Why powerpoint is bad

Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication.

These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall. Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations -is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools.

Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

Of course, data-driven meetings are nothing new. Years before today's slideware, presentations at companies such as IBM and in the military used bullet lists shown by overhead projectors.

But the format has become ubiquitous under PowerPoint, which was created in and later acquired by Microsoft. PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Particularly disturbing is the adoption of the PowerPoint cognitive style in our schools.

Rather than learning to write a report using sentences, children are being taught how to formulate client pitches and infomercials. To counteract the linear restriction, companies are moving towards a more narrative structure, due to our brains being naturally hardwired to process, understand, and engage a story.

Instead, his teams spend the first 30 minutes of the meeting reading a multi-page memo with a narrative structure in order to improve learning and engagement with everyone involved.

In situations where more than one person is involved in putting together a presentation, they will also come across some roadblocks, as PowerPoint limits the ability for teammates to collaborate easily. While PowerPoint slides can be shared and edited simultaneously, essential components of efficient and effective collaboration are not taken into consideration such as task management with assigned duties and notifications, seamless access on any device, approval workflow functionality, or integration into the existing communication and collaboration structure at a company.

Unfortunately, PowerPoint does provide an analytics dashboard, leaving the presenter with no information that they can work off of, unless they follow up with the audience directly. This makes improving the presentation, let along gauging its effectiveness, extremely difficult. Even something as simple as a ratings and comments system can provide presenters with invaluable information that can end up transforming presentations for the better.

Imagine being able to get immediate responses from your audience, rating how informative or fun your presentation was. You could even take a quick poll to see if your audience felt that the presentation itself was even necessary, which could be useful for cutting out inefficiencies in things such as corporate training programs.

However, you should know that PowerPoint is not your only choice for presentations, as there are solutions available that are better for both you and your audience that you should be aware of.

There are methods for creating more engaging presentations that are easier than putting together a deck of slides and come fully equipped with tools that will set you up for success, from security and analytics to collaboration and content management. SpeachMe allows you to quickly create brief interactive presentations optimized for maximum impact that feature video captured on a smartphone, tablet or webcam combined with existing media and documents.

I can only speculate. In the article, and in the complaints of the military commanders it quotes, one of the chief issues is the use of skimpy bullet points rather than complete, analytically rigorous documents to convey intricate ideas.

The logical extreme that Bumiller offers up: What if lawyers were to present briefs to the Supreme Court in PowerPoint? The other issue, somewhat at odds with the first, is the packing of too much information into each slide.

I am very glad to have never met such a beast in the field myself. The highly complex slide appears for a few seconds before a puzzled audience and then disappears in a blink, replaced by another, equally detail-riddled slide that would take a sane person a week to decipher.

While I agree overall that PowerPoint is abysmal for communication, I disagree with the view that these particular issues are the root of the tree of PowerPoint evil.

The easily communicable components of miscommunication, if you will. Simply put, people try to do way too much with it. It is the metaphorical hammer for every information nail. It took me about four hours of fiddling and fighting with PowerPoint to make the picture. Just reformatting it for this blog post took me 30 minutes.