PowerPoint: 6 presentation peeves
Keep slides simple, and practice your lecture.
Most images from scanners or digital cameras are at higher resolutions than needed; computer monitors generally cannot display detail beyond 96 dots per inch (DPI), and photographs should be resampled accordingly to reduce file sizes. Resizing the image within PowerPoint does not change the resolution; you need a photo-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop, or Macromedia Fireworks (while there, be sure to crop out unnecessary parts of the photo).
Humor and comics. Including comic strips in a presentation has become somewhat hackneyed and overused. Use comics minimally and only when they help illustrate an important point.
6 ‘Do you have a handout?’
When audience members request printouts of slide presentations, speakers usually respond with straight printouts of the PowerPoint slides.
This makes little sense. Seeing the slides minus the speaker is like watching a documentary with the narration turned off. The more effective slides are as speaking aids, the less appropriate they are for stand-alone information.
Instead, create annotated slide printouts for distribution. Your best bet is to export the presentation to Microsoft Word, which creates a document containing pictures of the slides with adjacent notes. You could print out your slides using the PowerPoint notes function, but this only lets you print slides or notes on separate documents.
- TechRepublic.com. 10 slide design tips for producing powerful and effective presentations. https://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10881-6117178.html.
- Microsoft guidelines for selecting a picture format in an Office XP program. https://support.microsoft.com/kb/320314.
- Tufte ER. The cognitive style of PowerPoint: pitching out corrupts within. Cheshire CT: Graphics Press; 2006. (Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University, is an authority on presenting graphic information).
- Presentation Zen, a blog maintained by Garr Reynolds, former program manager for worldwide user group relations at Apple. www.presentationzen.com.
- PowerPoint does rocket science. Tufte’s analysis shows the mismanagement resulting from NASA’s insistence on using PowerPoint to present technical analyses, ultimately leading to the Columbia shuttle disaster. www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1.
- Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address, an intriguing example of “death by PowerPoint.” www.norvig.com/Gettysburg.
Disclosure
The author reports no financial relationship with any company whose products are mentioned in this article or with manufacturers of competing products.
