How Effective Is PowerPoint?

If you listen to PowerPoint proponents or to its detractors, you could be convinced that it's a panacea, with the potential for brining world peace, or the embodiment of evil itself, contributing to the delinquency of minors and turning corporate minds into mush. So what's the real story?

What's Behind an Effective Presentation

An effective presentation is one that communicates ideas, teaches concepts, or convinces or motivates listeners. Obviously, such presentations can happen without PowerPoint. And that's the point. In my experience, if you're already a good teacher, PowerPoint can help you teach more effectively. If you're a poor teacher, more likely than not PowerPoint will only make that more obvious. But that's why you're here you're already good and you want to find ways to do your job even better.

The following is not an exhaustive list, but it describes some key elements for any engaging presentation:

• Know what the purpose is for your presentation. Do you want to entertain or inform, motivate or convince, provide facts or stimulate creative thinking? If you don't know what you want to accomplish, your audience won't either.

• Organize yourself. Creating a plan or roadmap is crucial if you want to reach a target destination. Using an outline can help you show the big picture (major topics) and make sure the small picture (subtopics) is covered as well. If you don't know what you want the audience to know, chances are it won't end up knowing it.

• Practice your presentation. Know where you'll stand and when and how you'll move, what visual materials you'll use, and how you'll interact with the audience. You have to be comfortable with your presentation, or the audience certainly won't be.

• Capture the audience's interest. What can you use to grab people's attention and get them thinking along with you? How can you add fuel when the fire of interest is flickering? Can you use a story, an illustration, or some humor to keep them with you? Even the most important information can go unlearned or unnoticed if you don't get the audience's attention and keep it.

• Keep it relevant. Talking about critical success factors to third graders works no better than using exploding spiders in the boardroom to illustrate the need to lay off employees. Likewise, don't let merely interesting facts obscure what you really want the audience to know.

• Try to assess whether the presentation has worked. Use overviews at the beginning and summaries at the end so that it's clear to the audience members what they should have learned. Look for ways to get them to tell you what they learned.

None of these elements require the use of PowerPoint. However, PowerPoint might make it easier to pull them off. You should try to keep this in mind as you explore PowerPoint.

For more details or a summary of effective presentations, see p. 289.

Can PowerPoint Make Presentations Less Effective?

Earlier in this chapter I asked you to consider successful TV or print ads. You have probably noticed that not all commercial ads get the job done. Likewise, things that don't work in an ad probably won't work in PowerPoint either. What was the purpose of the ad? Was the presentation too "cute" so that you remember the cuteness but not the product? Were you distracted by poor design, clashing colors, extraneous music or sounds? Was the screen filled with too much text, not allowing you to read it all, or worse, making you not care to read it?

Once again, if you work at being an effective presenter, PowerPoint will help. If you don't, PowerPoint will likely magnify your shortcomings.

POWERPOINT 101

I once heard a story about a campus English professor who used PowerPoint to illustrate a lecture on Mark Twain. The opening slide read: "Mark Twain wrote..." When the professor tried to advance the slide, nothing happened. He and several technology-oriented students worked for 15 minutes before they fixed the problem, whereupon the professor proudly stated, backed up by flying, flaming text and a ricocheting bullet sound effect: Huckleberry Finn! The student who reported the incident opined that many professors seem to be majoring in PowerPoint 101, not in the subject they're trying to teach.

Another, more recent, phenomenon also makes it difficult to use PowerPoint effectively. Because PowerPoint has been used so poorly in many presentations, some audience members automatically think, "Oh no. Here comes another boring PowerPoint lecture. Turn off the lights and put me to sleep!" You need to be doubly effective if you want to overcome this conditioned negativity.

On the other hand, enough people have seen good presentations that they often expect you to use the technology available to you. If you don't, you have to rely on your charisma (and we don't all have that) if you want to capture and keep their attention. Likewise, the "MTV Generation" knows what it likes and expects to see a little pizzazz in any presentation.