“Standardized communications always herald the end of a civilization."

So in case you missed it, we lost the place in 1984. How so? A little something then called Presenter--but you probably know it better by the name it took on in 1987: PowerPoint. How come? I’ll get back to that. Let’s start by looking into the dark depth of history.

What did you do in the past, Dad?
Before we had PowerPoint, if we wanted visual aids, we had few choices. The hardware delivery method was the overhead projector (OHP), onto which the presenter would either place pre-printed (usually black and white) slides or foils, or (more commonly) write down their bullet points using smudgy wipe-off sharpies in a rainbow of colors—that is, seven. The preprinted foils were either simple carbon copies of typewritten text or were prepared by professional design groups at significant cost. The room had to be darkened for the slides to be visible, making the presenter come across as a voice from the void. It sucked other than that as a viewer you could usually take a nap and no-one would notice. Most people would stand before their audience, look ‘em in the eye, and talk. Most business meeting were simple—people, a table, notepads and pens, and sometimes maybe even an agenda!

Not that far in the past!
Presenter (which I may as well just call PowerPoint from here on out) aimed to do for the foil what PageMaker had done for page layout: allow amateurs with no talent to create “professional looking presentations, quickly and easily!” and so it did. Just like PageMaker before it, a whole new group of people could now create their own material, using whatever combination of fonts, styles, graphic elements (so long as they were lines, rectangles or ovals) they wanted to. And just like the dcuments created by the new PageMaker users, it was enough to make anyone who knew the first thing about type use, design, or layout weep uncontrollably. Fortunately for the page layout folks, PageMakers “thrill” was brief, and within a few years the control of professional documents was back with people who knew what they were doing. Yeah for DTP, but pity poor DTPresentation--its hell had only just begun.

What was in the middle, then?
Up until this point, things were not that bad (outside of the horrific pieces being produced)--slides remained physical, printed things that ended up on OHPs. Then the other shoe dropped. Desktop projectors that could link up to your PC or Mac and display the image onto a conference screen. Suddenly, almost overnight, no presentation was complete without an accompanying computer-generated slide-show. The standard show routine would go something like this: meeting due to start at 2:00pm; set-up at 1:45pm to be ready; go to room at 1:45pm; projector is not in room; ask area associate where projector is; it’s in the boardroom and will be free at 2:00pm; twiddle fingers; 2:00pm of to boardroom, boardroom meeting is running over; 2:10pm politely break in and steal projector; take projector to meeting room; most people have not shown up yet; set up projector; link projector to PC/Mac (no matter which type of computer you have, the projector will have the opposing video connector); where’s the adaptor?; ask the associate where it is; he doesn’t know; search; find it; wire it up; start up projector; start up PC/Mac; computer doesn’t see external display; switch everything off; switch on the PC/Mac first, then the projector; ok, now we see it; in fact we see the whole desktop of the computer including slightly careful@work desktop picture; start up PowerPoint; PowerPoint shows the last slide it was on, usually the summary so effectively making the presentation (power)pointless; fiddle with focus; move projector further back to make image bigger; presenter tries to use computer while watching screen behind him over his shoulder; finally figures out how to get into slide-show mode; presentation begins (2:30pm to 2:45pm, audience is totally disinterested at this time and are chatting amongst themselves); audience play ‘spot the typo’ as presenter blandly reads text from interminable slides while facing the whiteboard, his back turned to his audience; 20 minutes in, bulb in projector blows; meeting rearranged for another day.

But things got better, didn’t they Dad?
Yes and no. The technology got better. The projectors got more reliable, the computers could display the same image on their external video and internal display; color became commonplace. The software also grew: charts were added, then tables, then bullet points could be revealed one by one, then clipart, then animation, then slide transitions, then sounds, then multimedia (remember that?!)—but something was going horribly, horribly wrong. For every new feature added, a throng of users would pick up on it and “incorporate” these features into their presentations. The content remained strictly the same bland, typo-filled, mess—but now appearing letter by letter, flying in from the top, the bottom, the left, the right…

Stop it, stop it, make it stop!
Let’s be clear, those long, boring, pointless corporate presentations that fill ever off-site meeting are not the fault of PowerPoint per say, and while the author must take some of the blame, it’s really corporate culture that should carry the can. Today, if you make a presentation that doesn’t have an accompanying PowerPoint,then, well, you are not really trying are you? Point missed. Worse, this enforcement of the visual aid makes poor presenters out of almost everyone.

Make it better!
I’ve given more presentations than I care to think about. I eventually got to the point where I’d sooner sabotage equipment than use PowerPoint/Keynote. If you want people to listen to you, you need to get them to focus on you. If you want to tell different groups the same core things, but they have different areas of focus, a linear slide show is your enemy. Visual aids have their place (simple diagrams, organization charts, etc.) but if you can talk without them, you’ll be more effective, better able to move the discussion along as appropriate, and you’ll never be at the mercy of a bust bulb, missing cable, or dirty desktop picture. Presenting is pretty simple: determine what it is you want to say; determine how you want to say it; find the minimum (hopefully zero) volume of visual aids you’ll need; rehearse thrice before going live; keep it simple; follow the golden rule—tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.

As University of Toronto management professor David Beatty says: “PowerPoint is like a disease. It’s the AIDS of management.” Wiki