Robert Hampton

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19th August 2009

Missing the (Power)Point

PowerPoint is 25 years old and the BBC is “celebrating” by pointing out the worst excesses of PowerPoint misuse. It will strike a chord with anyone who has ever had to sit through a presentation by a boss who knows a little bit about computers, but not enough. Money quote:-

You think bullet points make information more digestible? Think again. A dozen slides with five bullet points on each assumes that people are mentally capable of taking in a list of 60 points. If it’s a 30-minute presentation, that’s a rate of two-per-minute.

I once sat through a presentation which consisted entirely of a list of bullet points, rendered in the most ghastly and illegible colour scheme imaginable. Each one popped onto the screen via a low-tech animation which would not exactly put Pixar to shame. The speaker then pointed to the screen and read out the text, after which he would click the mouse to make the next sentence appear. This lasted for over 90 minutes.