PowerPoint: devil in a red dress

Information Outlook, March, 2004 by Stephen Abram

There are few guaranteed public speaking tips, but here's one. Start your talk by announcing that (a) you hate PowerPoint (PPT) and (b) you're not going to use it today. I would take bets that this will generate applause and possibly cheers. Too bad the bookie's odds would be too low!

As usual, I find myself out of sync with the common wisdom. Why do I find that, for my purposes, PPT mostly works? Why do I think it's such a useful tool? I worry that some of our colleagues are swinging the pendulum in the direction of avoiding PPT. This would be a shame. On a very shallow level, I sometimes think that the well-educated communities in which we travel have a congenital distrust and hatred of the success exemplified by Microsoft and PowerPoint. It could also be that librarians and information professionals don't think they need the additional learning support that PPT provides because they have huge vocabularies; read very well, and listen intently; to the point of having fine comprehension and understanding on the first pass. Maybe not.

Indeed, the investigators of the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy identified PPT as one of the contributors to that disaster and as an indicator of problems in NASA's culture and communication environment. Wow. Can PPT be that evil? Here's a direct quote from the report (emphasis mine):

As information gets passed up an organization hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information is filtered out. In this context, it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.

At many points during its investigation, the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.

Those who have seen the over-the-top articles about PowerPoint and NASA might be surprised that it's mentioned only five or six times in a 248-page report, and that the main point is not an indictment of PPT but the assertion that PPT should not be a replacement for more solid content.

As information professionals, we recognize that the responsibility for effective communication rests with the communicator, not the audience. This means we must understand how to communicate so that the listener can absorb the information and balance what needs to be learned and what needs to be discarded. This is a challenge for ordinary beings! Luckily we are equipped for this. We know that different information formats serve different purposes. We know that no one format is "right," and a combination of formats is usually the best tactic, for example, PPT presentations backed up by website copies; PPT handout pages with room to write; or formal reports distributed with details and back-up. Our users may best be served by an article or two on a topic rather than a long treatise. We might be able to locate a quickie website on a topic, but perhaps a detailed dissertation is called for. Even when we're searching Google, we often limit our results to websites, PDFs, or PPTs because they offer the right level of content. That's just common sense.

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Of course, as the old saw goes, common sense ain't so common!

So rather than irrationally hating PPT, we should learn to use it well. As information professionals, here are just a few of the ways we use it:

* Presenting strategic plans

* Making speeches

* Database training

* Information literacy and searching development

* Project reports

Here are some tips for making the best use of this ubiquitous tool (you'll find loads more tips and cautions in the list of sites at the end of the column):

* Understand your audience's learning style. If they are visual learners, don't shy away from pictures. (Most people are visual learners--we text folks are the minority.)

* Write your first slides with very few words and bullet points-then aggressively attempt to remove half of them. If your talk complements and reinforces your slides--and vice versa--your presentation or training session will have better results.

* To reiterate--remember, the slides are meant to supplement and complement what you are saying or demonstrating. If you remember this you will not read your slides, which is the number one thing audiences hate. (Librarians rarely make presentations to an illiterate audience.) That said, audiences seldom complain that your font size is too big! Stand at the back of the room and take off your glasses--if you can still read the slides, they're fine.

* Learn the neat features of PPT. You must learn how to add visuals. It's easy to practice--open PPT and open your MSIE browser. In the browser, press CTL PrintScrn. Then, in PPT click on a blank slide and press CTL V (or right click--paste). Voila! You've just pasted a screenshot into PPT. Easy as pie. There are other ways, and there are few excuses not to include screenshots of visuals of search pages from your databases, websites, digital photos, etc. You can then easily pull in the graphics toolbar in PPT and crop and size your images to fit.