Powerpoint Really Can Kill

This short week, we talked a lot about how to really make a good presentation. No, this doesn't mean millions of bullet-points with graph after graph of unnecessary data. And yes, while it is fun choosing the color scheme of your pie charts, those don't work so well either. The key to a great presentation, is to almost NOT have a presentation.

The man who leads this uprising against the popular program PowerPoint is a man named Edward Tufte. He has written numerous reports on design and how humans receive information. In addition, he has worked with many companies to examine why things went wrong with their system. For example, in the space shuttle Columbia disaster, he looked at the presentation that was given to the engineers and criticized it. I became very interested in this subject, and decided to do a little more research.

To Tufte, less is more. In his essay, the "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", he basically says that information should not be in a hierarchy (which bullet-points tend to do), but instead should be spread nicely so the audience can see trends and important pieces of information without thinking too hard. The presentation should give the audience another opportunity to take in the big ideas, without taking away from the presenter. This is also where a hand-out comes in handy.

Mr. Bolos takes this into consideration when making his presentations, as I will start to. Instead of there being multiple charts and paragraphs on a slide, it is better to try to use one quote or one word that summarizes the main point, with a picture that supports the word. This way, the audience will understand the main point, but will not read ahead on the PowerPoint and tune the speaker out. If you want to know more, here's an interesting presentation about this same fact.