5 ways PowerPoint mirrors life

PowerPoint is one of the most maligned pieces of software in the world – who among us has not heard (or repeatedly used) the phrase “Death by powerpoint?” The problem, however, lies not in the tool, but in the way the tool is used. And, surprisingly, many of the ways that PowerPoint is misused have their roots in “life.”

1) Just because something is easy, doesn’t mean it is right

It might be a relationship or job we stay in too long because staying is easier than leaving. Or perhaps it is watching passively as someone gets bullied. Or maybe it is letting some egregious piece of legislation move forward instead of getting involved in the fight to stop it. There are lots of instances where we take the easy way out, even when we know that doing so is wrong.

We see this same tendency – to take the path of least resistance – when we use PowerPoint. The most egregious example is bullet points. We know that text bullets are quite possibly the least efficient way to get your point across in a presentation: the audience reads the text instead of listening to you, it entices people to simply read their slides instead of adding value, and the audience does not remember text nearly as well as it remembers images.

And yet most presentations we see are little more than cue cards that we share with the audience – slide after slide of bullet points. Why? Because it easy. When a new presentation opens up in PowerPoint it defaults to bullet points. Finding or making relevant images or data plots takes time and effort. And by using text bullets we “save” ourselves the effort of practicing to help remember the presentation.

But just like so many things in life are easy but wrong, so is using text bullets instead of taking the time and effort to include relevant imagery and to practice in order to keep your audience engaged and to help your audience remember the points you make in your presentation.

2) Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
        
The prototypical example is yelling “fire” in a crowded movie theatre. Sure you can but you certainly should not. Other examples abound. You can heap abuse on the referees at your kid’s sports game, but you certainly should not. You can use Comic Sans in your companies annual report, but you should not. And you can randomly mix metaphors in your writing, but you should not.

In PowerPoint you can use a different transition for every slide. You can have all of your text fly in from different directions on the screen. And you can alternate six different colors for every letter in your text. But – and I hope I do not have to tell you this – you certainly should NOT. The basic “appear” transition will always serve the purpose, flying text is a desperate attempt to add life to poorly constructed presentation, and using one color for most text with another contrasting color for emphasis is all you need.

And for crying out loud, never use Comic Sans in your presentation.

3) Go big or go home

The meek may inherit the Earth, but until then it is the loud and the strong that will possess it. Not everyone needs to be Donald Trump (or, really, anyone for that mater), but it is the larger-than-life types that often succeed. Being just another engineer in your company will not lead to a promotion. Staying silent in meetings is a sure path to being ignored. Thinking small yields small results.

The same goes for PowerPoint – you have to think big or you might as well not show up. Fonts? Make them as big as possible. Images? Expand them to fill the whole screen. Data? Make it big and easy to see, even from the last row. When you are on stage your point is to draw attention, not shy away from it. If you do not want to do so, get off the stage.

4) Never Assume

Oh lordy – how often does making assumptions screw us over? Maybe it was the time you assumed there was enough cash in your account to cover the rent cheque? Or the time that you assumed that the car approaching the intersection knew that they had the stop sign? How about the time you assumed that your parents were out of town for the weekend and you threw that house party? Boy, was that a disaster….

Making assumptions with PowerPoint has the potential to result in ugliness also. Consider when you develop a presentation on one computer, but deliver it on another. You make the assumption that the fonts in all versions of powerpoint will have the same fonts, only to find that all the text in your presentation has been transformed into “wingdings.” Or maybe you center your presentation to the CEO around video clips that run fine on your machine, but the presentation machine does not have the codec you need. Or it could be the presentation that you borrowed from a colleague, only to find out that he had put automatic timings in and your presentation is six slides ahead of you. Whatever the problem, the root of it is often that you made an assumption of some sort.

So do not assume anything. Always give yourself time to test drive your slides on the presentation machine. Bring your own laptop and try to use that if you can. Backup your slides on a memory stick and online, and make a copy in PDF format in case all else fails.

5) De-clutter

We all know that life can get cluttered. We take on too many responsibilities. We have people in our lives who make their problems our problems. Our homes become filled with “stuff” that we hardly use. We even find it hard to do simple things like cooking healthy meals and keeping our living spaces clean become difficult.

