You may not know it, but there is a World PowerPoint Championship. This year it had about 850,000 students from 119 countries and has state, national, and global competition.
The prizes are pretty cool. The only U.S. student to win the global competition, Seth Maddox of Geraldine, won a $10,000 prize, a laptop, and, of course, a trophy.
When I first learned about this contest, I assumed that the contest was “who can create the most effective PowerPoint presentation?” I imagined a panel of judges and a series of criteria such as whether the presentation was readable, persuasive, etc.
I eventually dropped out. Instead of efficiency, the contest tests who can reproduce a presentation the fastest. In other words, it's a contest to see who can compete with PowerPoint's cumbersome user interface the fastest.
While this is something you can easily measure, it is also a tacit admission by Microsoft that there is no point in measuring the effectiveness of PowerPoint presentations , otherwise they would measure it
Unfortunately, we all know that PowerPoint is a terrible waste of time and extremely boring. (Admit it: we all gasp when the first slide appears.).
A study conducted at the University of New South Wales in 2007 by John Sweller (a psychologist who invented the Theory of Portable Cognition) found that presenting an audience with the same words used verbally reduces, not increases, audience comprehension.
In other words, when you show some bullet points and then explain more details, be sure that whatever you say will be quickly forgotten. Not because you are particularly boring, but because people can't read and listen at the same time.
The whole concept of PowerPoint is apparently misleading, according to a recent Harvard study cited in Forbes, which found that “PowerPoint was rated (by audiences) as no better than oral presentations without visual aids.”
Think about this for a second. Your audience will be just as happy with your presentation if you do it without your slides. This means that the time you spend building your PowerPoint is essentially wasted.
PowerPoint can make your team members less intelligent. As the woefully underrated “How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid” points out:
“The celebrated ease and efficiency of PowerPoint actually conceals a deeply disturbing but little-understood transformation in human communication. The slides, bullet points, and flashy graphics that we all now take for granted have promoted a new, slippery grammar” where faulty causality, misleading logic, decompressed data, and seductive demonstration have replaced traditional tools of persuasion and argument [leading to] the corruption of language [and] the debasement of society.”
You will communicate better and put your audience at ease if you simply stop making PowerPoint slides altogether and instead, if necessary, write a summary or some diagrams to help with presentation .
