Almost 20 years ago — 2001! — Seth Godin wrote an ebook called Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it). In that book he detailed all of the things that tend to go wrong in slide presentations.
Everyone creates presentations with the right intent — to communicate something of importance to a group of people. But then we do all sorts of dumb things to undermine their communication, don’t we? Like jamming it with bullet points so it can serve as a teleprompter, or throwing in every factoid we’ve learned about the topic to anticipate (and ward off) questions. Sometimes we want to manage or even mitigate conversation. And sometimes, we create them simply because we were told that we should.
On the very first page of Godin’s ebook, he says “Almost every PowerPoint presentation sucks rotten eggs.” And that was nineteen years ago! Here we are in 2020 and PowerPoint is just as prevalent as it was in 2001 and yet, for the most part, presentations have not gotten better. There are companies that have tried to help people make better presentations. Keynote was made specifically for Steve Jobs keynote presentations. Haiku Deck encouraged folks to remember that ‘less is more’, followed quickly by Prezi which seemed like a revelation for a moment in time — encouraging people to take their audience on a journey on an infinite canvas. All of these were born from the right intent — make better slides so you can tell better stories. In other words, get people to communicate better, and to create slides that don’t suck.
