This was written well over a year ago and offered to a site. I assume it’s not coming out there, so I thought I’d put it up here before I lose it.
“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”
Edward Tufte (2003)“Which came first on the evolutionary ladder, stupidity or PowerPoint? For all the demonizing, PowerPoint is just a tool.”
Adam Hanft (2003)“I’d rather gouge my eyeballs out with a spoon than sit through another boring PowerPoint presentation.”
Dan Groft (2002)
There has been a quiet revolution in archæology and ancient history in the past couple of years. Both OHP transparencies and slides are being driven to extinction by PowerPoint, the leading “slideware” package. If the hype is to be believed we are entering an era when all presentations should glisten and glide before our eyes with the greatest of ease. The digitisation of presentation would seem to mark the victory of the technophiles over the Luddites. So why is there is an increasing number of articles by technology pundits with names like “Friends don’t let friends use PowerPoint” (Stewart 2001), “PowerPoint makes you dumb” (Thompson 2003), and “Is PowerPoint the devil?” (Keller 2003)? Are these warnings of fundamental flaws in PowerPoint, or another round of Micro$oft bashing by posturing cybernauts? The answer is probably a bit of both.
Segments of this article first appeared in various forms in arch-pgs, the Leicester mailing list after attending a few conferences and sitting through PowerPoint presentations of varying quality. There are some emerging conventions in PowerPoint presentations, but they seem disjointed and ill-thought through. In particular I was amazed at one presentation which was designed in blue. Blue, the author told me, is the best colour for PowerPoint. Her graphs were blue too. Neolithic pottery was in dark blue, Bronze Age pottery in light blue, Iron Age pottery in hashed blue, Greek pottery in polka-dotted blue… This was followed at the same conference by three other speakers who all also thought blue was the best colour for a presentation. The result of which was I couldn’t distinguish in my memory between one talk and another.
It would seem that either through misuse or poor design, PowerPoint often works to obscure the message that the presenter gives rather than aid it. It is time that we look critically at the use of PowerPoint, and look at the alternatives. Do we even need PowerPoint?
Why present?
The first PowerPoint error that many people commit is double-clicking on the PowerPoint icon.
Word-processing has not fundamentally changed the art of writing. Paragraphs may be drafted and re-drafted to infinity. Spelling can be corrected over and over. But the basic requirements of writing, correct use of grammar, use of appropriate language and above all having something to communicate remains. Similarly PowerPoint has not re-written the fundamentals of presentation. The best presentations are planned with a goal in mind. Opening PowerPoint without having defined what you want to do ignores this. A plan is imperative. The problem is compounded should you try and use the AutoContent wizard to substitute for the planning phase.
The AutoContent wizard shows the first problem which is inherent in PowerPoint. It is a sales tool. The categories for presentations are: General, Corporate, Projects, Sales/Marketing and Carnegie Coach. These categories are all business orientated. The closest concept PowerPoint includes are “Selling your Ideas” and “Recommending a Strategy”. Neither of these are suitable. Archæology and Ancient History both deal with ambiguities and interpretations. PowerPoint deals with hard facts and concentrates on making the sale. A PowerPoint wizard exists to remove the uncertainty from your presentation. Using the wizard as alternative to planning ignores the cultural basis of PowerPoint, it has been designed as a business, rather than academic tool. Tufte (2003) damns the reliance on PowerPoint for presentation planning, arguing that “Power corrupts [and] PowerPoint corrupts absolutely”.
The first stage of any presentation therefore remains to plan first what it is you want to achieve and what is you want to say and why it is important that you say it. This is true for any presentation with any tool. In this particular case PowerPoint simply makes it easier to create poorly planned presentations in a way that an OHP or slide projector cannot.
Background and Text
The look of a slide is a personal choice, and the only fixed rule is that if it looks good, it is good. This is of little help to people like me who have a poor sense of colour, but there are some other basic rules. They cannot guarantee a work of beauty, but they help avoid making the slides much worse.
Firstly there is the issue of colour. Colour can be used for either text or background but not both. If you plan to use colour in your text, then the background should be a low saturation colour, effectively a shade of black, white or grey. Similarly if the background is coloured the best choice for text colour is black, white or grey. For preference there should be a large contrast in brightness between the two colours. Grey on red will not work for colour-blind people and it is difficult for even for people with normal vision to read.
Another background choice is an image. This should be used with care. Consider the purpose of a background. It should be for the interesting material to sit over. If people are admiring your background, then are they missing the things you want them to see on screen? Textures often make better backgrounds than photos. They lift the slides and prevent them from being heavy and flat, yet are repetitive enough not to draw attention to themselves.
The other textual factor is the font. The size should be enough to be readable. How big is readable? The answer depends on how far back people are from the screen, which varies on the size of the room you’re talking in. Microsoft defaults are around 40pt for the slide titles and 28pt for the text. It would be hard to see how you can go below 24pt for the slides, but 40pt is excessive for titles. If you put the titles in bold, then usually this is sufficient to identify them as titles.
