PowerPoint gets a bad rap (part deux).

 In my previous entry onpoint , I asked the question “Is it the medium of PowerPoint…that puts the “Death” in “Death by PowerPoint?” In that entry, I asked if it was the medium or a boring instructor that is to blame.

Here we are almost four years downstream from that entry and still I hear people “poo-poo’ing” PowerPoint.

Granted, I grew up back in a time when we kids were the only TV remote control our parents had ever heard of. And when I took Speech class, the only “visual aids” involved were eyeglasses worn in the audience or inanimate objects the speaker displayed to help make a point or two.

In other words, the visual aids were used to help support and enhance the speaker.

But fast-forwarding to the 21^st century now we see that now the tail wags the dog. Instead of visual aids supporting a strong speaker making his or her presentation stronger, we have far too many speakers rely on the “flash and dash” of PowerPoint and other software as the main part of a presentation. Anymore it’s almost like the carbon-based life form speaker is only around to take up volume and space and mumble a few stammered phrases during an otherwise silicon-based electronic presentation.

And I’ll go even further; in such bassackward presentations, I notice an infatuation with having some kind of jazzy-and-more-decoration-than-cognitive-support graphic (at least) or, worse, a half dozen images flying round the screen in some useless animation done more “just because” than for any sound instructional design or presentation logic.

In other words, the whole structure and flow of the presentation becomes too much digital entertainment – aka “edutainment” – and less on content and delivery. It’s almost as if the “if ya can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with BS” phraseology has morphed (decayed) into “if ya can’t dazzle them with gee-whizzery and lightshows, then ya ain’t tryin’ hard enough.”

Newsflash, folks; bombarding your audience with slide after slide of decorative graphics (those that don’t add to the point but are just there to have some kind of onscreen graphic) or those that make points that could just as easily be made by the speaker do nothing but “numb” your audience to the impact of graphics in presentations. Why? Because everyone and I mean everyone one is bombarding their audiences with pointless graphics too – endlessly – slide after slide after slide….

So, it’s small wonder folks still hate PowerPoint presentations. The Irish have a saying, “You can put lipstick on a pig…but, it’s still a pig.” In other words, if your content and/or speaker sucks, you can have all the software toys you want going during a presentation and it’s likely to still suck. Why? because the focus of the presentation is the content and how it’s presented. If it’s a presentation that is done with some kind of speaker on stage, then keep the speaker supported by and not dominated by the visual aids.

It’s ok to have several blank slides (dark screen) in your presentation. Those could and should “show” while the speaker in front of the audience is presenting and is the focus of the audience. Then when an graphic appears on screen it should only be because a graphic is needed to help get the point across. It’s time to get back to the mindset that graphics and visual aids are there to support the presentation not BE the presentation. If we don’t we’re just gonna keep on numbing the audience and alienate them from software-supported presentations even more so than they’ve already become.