Powerpoint can also get cluttered. Clip-art that is used to fill up empty space on the slide. Multiple bullets on a slide, all with multiple lines of text. Slides that try to show 25 separate sets of data on a single page. Transitions and effects on slides that make us long for the simplicity of the 1990s vintage “blink” tag on web pages. The number of ways that slides can get cluttered simply boggles the mind.

The trick, in Powerpoint as in life, is to simplify. Limit each slide to a single point. Remove “slide junk” (useless images and clipart) from the edges of the slides. Use a single main color and a simple “appear” transition. Resist the urge to show all your data and show only the representative/important bits.

So – are there any other ways that PowerPoint mirrors life? Drop a comment if you can think of any that I’ve missed!

        

[Commentary] The most important science courses

I was just doing some research on scientific literacy. In light of some recent high-profile trends, I was looking to see if adult scientific literacy in the US has been decreasing and whether it is notably less than other industrial countries. The answer – which surprised me – is no to both. The US is, if anything, a leader in the world (In 2005 28% of the population could be said to be scientifically literate, second to Sweden in the study referenced below).

This appears to fly in the face of evidence that US primary and secondary students lag behind many of the their international peers when it comes to scientific literacy, as well as the general impression that the US is adopting many anti-scientific positions. So, somehow, the average American goes from a state of relative scientific ignorance in primary and secondary school, and blossoms into one of the the most scientifically literate in adulthood.

So the question that needs to be asked is “Why?” What is it that makes the average US adult more likely to be scientifically literate than, say, your average European adult?”

First year general science courses in college and university.

So says Jon Miller, currently at the University of Michigan. Dr. Miller is one of the world leaders on scientific literacy, and he asked the question above – what turns the average US from relatively scientifically illiterate to scientifically literate?

What he found, after taking all sorts of measurements and doing lots of clever things to make sure he was comparing apples to apples and not apples to squid, was that it boiled down to the fact that US colleges and universities require students to take at least one first year course in science, while European universities do not (he reported the results in a paper at the 2007 AAAS meeting in San Francisco).

Seriously – just taking that one course was enough to raise the level of the student’s scientific literacy to the point that they can better understand scientific terms and issues, and to make relatively informed judgements about the scientific and technical issues of the day.

This study compared Americans and Europeans, and did not include other countries such as Canada (which requires first years science courses in university), Australia, Japan, China and Russia, so I do not know if the results hold up more generally. Then there is also the question of why so many Americans seem to hold anti-scientific positions on e.g. evolution and climate change (these last seem to be related to the nature of politics in the US) and how things may have changed since 2005.

But it is very interesting nonetheless – first year general science courses are among the most important courses that a university can offer, and the most influential that a professor can teach.

Given this, one has to ask why the academic community – which has a vested interest in a scientifically literate taxpayer – has been devaluing these first year courses. Instead of treating these first year courses (which are typically large in size and time consuming to teach) as some sort of teaching purgatory perhaps the community should be putting more resources into teaching these very courses.

Offer more sections so that the classes are smaller in size and the professors are more approachable. Make sure that the very best and enthusiastic lecturers are teaching the courses. And stop looking down on the students who take them because they will not take any other science courses.

After all, the students that you look down on today are the taxpayers who will decide (through their votes) whether to fund your research in the future.

Reclaim your time – ditch slides for your next presentation

Yesterday I read an article about a message that the CEO of Nokia sent to his employees. It was a refreshingly candid summary of the state of the company. I do not want to discuss the letter itself, but there was one sentence that stuck out:

At the lower-end price range, Chinese OEMs are cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, “the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.”

This is far from the first time that a (negative) comparison with Powerpoint has been made. A US military reserve officer was released from the service because he went public with his frustrations with a HQ in Afghanistan; he claimed that the majority of the work being conducted there was creating powerpoint slides for briefings. I suspect that we all have our own stories that reflect the same frustration – that we waste valuable time creating slide decks for meetings.

And, quite frankly, this is true. We do spend too much time preparing slides for meetings.

Why?

Somewhere over the last decade or so the terms “meeting,” “presentation,” and “talk” have all become synonymous with “Powerpoint.” There is an expectation that, whatever the specifics of the occasion, we will have to prepare slides. And slides take time to create – time that could be better spent elsewhere.

