Getting PowerPoint right: How to avoid presentation hell

PowerPoint celebrated its 25th birthday recently, but the likes of Seth Godin - and countless meeting attendees - are unimpressed with its use. To right these wrongs, John Stokdyk provides a comprehensive guide to presenting with PowerPoint.

PowerPoint celebrated its 25th birthday only a few weeks ago, and yet there was little popping of champagne corks. In fact, it only served to herald another round of criticism aimed at users of the software package.

This is all fairly old news, and these kinds of attacks have been delivered before, and delivered better. Seth Godin's 2007 blog post Really bad PowerPoint, for instance, argues: "PowerPoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department - and vice versa." PowerPoint allows very dense verbal communication and as companies get faster and faster, it provides a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. "PowerPoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it's not," Godin argues. The reason?. "Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way."

I asked experienced presenters and trawled the internet archives to document the definitive way to use PowerPoint.