Do you groan whenever you’re subjected to a PowerPoint presentation? You’re not alone. Few business tools are more blatantly misused and abused than PowerPoint. Some top business people are so burned out on these digital presentations that they’re putting limits on slides or nixing PowerPoint altogether. For many people, however, it’s not easy to turn the laptop off and just talk, one on one, even if their presentation would be substantially more effective that way.

Here are a few commonly cited PowerPoint weaknesses, and some tips for overcoming them*:

    It’s too easy to create slides. Because you can crank them out quickly, you make far more than are appropriate for the presentation.

    It wastes time. You can suck up precious time tweaking a presentation.

    It takes too much control away from the presenter – it makes it too easy to start the presentation with PowerPoint instead of starting with ideas and using PowerPoint to reinforce them.

    It makes for ugly presentations.

    It can actually impede attention.

    It does not lend itself to spontaneous discussions in the boardroom. It is heavily scripted and is not a tool for discovery.

    It does not handle text well.

  • The general rule for PowerPoint text is no more than three lines of text on a slide and no more than 6 words per line.
  • If you put a lot of text in a presentation, you have to move through a lot of slides. The rapid movement does nothing to aid the presentation and detracts from the message.

    • It too easily becomes a replacement for the presenter, not a reinforcement. Instead of a visual aid for the speaker, the speaker becomes an audio aid for the slides.

    Presenters rely too much on the slides for structure. Clear structure should still be part of the verbal presentation even with visual aids.

    Presenters fail to establish the connections necessary to make their message memorable. They often rely too much on the visual slide to make the connection and neglect repetition, examples, metaphors and other devices that make a message memorable.

    Business presenters feel that PowerPoint helps keep the audience’s attention. However, PowerPoint simply masks the fact that the presentation does not have enough intrinsic attention factors in itself. An effective presentation should keep the audience’s attention without depending on visuals. The visuals should be aids, not commanders.

With a little extra planning and effort, almost all business presentations given with PowerPoint would be better – and often much better. Make a new resolution for your 2010 business presentations: Less is more!

*Adapted from “PowerPoint Presentations: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” by Steven H. Kaminski

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