Anyone who creates “presentations” needs to read Seth Godin’s treatise Really Bad PowerPoint (click on the “Get It” button – it’s a free PDF download).
If the meeting involves PowerPoint, I will leave.
If the meeting involves sales, I will leave.
If the meeting involves customer interaction, I will leave.
If the meeting does not require my presence, I will leave.
If the meeting has no bearing on my job function, I will leave.
If HR called the meeting, I will leave.
I am a back end server tech. I go to meetings only to tell you why you are wrong.
This happens for about 10 hours (forced on various combinations of sailors) a day in any reactor department onboard any carrier in the US Navy. Training, it is called by the Alcolytes of St. Hyman the Insane.
The rest of us (who had a lot of work to do) called it Death by Power Point.
I’ve taught PowerPoint classes to executives, and I couldn’t agree more with what has been said. I always made a part of my classes include PowerPoint etiquette:
[ol]
[li]Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you have to do it. This includes cute animations and sound effects. [/li][li]Follow the 6-2-2 rule of thumb: No more than 6 bullets per page, no more than 2 lines per title, no more than 2 lines per bullet.[/li][li] If a slide breaks the 6-2-2 rule, break it into two slides.[/li][li]Slide presentations are supposed to augment your presentation, not replace it.[/li][li] If it doesn’t augment your presentation, leave it out. [/li][/ol]
I especially learned this when giving presentations at academic conferences, where you might have only 15 minutes to communicate months worth of work. The slide show serves as kind of a side bar to your presentation.
good rules. The conference I’m involved with also limits the number of words per line, and has requirements on font size. No sound is allowed. The program committee sees all slides first, and gets to change bad ones. It’s not perfect, but our feedback on presentations is a lot better now.
My only advice to Cervaise is that boring PPT presentations should give you ample time to dream up a lovely sex fantasy. So they’re good for something.
You must have more attractive co-workers than I do. The only thing I was fantasizing about was stabbing the guy in the face with a desk.
Picture this: I started a new job last year. I got an Employee Handbook, with a section on health insurance. I also got another handbook on nothing but health insurance, plus a big ol stack of forms involving health insurance. And I was given a power pointless printout on health insurance. Then I got to see the power pointless presentation, as it was read, word for word, by the presenter. I will give them one thumbs-up, though. The slides were plain black text on white background. No noises, no fancy patterns and most of all, no spawn-of-Azathoth animations. They had transitions, though. Jesus Fucking Krisha, did they ever have transitions. Every. Fucking. Slide. Had. A. Different. Transition. And they were all sloooooooow. I’d read the entire handout before the second slide finished oozing onto the screen.
I’ve had to give a few pp-presentations in the past. Title slide, a slide with all the main points (heh-just typed that as “pain points”) and then a slide for each main point, with it’s sub-points. A wrap-up slide, and that’s it. Purely verbal presentation and elaboration on each main and sub point. No fancy background patterns, no noises, no fancy fades or transitions and no animations. You want a hand-out? Ask me and I’ll get you one. No one has ever asked.
Ugh, this is my French Civ class, day in and day out. Today a girl presented a speech on the Rebellion in Haiti around the time of the French Revolution, and she just looked at the screen (not at us), and read her entire presentation. But Voyager is right; it’s a good time to relax and daydream. After all, if the person presenting doesn’t care enough to put effort into it, then why should I care about paying attention?
I’ve sat through several student presentations just like this in every kind of class, from Geography to Religious Studies. When I have to do a presentation, I don’t committ this sin, I’m proud to say. But I still have to sit through these torture fests, compounded by the fact that there is usually at least one glaring typo per slide.
What if Abraham Lincoln used PowerPoint?
This rhetorical question is answered in brilliant fashion here: http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/
Yeah, but this means you can just quickly scan ahead, then barge in and start talking about something half a dozen slides farther on. It’s remarkably effective at derailing a mediocre speaker 
When I have to use PowerPoint, I go about it a little differently. I will type in the full sentences of the points that I need to make. Once all the slides are done that way, I go back through and break those down to just the main idea of the sentence. I typically end up with 3-4 bullet points on each slide of no more than 2 words each. A brief (no more than 4 word) title at the top of each slide to state the main point of the slide, 3-4 bullet points to remind me of the supporting ideas for that point, and there you go.
Then I print out notes pages and make more detailed notes for me to follow when I’m actually giving the presentation.
If I had to make PP presentations more often, I’d find a more efficient way to do it, but since it’s rare that I have to, this way works for me.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could get all your fellow cubicle drones to read the presentation along in unison with the meeting leader ? That would freak him out.
I forgot to say, last semester I was in a bio psych class that relied heavily upon PowerPoint, and the professor wasn’t afraid to use all of the features. So he would bring up a new slide, and each bullet point would come up one at a time, accompanied by some loud whoosh sound or buzz or something like that. And he knew damn well that each bullet point was accompanied by a loud, annoying sound, since he was the one who made the presentation, yet he never waited for the sound to finish. The first second or two of what he was saying was always cut off. Moron.
He also compiled all of the slides and had them sent off to a copy center, where hundreds of my fellow idiot students went and shelled out $40 for all of the slides that he showed in class and later put on the website. So maybe he wasn’t as stupid as I thought.
That’s great. That gets a bookmark.
Ahh, I was just going to rant about this myself…today I suffered a double-whammy presentation
Powerpoint (as described in the OP) followed by a database form demonstration.
For two hours I had to listen to the engineering’s annoying equivalent to Scrappy Doo prattle on and on about how to enter information into a database form.
“First, you see this field that says name. Let’s type in our name.” clickety clickety “First name in the first name field, mind you. Last name goes in the last name field” clickety clickety
“Then we want to submit. We do that by clicking this button that says submit” click. “Now we see our name filled into the proper fields. Let’s move on to the date field. Note that the form says MM/DD/YYYY. This means that you should enter the date in the MM/DD/YYYY format…”
It was at this point that my entire world turned a fiery swirl of crimson rage.
The OP sounds exactly like the majority of my AI lectures.