By Ginny Stibolt, web content consultant (Published Jan. 12, 2004)

There has been a fairly active debate recently about the use, overuse and misuse of Microsoft's PowerPoint. In '97 Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun MicroSystems, banned PowerPoint from his company saying that it was a huge waste of productivity. On the other hand, PowerPoint presentations have become an expected part of training and presentations. Often PowerPoint slides are required as part of a course design and textbooks quite often come with generic PowerPoints for instructors to use.

So what are the problems and what can you do about them?

1) Poorly designed slides can detract from even the best oral presentation.
I'm sure you've suffered through presentations where:

* the slides have too much text or a weird color scheme making them difficult to read.
* the slides are simply bullet points to cue the speaker - really boring.
* the slides look like they've been recycled from several other presentations - no unifying look.
* the slides do not follow or enhance the speaker's topics.

Moving from portrait to landscape orientation.
Slides are a visual medium - they should look more like a billboard or a TV ad than a Word file. With a document, your eye travels down the page and the bullets help to organize and define the ideas. But if you look at any (other) visual medium, you'll not find the space divvied up in this way. You are making a mistake if you simply transfer your Word document's bullets over to PowerPoint slides - your brain works differently when seeing a visually oriented image. Good design incorporates these ideas, but I won't cover any more of it here. It is a subject that could takes many semesters to cover.

2) When poorly used, even the best-designed slides can be deadly.
I'm also sure you've had the misfortune of being on the receiving end of presentations or training sessions where the presenter is giving Ben Stein competition for the most boring monotone while reading the bullet points and text of the slides to you. In reality most presentations would be greatly enhanced if the speaker kept those bullets for himself on 3x5 cards (Remember those?) and spoke to the audience and not to the slides. It's been said that bullets can kill a presentation.

Plus, if the slides are provided as handouts, then people have a reason to tune it out - they can read it later themselves. There is very little learning going on here.

The presenter should know the topic and have a clear message that has been designed for the audience. One size does NOT fit all audiences - canned presentations hardly ever work well.

The slides should be used to enhance the discussion by illustrating a point or presenting results, statistics or other numeric information visually such as a graph. The slides alone should not represent all of the material. The slides are not the presentation; they are just a tool for a knowledgeable presenter.

In previous a training column, I covered ways to design training materials to accommodate people with different learning styles. (http://www.digitalharboronline.com/columns/archive16.html) When students can see and listen to information, you have increased the chances of their understanding the topic. BUT, and this is a big but, they must be engaged in the presentation and not napping, playing with their text messaging phone or game boy. Gosh, maybe they'd actually have to tune in and actually think of a question. Maybe they'd take notes, which is another way many people learn.

3) PowerPoint slides use a huge amount of memory.

a) Internal storage:
While storage is inexpensive these days, it is still a resource that can be over-taxed by too many sets of the same slides being used over and over in slightly different ways and all stored as full presentations. The slides, if they are to be reused for future presentations, should be managed for easy retrieval, but to minimize redundancy. If a presentation will not be made a again, delete it.

If you've ended up with a large collection of presentations that you are determined to keep, use Impatica (www.impatica.com) or other program to compress them into a manageable size. Many presentations with narration can be reduced up to 95%!

b) Using web pages to deliver Power Points presentations:
PowerPoint Presentations take a long time to download if people are to access them via the Internet. Plus the receiver's system must either have PowerPoint or a Power Point viewer to access the information. (On an Intranet, it is not so critical.) Again Impatica is useful: it converts a large PowerPoint file into 3 smaller files - one of them is an html file accessible by anyone on the net without a special viewer.

While the slides themselves rarely stand alone, you can still use PowerPoint to effectively present a topic on-line if it is narrated. Here is an example of an impaticized (Compressed with Impatica software - see above.) presentation of a program, served from HCC's website. (Works best if your screen is set at 1024x768 or higher.)
http://www.howardcc.edu/business/Office-Technology-@-HCC-N.html Notice how the narrator talks about the content of the slides, but does not read the slides to you. Yes, I know, there are some bullets included, but they are enhanced by photographs and other visuals.

There are some thought-provoking articles on the ineffective use of PowerPoints at www.MarketingProfs.com,
http://search.atomz.com/search/?sp-q=powerpoint&sp-a=sp1002af2d&sp-p=all&sp-f=ISO-8859-1&submit.x=32&submit.y=13

Several of theses articles are by Cliff Atkinson, who has strong feelings on the subject. His site: http://www.sociablemedia.com

I'm collecting input on this subject: please email me with your PowerPoint and/or presentation thoughts. Thanks. ginnys@digitalharboronline.com

Ginny Stibolt has been "into" computers since 1981 when she opened a retail computer store.  She also owned a software development company during the '90s and is now working part-time at Howard Community College.  www.sky-bolt.com