There’s an (old) article here that suggests it is! (It’s just a shame that I couldn’t comment on the article on the original site :( )
Despite seeing the carnage of death by PowerPoint so often I deserve a medal I’m not absolutely convinced. Yes, there’s a lot of bad things about it and yes, it’s obviously been designed to the lowest common denominator of presenter – but that doesn’t make it automatically evil. Not any more than a loaded gun is intrinsically evil…..
….. it can be used for something positive and life-affirming, but the odds aren’t in that direction! :)
You see, my major complaint about PowerPoint is that it makes things too easy. Too easy? Really? Well yes, bear with me here!
Most of the work I do as a trainer is not with people who aspire to be “professional speakers” (thank God!) – it’s with normal, real people who have to make presentations. The might not want to and they might not be any good at it instinctively, but the are experts in what they do and the need to tell other people about it.
Faced with this, and the fear which is generally associated with it, people look for crutches. The biggest and best known is – yes – PowerPoint. My experience is that they reach for the icon and fire it up, and then start typing, without really thinking about things. Naturally they take the defaults offered to them.
I don’t like PowerPoint’s defaults but I admit that a program has to have them. The fact that they’re not the best isn’t the point – if the users of PowerPoint were better educated about how to make presentations then the fact that their presentation software steered them in an unhelpful direction wouldn’t matter (so much) because they’d have a better idea of what they actually wanted.
In other words, it’s not PowerPoint that’s evil, it’s just that it’s not great, and people are so desperate to find some help when they present that they clutch at straws – especially if that straw happens to come bundled with their default office package.
PowerPoint leading people who are only too happy to be lead: it’s the blind leading the blind!
