In a previous post I promised you to write about how to craft great PowerPoint presentations. I was planning to give you a list of “do this, do that” tips, but I found myself thinking about some underlying factors that make a slide presentation effective (or not). This turned out much more interesting than just a list of tips, so I’ll share my conclusions with you as food for thought. The conclusions pretty much agree with the way I write presentations for my lectures; I will give you some pointers at the end.

Do you really need a “Great PowerPoint presentation”?

The truth is, creating a really good presentation deck takes a lot of hard, skilled work. It may not be worth investing the effort when preparing to present some data in the daily operations review meeting. It’s worth doing if you’re preparing a lecture for a conference, or if you plan to present to external customers or to your own senior management, or if you lecture professionally as I do these days – although it’s surprising how often you see a professional speaker use slipshod foils that would shame a beginner…

However, even though you may not need a great presentation every time, it makes sense to acquire the skill of creating one; some of it will rub off even in the day to day PowerPoint work you do. So – read on!

Who benefits from your PowerPoint presentation?

This is the first question you must ask yourself. It is far from trivial, because PowerPoint is inherently a problematic communication tool, so you’d better be clear that there is value to your using it (as compared to doing without) – and you’d better be absolutely certain the value goes to the right beneficiary: your audience!

Many presenters use PowerPoint to benefit not their audience, but themselves. Perhaps they can’t speak fluidly or they get stage fright, in which case the presentation can save them by guiding them along and putting words in their mouth. These are the “seven bullets per slide, seven words per bullet” presentations – and many speakers just read them out mechanically.

Of course, in this case the audience does benefit somewhat – at least the content gets across. But a speaker who can do no better than this ought to invest time in improving their oratory skills (if Demosthenes managed, so can they!), rather than relying on a crutch of poorly crafted slides.

The real beneficiary of PowerPoint should always be your listeners, not yourself. Ask yourself, then: why does your audience – not you – need these slides? After all, Lincoln managed the Gettysburg address without PowerPoint (this hilarious spoof notwithstanding), and all the prophets of old did pretty well too. Here are some valid answers:

• Slides can show pictures – I don’t mean tasteless clip art, I mean real quality photos or diagrams that illustrate what you’re talking about, add interest, and help people remember your point. In some cases, a good picture really is worth 1000 words – in which case you just show the image and shut up.
• Slides can show relationships in data by using graphs and tables (but more on this below).
• Slides can summarize the key points you’ve made (over many minutes of speaking), to reinforce the learning.
• Slides can facilitate visual jokes and gags that – if used sparingly – can keep audience interest and make a point.

None of which, you can see, exempts you from knowing how to speak well. These are all in addition to, not in lieu of, your skill as a speaker.

Thus, you should always ask yourself: is this slide I’m creating an enhancement of my skill as a speaker – or an excuse for its lack?

How to achieve an acceptable information transfer rate in a presentation

The purpose of speaking is to communicate information, and our brains are capable of doing this transfer at a pretty high rate. Unfortunately, as Prof. Edward Tufte has pointed out in his unforgettable “The cognitive style of PowerPoint”, information density in most standard presentation templates is hopelessly low. To make a good lecture, we need a better conduit to achieve adequate information transfer rates.

There are many ways to get around this problem:

• Use images on your slides, and benefit from the “thousand words” leverage. For example, if you’re making a lecture about conditions in the third world, or about ecological devastation, one carefully chosen image can have a huge impact in conveying a complicated message.
• Put most of the information transfer in your own speaking – not on the slide. You see this with outstanding speakers who throw up a slide, then talk for ten minutes before replacing it with the next one.
• A real problem arises when you need to convey lots of detailed technical data. You can’t describe this much data by reading out the numbers, and you can’t do it justice on a PPT slide because of the latter’s inherently low resolution. In this case a printed paper handout may still be your best choice.
• One workaround is to keep PowerPoint as a vehicle but strip it of its PowerPointiness – delete all background and template elements to attain a blank slide, then paste a hi-res screenshot of your data across the full slide area. With the resolution of a modern projector, this comes close to 35 mm slide quality.
• Another solution is to use physical objects to show the audience – after all, when dealing with products or machines nothing comes close to holding the real thing. This is why when I lecture about Innovation and the History of Computing I bring a logarithmic slide rule to pass through the audience: even the best photo can’t compare to actually touching this beautiful piece of math history.

The main thing is to remember what you’re up there to do: transfer information, knowledge, and (hopefully) some wisdom. If your message is shallow enough to fit in seven-bullet chunks, so be it; if it isn’t, move it across by adding imagery, objects and spoken words. Or, if nothing else will do, dump the slides and use your words alone!

Some tips from my own PowerPoint presentations

I’d rather you give it some thought and define your own rules, but here are some ideas from my own usage that you may want to consider:

• I stay away from Microsoft’s built-in design templates and styles. Instead I create my own presentation templates, keeping them clean and simple. I prefer mostly white backgrounds that allow me free play with images and text.
• I use lots of photographs and diagrams, carefully selected to effectively make or illustrate the main point(s). In most of my lectures, some 2/3 of the slides have images only, and most of the rest use a combination of images and a little text. The idea is that I do the talking, and the imagery augments the effect.
• I often put text here and there on a slide without bulleting it; when I do use bulleted text I never plan to read it to the audience. The text must support, not echo, my words!
• I do my best to make the placement of images and text visually pleasing and well proportioned, at least to my eye. I like my work – in any area – to look professional.
• I do use section header slides, to help the audience realize we’re moving from one part of a lecture into another.
• When I was younger I used (in moderation) some slide builds, transitions and animations; these days I never do it. It’s distracting and I have enough confidence in my speaking not to need such bells and whistles.

One outcome is that I don’t distribute my PPT files, as many speakers do. They aren’t designed to be read without my accompanying words; indeed, a casual reader would miss most of the message. Instead, when asked by a client, I provide a Word document with a summary of the lecture that is designed to stand on its own.

Whatever you do, do your audience a favor: put some thought up front into how you craft your presentation. They deserve your effort – and will appreciate it!

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