The font style is another personal choice. San-serif fonts such as Helvetica, Arial and Verdana tend to make the best fonts for headings. In print serif fonts work for body text. However, your slides are unlikely to have much body text. If you are working on a Windows machine, you may find the fonts Verdana (san-serif) and Georgia (serif) useful. They were designed specifically by Microsoft for use on the web. Because they are easy to read from a screen they could be acceptable choices for your presentation.
Another popular font choice is Comic Sans. Redman (2004) has described it as the font of the devil. A search on Google for the phrase on turned up Comic Sans as receiving this accolade. It seems to be used to add “fun” to presentations. If your presentation needs Comic Sans to be fun, then perhaps a rethink of the presentation itself is in order. Once you have your choices made, you need them applied to the whole presentation. The easiest and most efficient way is to use the Master Slide.
Using the Master Slide
The Master Slide is one of PowerPoint’s strongest features, and one of its most underused. It can be found by click on View, Master and then Slide Master. The Master Slide is the template for how your text and layout will look for all of your slides. It is not just the background. Font types, sizes and colours can all be defined here to. Should you decide that Adventure is a poor font, changing it in the master will change all your presentation. Similarly if on reflection you decided to ditch the green on red layout, this too can be done via the slide master.
The power of the slide master is that it also makes you consider the presentation as a complete unit instead of a collection of disparate slides. There are many presentations where titles are shifted from centre to left or right to squeeze round pictures. Text by the side of pictures can jump from one slide to the next to work round photos. If you have no standard layout for your slides then you are presenting a new challenge to your audience each time you click on the next button. When the new slide comes up the audience will spend time mentally navigating round it if you have radically altered the layout. It is not an insurmountable problem, but it is a distraction. Ideally your audience should be concentrating on your message rather than examining the medium.
And though it may seem shallow a standard slide layout does perform one other useful rôle. It looks more professional. It’s the difference between a professionally laid out page and a scrapbook. Using differing slide layouts is rather akin to using different margins on each page of an article. There are good aesthetic reasons why we don’t do it.
Text and the PowerPoint Slide
So far the above has been common sense. Here is where slideware as a whole appears to be suffering from conceptual problem. The orthodox view is that slides should have brief titles and plenty of text, often with bullet points. This is not a fault inherent in PowerPoint but a sign of the immaturity of its use. So far little thought has been given to what PowerPoint is capable of. Rather than sleek Ferraris, PowerPoint presentations are still in their horseless carriage phase. Strong arguments can be made for turning each of these assumptions around.
Michael Alley (2003) has shown the way by challenging the use of the title in PowerPoint. He uses a graph slide as an example of where communication breaks down. Consider a graph of Roman coinage beyond the empire’s borders. You could envisage a graph with a rapid tail off of coins recovered against distance from the empire. A nice high peak at the left near the border and a slope you could ski down as you move further away. And the title for the slide? “Coin distribution.” This title is accurate, concise and of little help in describing the slide. Alley argues that titles are perfect places for dumping important information. In this case the title “Coins are found in much lesser quantities away from the empire, implying little long distance trade” would not only say what the graph was about but also summarise its findings. People do get distracted, and this title acts as an anchor and sharp reminder of the point you want to make. This is even more useful if your spoken word isn’t making the point particularly well. Alley also argues that titles that you would normally think of as cumbersome have a greater recall rate after the presentation then short terse titles. Really why would anyone remember a slide titled “Coin”?
In direct contrast to this there does seem to a joy in presenters for text on PowerPoint slides. Often a PowerPoint presentation will consist of slides of text, bereft of any art unless you assign bullet points to the minimalist school of art. There are a few objections to this use of PowerPoint. The first is that text is dull. I know of no-one who created text slides before they used PowerPoint. People did use the OHP, which brings us to the second objection. PowerPoint slides cannot legibly hold much text, and so what fits on one OHP transparency gets cut across two or three slides. Finally text is often bulleted. Bullet points draw the eye away from the text.
- This might be useful for short punchy sentences, but plain weird for long sections of text.
Bullets are easily removed in PowerPoint by highlighting the text, right-clicking it and then selecting “Bullets and Numbering”. More difficult is removing the indentation of the paragraph. Even without bullets the paragraphs are indented as if bullets are still there. These indents are most easily removed by tweaking the ruler above the slide. To find this ruler click “View” and select the ruler option. Bullets exist to draw attention. If they are on screen they draw attention away from the text. This is useful if a visual anchor is needed to pull out the start of points from large blocks of text. However resolutions being what they are you will never have enough text on screen to make bullets essential.
There go the bullets…
…and there goes the indent.
