I recently stumbled across a page entitled "12 Tips for Creating Better Presentations," composed by a "Document Production Expert" at Microsoft.
What amazes me is not the banality of some of the tips, but how they focus on almost entirely the wrong things. Autolayouts? Autocorrect options? Not only do their "before" and "after" shots look almost identical, they are all terrible slides filled with paragraphs of 8-point writing.
And the worst part? My manager will read this page and think that this is what is meant by "Good Powerpoint".
Is bad advice better than no advice?
2 comments:
You're right: not only was the slide on that site garbage, it was poorly written as well. I found at least two places that needed an editor to go over them. Surely the point of a slide is to serve as some kind of visual cue? If you're just going to write up everything that the presenter is saying, you can get rid of the presenter and just make hand-outs instead.
Bloody Microsoft.
What amazes me is how there are so many really bad presentations given, everywhere we go. Somehow, everyone decided that "the default template is good enough," and stopped thinking critically about how to best convey a message.
Excellent advice on presenting is freely available (presentationzen.blogs.com is a good start), but it just seems like most people have given up.
This means, of course, that for those of us that care there is more opportunity to excel.
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