaults. Once, for example, I tried to make the background a Job-esque gradient (it was a very Jobsnote presentation) - I gave up figuring out how to make a custom gradient and used Photoshop. Much like the image effects Microsoft has (shadows and what not) - to create something custom, you probably need one of those Office 2007 guidebooks you see in the bookstore.

I never needed those books for Office 97. Maybe I'm growing old. However, it is quite clear more and more people would stick to the limited range of stuff Microsoft was kind enough to provide presets for, even if they break out from templates.

[Charlie Arehart]

Very interesting info, as always. And this is an issue I struggle with myself.

At the risk of splaying myself like a lab rat on the operating table (and a long-ish comment), I'll share my own experience and challenges in this very regard and ask your help.

I'm a presenter of nearly 20 years (started with Harvard Graphics, then FreeLance, so as others have said, it's not PPTs fault per se.) Though I always get high ratings as a presenter, I still fall into the trap of using mostly text, as both a teleprompter for me and notes for my audience (who can download the talk afterward).

I agree with Graham Chastney, that while creating a document as an alternative may seem the solution, the problem is that often I and many presenters are offering the PPT as an alternative way to present info that exists in written form, because people don't read it. (The same could be said of putting them into the notes section.)

On the subject of offering handouts in advance (another classic debate), Bruce's comments would lead us to conclude there's no point to making presentations at all: we just give out the notes and slides in advance so people can either read email during the talk or not even show up at all. That may seem efficient, but again if people then really never read the stuff, what's been gained?

At least in the software world I speak to, I get high ratings and am asked back often (despite the "poor" quality slides, which is never mentioned in evals). Perhaps some audience types may indeed be so conditioned to accept what they've been getting. I'll note that I also often am hopping out of the slides to do live demos of the software I talk about, which could offer a break to the "all slideument" dilemma.

I also struggle with how to convert the words into something other than words. I'm not presenting "data", so I can't just "chart" it. I'm presenting observations, tips, and techniques.

Still, I've often felt that there must be some way to make the slides more compelling, while still offering the info/details (as much to save audience members taking notes, as well as to prompt me to remember to mention them).

I'm open to ideas. In fact, I'll gladly take Simon and John's offers to improve any of my talks. They're all online at carehart.org/presentations. (Even the site itself reflect a traditional text-heavy orientation.) Whether done privately (interacting with me a bit) or publicly (just take your best shot), if someone wanted to use a few slides from any one as an example to show how they'd do it differently--while achieving the same benefit to the audience to avoid taking notes and me to be prompted to remember key points, I'd certainly welcome it.

But please don't suggest using the "presenter view" or "dual monitor mode" (to show the display on projector and notes on the laptop). The former is widely panned for the tiny display of notes (no formatting rendered) and the latter suffers from a challenge for people like me who need to also demo software during the presentation. When you switch out of PPT to do the demos, if you move the mouse, you lose the synchronization of the notes and the slides (see http://accelerating.org/articles/beyondpresenterview.html#commonproblem).

Both also force you to stay in front of your laptop (as would printed notes).

Whenever I read these articles, I think I've got to work to make my preso's better, but until these problems can be solved (or I give just one presentation that I learn by heart), it seems I and my audience are stuck. I'd love to be shown a better way.

(One solution may well be to give the presentations only remotely. You lose the benefit of "being there" in front of the audience, but then you can more easily work from paper notes or indeed even a second monitor to show them.)

(That might even be an option for some presenters: have a second monitor to view notes. Again, it may seem you could just make your projector the 2nd monitor and show notes on the laptop, but that doesn't work well for 2 reasons: you generally want to see on your laptop what the others are seeing on the projector, and also if you need to do demos, then you really need your laptop and the projector to show the same thing.)

If all these challenges weren't so thorny, perhaps we'd see less reliance on "slideuments".