How not to present
Chris Petrilli calls BS on the need for a "powerful" presentation application:
Here’s the thing. PowerPoint sucks. It sucks on a nearly epic scale. The best thing about the first version of Keynote was that it didn’t have 75% of PowerPoint’s functionality. That was a good thing . Most things in PowerPoint are useless at best, and a brain-melting disaster of bullet-point hell. I don’t want lots of clip-art, animations, or dancing paper clips. I don’t want sparkly text.
Recently, I've gone away from using presentations completely - I just give a talk. That way, the audience is actually listening to what I say, rather than reading the slides.
Technorati Tags: PR, Presentation
Comments
Re: How not to present
[Rich Demers] September 19, 2007 16:51:43.345
I believe it is better to engage multiple senses at the same time, but not with presentations of bullet points that just repeat what the speaker is saying. I prefer presentations that consist mostly of figures, drawings, graphs, and other illustrations that the the speaker then discusses and elaborates.
The same is also true of documentation. For each topic, provide some type of visual illustration and then follow it with descriptive text. I have long advocated this approach for VisualWorks documentation, including online documentation. Of course it presupposes an ability to create and reference or include illustrations in the documentation. The recent addition of hypertext links in online text is a start, but only a start.