PowerPoint misfit

I’m not a PowerPoint expert. I occasionally have to do presentation to colleagues but it’s not a regular part of my job. The discovery of a markdown to PowerPoint converters I’m probably going to use the PowerPoint editor even less. I normally most interested in the information, a bit of text and a few bullet points. Though there’s definitely a place for more than that. This is more about the amount of content rather than how fancy it is.

Balanced presentations

A PowerPoint presentation has two main components: the slides and someone talking. In my view the best presentations balance these things. There’s enough information on the slides to provide a scaffold and show some critical aspects. The speaker adds more details, expanding individual points on the slides to full paragraphs. It can be interactive with the speaker taking questions or reading the room. If there are a lot of puzzled expressions in the audience then more details are required. If everyone is nodding their heads it’s time to move on. If everyone is shaking their heads maybe something different again.

Unbalanced presentations

If the slides have too much information then the speaker can end up just reading them out. To me those presentations tend to be more boring. I can read, indeed I can read faster than the speaker will be speaking. It’s possible to read it all and then have to wait for the speaker to catch up. You also end up with a slide that’s crammed full of text. That makes it harder to see what’s really important.

Slides can end up like this for different reasons. One of them is that the slides are having to serve double duty. They have to act as a backdrop for someone talking and they have to stand by themselves. This is a shame. I can enjoy watching maths videos on YouTube but I wouldn’t expect them to work if you switched the audio off. If I read a book for this blog then I expect to get everything from the text and not have someone narrate it for me. It’s not that you can’t make something that does two jobs but it’s often not as good at each individual one.

Examples

If I were to make a presentation on The Power of 10. I could try to squash them all on to one page:

While this technically fits to me it’s just far too much text.

Better to spread things out:

Or be more succinct:

I used Marp for the first two but had to use a full editor to get the two column effect. None of these slides are great. It might be better to combine the last two, spread things out and be succinct. Or keep it to just 2 or 3 points per page and taken even longer. It’s just a demonstration. For me the first one is the worst and the last one is better just based on the amount of text.

In the end

Try to have a presentation with both visual and spoken components but don’t overwhelm the audience with either. Don’t pack a slide full of text but, similarly, don’t have three bullets points and then talk about them for 3 hours.

If you need to make a presentation then create slides that complement the talk. If you intend people to read something by themselves then PowerPoint isn’t the best thing to use. Having to fit something on to individual slides is a limitation to be avoided if possible. Whether it’s PowerPoint, Word or something else entirely choose the right tool for the job.