How Not to Use PowerPoint

By Rick Altman

I have seen it countless times, the most recent being at the Dallas / Ft. Worth Airport, during one of those all-too-familiar American Airlines layovers. While waiting at the gate, I was seated next to a man with a new and impressive-looking Dell notebook, and he was open to an untitled PowerPoint file, with a blank title slide before him. On those big 15-inch displays, it’s really hard not to see what others are typing…

“Market Analysis,” he wrote for the title. And then he erased it. “Analysis of Market Trends,” he typed, before backspacing over “Trends” in favor of  “Patterns.” And then came a flurry of fits and starts: removed Analysis…moved Patterns to the beginning…went back to Trends…switched to active voice…changed to lower case…switched to 48pt…left-aligned…no, make that centered.

Ten minutes later, he was ready to compose his sub-title.

This well-intentioned man had fallen prey to one of the most common maladies of the computer age: He believed that the tool could make him brilliant. He believed that PowerPoint alone was capable of creating a winning presentation.

Let’s point out the obvious: When you embark on a task, any task, you decide what it is you want to do, you determine how you are going to do it, and then you do it. That’s how people do things in real life. All too often, however, I see PowerPoint users doing the exact opposite: They sit in front of a blank slide and start creating bullet points, hoping that a finished presentation will spontaneously occur. In no other aspect of their lives do they expect to achieve success in this manner, but they hold exempt from natural laws their relationship with PowerPoint.

This phenomenon occurs well beyond the confines of PowerPoint. In fact, I can’t think of a software application that does not invite this upside-down thinking. You see, with a good software program, you can make something perfect; that’s why we love good software. But the temptation is irresistible to make something perfect right from the beginning, and that’s where users often get into trouble.

Like most applications, Microsoft PowerPoint is at its best when it is viewed as a finishing tool, not a starting tool. That is certainly what frustrated the young man at DFW that day. He knew that he had to produce a presentation on a particular topic, but he did not appear to start with much more direction than that. He kept composing titles and bullets, fiddling with them, fine-tuning the wording, even messing with the formatting.

Yes, he would have been better off using Outline view, but really, PowerPoint is simply the wrong tool for the beginning phases of a project. This is not a knock on the product—PowerPoint lets you do a lot of things quickly and easily, but sketching or roughing out a concept is not one of them. There’s way too much temptation to make everything perfect, and that’s exactly what you don’t want to do at this stage.

PowerPoint users should take a page from the playbook of an accomplished digital artist, like a professional CorelDRAW or Photoshop user. When starting work on an illustration, experienced artists want to record ideas as quickly as they think of them. This is the time to open the creative canal as wide as possible; it is not the time to be thinking of blends or gradient fills or typeface choices or least of all using a mouse and pushing the left button or the right button.

And so they sketch. They use pencil and paper. It doesn’t matter how juvenile those sketches are; there is no better way to allow good ideas to emerge than by doodling and scribbling.

All creative computing should start this way, but it goes double for PowerPoint. Even when you start with great ideas, conventional PowerPoint usage does not work in your favor, because many ideas simply cannot be communicated by titles and bullets. If I only had a nickel for every time I have seen a really great idea get butchered by an attempt to illustrate it with a title and a few bullets. If you’ve had to sit through a dreadful PowerPoint presentation, you’ve probably seen it too, because many of those horrible slides started as good ideas that got ruined by bullet points.

Great ideas deserve deeper thought and more sophisticated treatment. They deserve some doodling and scribbling.

Can you relate to this? Does the man at DFW sound like you or someone you know? This website offers several interesting PowerPoint techniques for getting started with a presentation, but the first PowerPoint technique to practice is avoidance. Move away from the computer! Get yourself a big ol’ legal pad and write down the following questions:

What am I trying to accomplish?

What do I really want to say?

What are the three key ideas that I must communicate?

How will my presentation be shown?

How should it look?

How should it behave?

The first two questions are redundant but you should ask them anyway. I have a client who adds her own Question No. 3—“What do I really, really want to say?—and each time she asks it of herself, she homes in on her true objective. Only then does she allow herself to go anywhere near PowerPoint.

It’s kind of funny when you think about it: One of the secrets to using PowerPoint effectively is knowing when not to use it...