Another PowerPoint cliché is the progressive fly in of bullet points. Progressive revealing is a useful tool. It provides a simple technique for highlighting a development of an argument. But “fly” should never have been the default option. Appear is much the more elegant method. There is a reason that films tend to use stick to cuts and reserve more elaborate dissolves and wipes for special events. A dissolve tends to imply passing of time. A wipe can be used for “meanwhile”. Fly is used by novice editors to tell their instructor they’ve found the various buttons on the console, but have yet to learn the art of self-control. Another factor against fly is that unless your computer is state-of-the-art it will stutter on entry. This highlights the most ignored feature of PowerPoint. Its grasp of animation is largely catastrophic. In most situations given a choice between using a PowerPoint animation and faking the effect, the fake will look more convincing. Pseudo-animation can be particularly effective with the use of unbulleted lists.
Pseudo-animation sets up a series of near-identical slides. One slide one in the sequence the first point is in bold. In slide two, it’s the second point and so on. The idea is that you only talk about one bullet point at a time, and so highlighting the point you talk about not only separates the point from the rest of the text, it also lets people know where in the list you are. This is useful if your route through the concepts outlined on the slide is complex.
The Mechanics of PowerPoint
The best argument against techniques like pseudo-animation is that they are ‘click intensive’. Some presenters may wish to wander around by the screen, and a multi-slided presentation demands that the presenter stand by the computer pressing the next button.
Actually it doesn’t.
Whether or not you have many slides there are good reasons to stand away from the computer whilst you talk. Often the computer will be tucked in the corner due to short cabling, leaving the presenter squashing in amongst the electronic equipment. This is simply not desirable. Therefore if you plan to present seriously using PowerPoint an investment in a magic wand would be helpful. These are cut down versions of wireless mice. Usually they are a stick with a ‘forward’ and ‘back’ button and perhaps a laser pointer. The range on the cheapest is limited to ten feet, but unless you plan to stand in an entirely different room as you present, this is rarely a problem. The wand allows you to walk, whilst giving you comfortable control over what slide comes next. The laptop can be placed discreetly among the audience or off to one side angled to face you and enable you to see what is on screen without having to look behind you. If you follow this set up it will become difficult to see exactly what is on screen, but you can mitigate this by practicing before you give your talk.
This last step perhaps highlights the biggest flaw in PowerPoint and other slideware. It makes the poor presentation so much easier. At major conferences there will always be people who think a PowerPoint show consists purely of bullet points which fly in with a brum-brum noise. The talk will simply be a narration of the same bullet points, which sit in pallid yellow on the default blue background. PowerPoint does not necessarily cause a lack of thought, but it does make it feasible to produce a presentation with minimal hindrance from ‘creativity’ or ‘exposition’. Peter Norvig summed it up best.
“My belief is that PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.”(AP 2003)
2006 Notes
The above was written early 2004. I haven’t tested Impress or KPresenter recently so they may have improved, but I’m still doubtful about the newbie-friendliness of Linux. I’d also downplay stacking slides for pseudo-animation. More recently I have found computers that can run fast enough to make watching PowerPoint’s animation bearable, and the animation features of Office XP are much improved.
There are two points which I think are still relevant though. One is that if you’re serious about presentation then you should take the time to learn how to use PowerPoint. That includes the simple things like pressing ‘B’ to blacken the screen, or F5 to start a presentation if you can’t conveniently click on the Slide Show button. It includes controlling the text so there isn’t an riduculous indent below the top line.
The other is that you still need something interesting to say. Even improved PowerPoint has not changed the fundamentals of presentation, which is that you need to show people why your topic is interesting and what you’re doing about it. No amount of fancy effects will salvage a dire paper. If you haven’t thought about where you’re going with your talk this will still be visible.
Bibliography
Alley, M. 2003. The craft of scientific presentations : critical steps to succeed and critical errors to avoid. Springer.
AP (Associated Press) 2003. “Does PowerPoint make us stupid?” CNN Technology. Available online at: http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/30/byrne.powerpoint.ap/
Groft, D. 2002. “PowerPoint: educational enhancer or complete disaster?” The Pitt News. Available online at: http://www.pittnews.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2002/09/06/3d7803fa98080
Hanft. A. 2003. “Grist: More Power Than Point” Inc.com Available online at: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20030801/ahanft.html
Keller, J. 2003. “Is PowerPoint the devil?” Chicago Tribune. Available online at: http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/5004120.htm
Redman, A. 2004. “Comic Sans – the font of Satan” Marblegravy. Available online at: http://www.marblegravy.com/articles/comic_sans.htm
Stewart, T. 2001. “Friends don’t let friends use PowerPoint” Fortune. Available online at: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/articles/0,15114,373991,00.html
Thompson, C. 2003. “PowerPoint makes you dumb” New York Times. Available online at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30A1FFE3D580C778DDDAB0994DB404482
Tufte, E. 2003. “PowerPoint is Evil” Wired. Available online at: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html
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