Presentation ware... use with care

In Now Hear This Cringely discusses Powerpoint, its lack of suitability as a stand alone documentation format and his general approach to doing speeches.

There's a lot of that (Powerpoint bashing) going around and he covers the basic problems including a relatively recent concept that Powerpoint is a perfectly reasonable way to pass around documentation. It's starting to take hold in technical circles as well and I'm not sure why there isn't a bigger backlash against this.

Powerpoint is a tool, it should not be the only tool. Perhaps the idea that vendors tend to throw every capability possible into these tools is what makes some decide that everything should be done there. There is also the concept that for the folks who never previously used anything more than a spreadsheet as a presentation method, Powerpoint (and tools like it) makes a significant step up.

On the other hand, I've had people ask where the rest of a presentation was when I handed them my slides and had to explain that the content is in the paper which goes along with the talk or in my head. The slides are the high points and main areas for discussion... I tend to wander off and take quite some time to get back to anything on the screen. I'm no great shakes as a public speaker and certainly don't have the kind of practice that Cringely has but I've found that engaging my small audiences and and asking questions that keep them in the loop is particularly effective.

This is the entertainment age, the era of bland corporate presentations should be over but it's not. There is nothing more boring than sitting through a presentation and getting nothing out of the other end that couldn't be sucked out of the Powerpoint document an hour ahead of time. It's even worse if the presentation hammers home the same point over and over (and over).

If you get tagged with the responsibility to effectively make use of a large groups time, it certainly makes sense to want to have them leave feeling like they've spend their time wisely.