If You Can't Do PowerPoint Well, Find Someone Who Can
PowerPoint is the go-to information sharing tool right after email. While email comes with spell check, PowerPoint lacks any type of automated system for letting you know that the slide you just created sucks. In fact, Microsoft has enabled PowerPoint sucking, with their horrendous templates, infinite sub-bullets and "artistic" filters.
Bad PowerPoint can be directly attributed with the deaths of 14 astronauts. And while that may seem like an extreme example, should you be taking the chance of having that level of disaster befall your company or team?
Microsoft's PowerPoint has given people with little to no artistic talent, zero creative background, questionable abilities to tell a story, and doubtful skills as prioritizing information a powerful tool. They shouldn't be trusted with creating a presentation anymore than I would allow my kids to use a chainsaw. That's my son Jack chopping down a tree with a hatchet, closely supervised my myself and my step-father.
In 1986 the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded dramatically on live television shortly after takeoff. The culprit? Bad PowerPoint. In the type of PPT slide we've all come to accept they buried the lead. Worse, the phraseology used didn't indicate the danger the Shuttle faced. Buried in the last sub-bullet at the bottom of the page (which, considering how we know most projector-screen partnerships result, may not even have been seen by scientists.
Why does this slide suck? Here:
The fact that the test did not use the same "volume ramp" as an actual launch, means that the test is not predictive. The fact that this test, despite being 640 times LESS powerful than real life, would cause "significant damage" is kinda important don'tcha think? If it's the lead, why is it buried at the very bottom as the 10th bullet?! It should have been the title. How about a title like, I don't know, "In A Real-Life Tile Penetration, The Shuttle Would Be Destroyed"? "Minor variations...can cause significant damage", "tests show it is possible" are a couple of other phrases they might have wanted to call out. The fact that there 4 levels of hierarchy in the bullets yet the most important piece is at the bottom is a HUGE problem. Oh, btw, using "significant" 5 times either reduced it's significance, meant that the slide should probably read "guys, we're SIGNIFICANTLY fucked" or meant that the most dramatic piece of news made any other slides unnecessary. I prefer my alternative to this slide:
"Well", you might say "I'm not an artist, so I can't draw that." is as obvious as the fact that ANYTHING hitting the wing at takeoff, from a tile to a tick would have exploded the Shuttle. First of all, don't tell me that NASA didn't have stock illustrations laying around. Second, we're talking actual rocket scientists here, they couldn't draw a line sketch or used their advanced and highly educated brains to consider asking an artist to draw them a picture? At the very least they should have been significantly better at understanding what the priority message was; that if a tile hit the shuttle at test speeds and caused damage, at REAL speeds it'd destroy the most complex vehicle every built by man.
So these were rocket scientists, actual rocket scientists that couldn't get Power Point right. So what chance do you have with your liberal arts BA or your MBA? Perhaps you should recruit a BFA or MFA? If you don't have internal creative that can create a library of stock drawings or images that can visually convey a variety of potential business ideas or create templates that make it easier for business people to tell a story, hire an agency to do it. Better yet, how about a few college courses in visual storytelling, or internal training using one of those dreaded corporate learning companies? You can even hit a bookstore.
Here are a few tips to not sucking at Power Point:
- Get someone with creative talent or training to do it.
- Pretend a slide is a billboard you're driving past at 35 mph, you get to convey 1 idea on that slide, what's it going to be? Because you're showing this to a room of 40-60 somethings on a TV 10' away from your viewers.
- Don't use bullets. Bullets are for guns.
- Don't write paragraphs of text unless you're printing out a take-home. 1 sentence with a photo will do: "Our stocks are up" (chart goes here).
- To reiterate above: use 1 idea or data point, etc. per page. 10 slides with 1 idea each can be shown and explained as quickly as 1 slide with 10 ideas on it. But 1 slide with 10 ideas is difficult to consume for any human being. It's hard to read, hard to create a hierarchy or priority, hard to organize.
- Working memory can only process 3-4 chunks of information at a time. Pick your 3-4 ideas or points, show one on each page, put supporting or "read later" pages at the end. That's right, don't even show them if you don't have to. The data heads would rather read it on the train anyway.