Why do people love PowerPoint?
One of the topics that were up for a session on the recent PresentationCamp in San Francisco was “Why do people hate PowerPoint?”. In the end it never materilized as a session – but it really got me thinking. In my professional consultancy life my main problem isn’t that people hate PowerPoint, but actually that they really love it. Love it as in adore it, idealize it, put it on a pedestal love it. PowerPoint can be used for anything, any situation – regardless of a presentation actually taking place. Word has been put out of business by PowerPoint that is the solution to all problem.
When I read Garr Reynolds’ PresentationZen last spring I almost had an epiphany. Slideuments. What a great word. As he writes:
The creation of the slideument stems for a desire to save time. People think they are being efficient and simplifying things. // The slideument isn’t effective and it isn’t efficient, and it isn’t pretty. Attempting to have slides serve both as projected visuals and as stand-alone handouts makes for bad visuals and bad documents*.
Unfortunately I’m beginning to think I have become a Master of Slideuments. And it’s not a title I want. So actually, I could do with a little more hate of power point and a little less love. In the meantime, I’m trying to get out of PowerPoint hell, one .pptx file at a time…
*Garr Reynolds, PresentationZen, 2008.