As such, I want to issue a call to arms: reclaim your productive time by creating fewer slide decks.

Let us start with the basics – the purpose of slides. Slides exist to support your message, they are not the message itself. I know that most people use them as cue cards, but text slides act in direct opposition to the purpose of sharing your message. Slides are most effective when they are used to display relevant graphics to support the point you are making verbally.

So the first question you really need to ask is whether you really need to show graphics to support your point. Do you have data that needs to be shown, or can you summarize it to the same effect? Do you need to show a picture of a product, or can you bring the product itself? Is a flow-chart, org-chart, or venn-diagram really required to make your point?

And even if you do need to show the graphics, is your audience big enough that you need to project slides on a screen, or can you simply pass around a piece of paper?

Meetings and even presentations do not require slides – we have simply become used to them. Yes, use them if you need them, but if you do not absolutely need them then simply create some speaking notes and go from there.

And then go and do something productive with the time you save.

[Technique] The importance of the narrative

A few days back Nancy Duarte authored an opinion piece on presentations. I was reluctant to read it at first because I was afraid it was going to be yet another article that extoll the virtues of slide design but does not address other – more important – aspects of excellent presentations. When I finally forced myself to read the article I was pleasantly surprised to find that the piece was not on the importance of design, but on the importance of the narrative.

This excited me because the narrative is arguably the most powerful type of presentation. We are surrounded by narratives in our life. There are the obvious ones such as the childhood stories that will stay with us until we die, and the movie arc that had us glued to our seats. But there are also less obvious ones: the come-from-behind victory that our favourite sports team pulled off, the rags-to-riches stories of a favourite entrepreneur or entertainer, our child’s explanation of his/her day at school (and the even more interesting explanation for why the missing cookies are hot his/her fault).

And because narratives are all around us, we are used to the patterns and conventions in the stories. The introduction and set-up, the conflict, the rising drama that leads to a climax where the conflict is resolved, and finally the denouement where everything is wrapped up – all of this is ingrained in our psyches. And because they are ingrained into all of us these patterns are something that presenters can latch onto.

Why? The fewer demands you can place on your audience, the more room the audience has for the message you are trying to get across. When you use a non-narrative presentation format your audience has to first understand the format before they can assimilate the message. I have found myself in presentations where I was lost and had to take time to work backwards in order to understand why the speaker was talking about whatever it was he was talking about. And while I was doing that, the speaker was moving on and I was not paying attention. Had the speaker been using the narrative style I would not have had to backtrack and would have kept track of the what he was saying.

So how do you use the narrative? Look for the story. Look for the main problem that you had to overcome or the problem that you set off to solve. Then describe how you solved it – the steps, the problems you encountered, your minor victories. Use that arc in your presentation.

And watch as the audience follows along to see how story ends.

[AUDIENCE] The value of presentations: quizzing the speaker

An article in The Atlantic discusses “meta research” – doing research on research. The highlight of the article is that meta research has shown that almost all medical (and other) research is subject to numerous biases (overt and subtle) that result in conclusions that are, well, frankly, most often wrong.

The issues behind this are complex but – for the most part – do not come as a surprise to any active researchers. But these biases are rarely (if ever) stated in the published research and are even more rarely talked about in a presentation (if only because of time restrictions). But these biases – whether they are in the selection of question being tested, the method being used, the quirks of the equipment, or even the personal or economic biases of researchers – are important to understanding the limitations of the results being reported.

This need – and gap – illustrates the values of presentations at workshops, colloquia, and conferences. In a live presentation, the audience is given a chance to question the presenter, and this opportunity can be used to bring out these possible biases. Sadly, this opportunity is most often missed, whether due to shyness on the part of the audience, a desire not to embarrass the speaker, or simply because the audience has tuned the speaker out.

So, my point? Twofold. The first is to point out that interaction in a presentation works both ways – not only from the speaker to the audience but from the audience to the speaker (and thus to the rest of the audience). The second point is that the audience – you! – need to take the opportunity to engage in this interaction, if only to identify issues that important to your understanding of the topic but that the speaker may not wish to volunteer.