Sometimes the medium and the message get mixed up.

Sometimes the medium is the message – or at least close enough to it as to make no difference. Perhaps another way of saying it is ‘It ain’t what you say, it’s the way that you say it’… so perhaps that’s why so many people confuse PowerPointing with Presenting. The fact that I can turn PowerPoint into a verb and you know what I mean should tell you volumes about how ubiquitous it has become as a means of presenting information.

And yet as often as not (if not more!) PowerPoint isn’t the best method for your presentation. For example, when I’m training people I often have to explain what the ‘fight or flight reflex’ is and I give a brief outline of the main hormones involved. I could, of course, have a slide which explained it all, but it’s more useful for people if I use a flipchart at that point – because hormones are organic and seeing me writing is also an organic process… the audience sees the word ‘grow’ as I write each letter out. That fixes things in people’s minds more than a simple click-and-there-it-is slide.

When should you be thinking of using PowerPoint then? Any why do so many people use it when they shouldn’t?

I suspect that much of the answer lies in the sheer ubiquity of PowerPoint as software. The vast majority of people use the versions of Windows that come pre-installed on their computers (which means they tend to think of the Operating System as ‘free’) and the habit of using PowerPoint is subconsciously drawn into the mind along with using Word or Excel. Which of course is exactly why Microsoft do it….

But this goes further than simply, passively making something available – it subconsciously normalises its use. When you add to that the culture of using PowerPoint because everyone else has been normalised in a similar way and you get a self-reinforcing mind set.

There are other reasons for using PowerPoint of course, not all of them valid.

For example people tend to use PowerPoint as a substitute script – reminding them of what they’re going to say. Unfortunately, this leads to bad slides with too much text and not enough imagination. There’s simply no substitute for deciding what you want to say and taking your time to learn how to say it. Reading off a script on the slides (either literally or metaphorically) will simply mean you give such a bad presentation than nine times out of ten, you’ve wasted your time. Worse than wasting your time is that if I’m in your audience, you’ve wasted my time too!

PowerPoint because “it’s expected/demanded/required” seems to be another so-called reason for PowerPointing. Conference organisers often email my clients asking for their presentation to be sent a week or so in advance. (Okay, so it’s good practise to do a technical check well in advance of your actual delivery.) That makes presenters, particularly nervous or inexperienced presenters, feel like if they don’t have a PowerPoint then they’re not presenting properly. They make something up just so that they don’t look too different from everyone else. (I’m not sure who they’re nervous of looking different in front of – the conference organisers or the audience!)

A variation on that theme would be expectations or demands placed on presenters by their boss. Time and time again I see people who have got into the habit of using PowerPoint by default because their boss wanted it. Some, in fact, have even been asked to write the presentation for their boss – by which, he (or she) meant “Create my PowerPoint for me while I do other things”. (As an aside, I’d suggest that except in exceptional circumstances, this can’t be done well because if the PowerPoint slides contain enough information for your boss to deliver it without lots of practice, it almost certainly means that the slides contain too much information for the audience.)

Okay, rant over – there are times when PowerPoint is the way you should be thinking with your presentations. For example, if what you’ve got to say can be said much more effectively by simple, clear visuals. A picture paints a thousand words, as they say. Sometimes that’s not an exaggeration, either!