fine whine

I just sat through a typical PowerPoint presentation. It is my hope that in ten or twenty years if anybody reads this they will say "PowerPoint?" just as now we would say "Harvard Graphics?", as something new will have long since come along and deposed king Microsoft from its ill-deserved throne for slide presentation software. I can hope, can't I?

Some people may say that PowerPoint gets a bad rap. Some people also say that lima beans are tasty, too, so we can't put too much faith in most people for their opinions. PowerPoint is evil, not so much for what it is as for what it has done to the whole idea of presentations.

Incidentally, some people probably know exactly what I mean.

Take the example of the presentation through which I just sat. Thankfully it was short, but I was left with the impression that I'd really gained nothing by sitting through it rather than waiting for the slides to be emailed to me (as I am sure they will be in the near future). Fifty or so of us sat there at rapt attention as somebody read exactly what was on screen to us. She even looked up at the screen with us to do it; she didn't even have cheat sheets.

Now for a guy like me who was sitting in the back and didn't put in any contacts today, I suppose doing things her way might've been considerate, but for the rest of the ably-sighted crowd I can't help but wonder if they felt somewhat cheated, if not downright insulted. How stultifying is it to have somebody read something written in huge Arial or Times New Roman to a roomful of adults? Not since elementary school has that sort of thing happened to me, at least this blatantly. I was somewhat annoyed, you might say.

Now let me describe my approach to the slideshow presentation. I practice my material out loud first and only thereafter make slides of things that should be highlighted or reinforced. The only slide to which I stick closely is the summary, and people are lucky if I happen to throw one of those in at all (generally only doing so only to pad the runtime out to a respectable length). Everything else I basically ignore completely. I get away from the podium and try to keep the audience's attention. The slideshow goes on behind me, minus bells, whistles and other needless transitions other than being synchronized with the major points I'm making if I'm lucky enough to have a mouse, otherwise a sidekick needs to be on top of things to know when to flip my slides. As for me I don't care what's up there as I'm focusing on what I'm saying. The slides are up behind me for convention, not because I want them there.

It works for me. That said, I've never gotten real feedback if my method works for the audience or not. When I do it, though, I can be pretty sure I'm not treating anybody like a kindergartner.