The Anti-PowerPoint
Party (APPP) in Switzerland has been taking a strong stand against using
the software for presentations. While he has admitted the party is a platform
to sell the book The PowerPoint Fallacy, the author Matthias Poehm has claimed “it
doesn’t end there.” The APPP claims that
the use of presentation
software costs the Swiss economy 2.1 billion Swiss francs (equivalent to
$2.5 billion US dollars) a year. This calculation is based on estimates of
about the number of employees that attend PowerPoint presentations every week.
This story caught my attention when I read a blog post from Mike Hoban at Fast
Company, Should
We Outlaw PowerPoint?
Here at SmartDraw, we are not ones to argue with the claims
that presentations made primarily with PowerPoint are not business friendly.
Since PowerPoint was introduced in 1987, a stack of bulleted PowerPoint slides
has become synonymous with “presentation.” I’m sure everyone reading this has
sat through a presentation where the presenter simply reads the bullets from
each sleep-inducing slide. Why do most presentations follow this formula? From
the beginning, PowerPoint was designed to make it easy to type in a title and
bullets. Creating a slide of bullets is the default action for most of the
PowerPoint templates. This means the most effective method of communication,
which is through visuals, is not used. We’ve identified the following three
major barriers that prevent most people from the effective use of visuals in
their presentations:
Barrier #1: PowerPoint encourages you to make slides of
bullets. With SmartDraw’s PowerPoint builder, you create your presentation
visually in a storyboard format that makes it easy to create and edit visuals
for every slide. Those who do not take the path of least resistance and try to
create visual slides run into the next major barrier.
Barrier #2: Visuals are difficult to create with PowerPoint. When creating a PowerPoint storyboard with SmartDraw, it is straightforward to create any type of visual to get across the point being made within each slide.The few that persevere and actually manage to create visuals for their slides
face the next big problem when they go to deliver their presentation.
Barrier #3: PowerPoint does not, by default, present your
visuals in the best way possible – sequenced! As presentation expert Rick
Altman explains in his book, showing a visual
to your audience all at once can be overwhelming. They will be too busy trying
to absorb all the information to focus on the specific point you are trying to
make.
What other barriers to effective presentations would you
identify? Is the Anti-PowerPoint Party something you would sign up for or do
you think they’ve gone a bit too far?
In the mean time, read some more about the APPP in
Switzerland:
Swiss
party makes dislike of PowerPoint a political issue
Anti-PowerPoint
Party In Switzerland Tries to Ban Software
Plus, learn how to make a more visual presentation with our SmartDraw
presentation tutorial.
