Keep the powerpoint simple - I totally agree with this. As for the objectives page, I usually include it because this is how I write essays - introduction, body, conclusion. Toastmasters recommend this for speeches, so I think it’s all right; but the powerpoint must not to be too bulky.
It can be done well, I think. This goes for every slide, though: it’s best to have a few keywords bulleted on the actual slide, then to verbally explain each in more detail. Just don’t read the entire friggin’ presentation to me. Believe it or not, I can do that myself. In my experience, if you have to significantly shrink the text in a bullet point, you’re doing it wrong.
I do like objectives slides because when the presenter gets to the last topic, I know the presentation is almost over. 
KneadToKnow, you haved started my day in an amused state.
Ahem.
PowerPoint tends to coax people into presenting their own outlines. An outline is a useful tool when writing, but you’re not supposed to show it to the reader!
PowerPoint by default leads you through 7 layers of hierarchy. This got me interested, so I found a posting of Einstein’s paper on the electrodynamics of moving clocks and rulers, and counted 2 layers of hierarchy. If Einstein’s theory of special relativity only needs two, nobody in the world who uses PowerPoint will ever, ever, ever need seven.
I am a long time hater of PowerPoint as it is most often used, although it does have the advantage of evening out the quality of business presentations, as now all of them are crap.
A while ago a book I was reading defined them as:
a method by which the bleeding obvious is turned into a list of dot points and a laptop becomes the keynote speaker at any presentation.
Happy to help. 
Was I the only one who thought it said “Objectivist” slides?
One reason PowerPoint presentations suck is because they are often not really presentations. They may be a project plan, a status update, a project proposal, a budget, or guidelines for new procedures. They need to stand alone because they will be sent to people who did not attend, or who are too busy to pay attention to the presentation.
Job’s presentation of the iPhone at MacWorld would not have been suitable to a group deciding whether to approve the project. That would have had detailed cost and price estimates, demographics of customers, projected sales, and lots of other details that used to be done in a text document.
is PowerPoint the best means for doing that? Maybe not, but it is easy and part of corporate culture in many places.
I remember doing a presentation to a senior exec at a large company where I had lots of pictures and few substantive words. He was not amused. I had a slide with “Been There” and a picture of an old product, “Done That” and a picture of another product, and then “Got the T-Shirt” with a picture of the project T-shirt that is always given out instead of bonuses. The point I was trying to make was that we had done similar projects in the past and had the “core competency” to do it again. My manager shot me daggers and I might just as well have farted loudly. Truly a stupid, career-limiting move on my part.
Another boo-boo: a slide showing that China was welcoming foreign companies like ours with open arms. I had a picture of Tienanmen Square and slowly faded out Mao’s portrait and faded in a picture of our CEO. Not sure how I lasted as long as I did.
[quote=“KneadToKnow, post:2, topic:517376”]
One school of pedagogy insists that a well-ordered lesson plan should follow three main steps:
[ol][li]Tell them what you’re going to tell them[/li][li]Tell them[/li][li]Tell them what you told them[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
I don’t know what school of pedagogy that would be, but I do know that it’s an ancient crutch for teachers who don’t know how to teach writing. It tends to lead to really boring essays. The same applies to presentations.
As the example of Jobs above shows, along with some of the comments regarding it, consideration of your audience and objective critically shapes all forms of effective communication–whether you’re handing down a screed from corporate offices or trying to get extra allowance from your father.
Powerpoint is but one of many boiler-plates that people have mindlessly applied through the ages. So is the “objectives of this presentation” list itself. Both have become good examples of how traditional format degenerates into useless protocol.
I don’t know. My speech teacher would win competitions on that premise. And while it may be boring in writing, some teacher’s expect it. The one time I didn’t follow this is the one time I didn’t get an A.
Of course, then again, I’ve often thought Jobs would be boring if he wasn’t telling us something new. And, when he didn’t this year, it was.
IMHO, any meeting should have an agenda, and people should be aware of the agenda. If this means having an objectives slide at the beginning of a PowerPoint, so be it.
Not every presentation is about telling a group of interested folks what cool things the new iPhone can do.
An objectives slide can be overkill for a simple meeting with an obvious agenda, and it is probably inadequate for a multi-day meeting with deliverables.
I would rather see an objectives slide than the many presentations I’ve seen where the speaker gave no thought to what the objective of their presentation was, or to what a reasonable scope for the allotted time might be.
LOL at DanBlather.
just don’t read the slides. the audience reads slides faster than you can speak them. be cognizant of this pitfall and your presentations will be lightyears better.
When I present something for which part of the evaluation relies on the audience members agreeing in writing that I met the objectives, I list the objectives.
At the end or at the start of the presentation?
If you show the objectives at the start, then are the audience supposed to commit the objectives to memory / paper? Seems pointless considering that this would not be necessary if you instead went through the objectives at the end.
If you show the objectives at the end then…that makes a lot of sense, since you can even summarise for the audience how each objective has been met.
But alas, this thread is specifically about showing objectives at the start…
However, if you’re including a handout, then that changes the picture somewhat.
If there’s a handout with a list of the objectives, then it makes sense to go through the objectives briefly initially – to make the audience aware that they can mentally tick off the objectives as you go through them in the same order as they are printed on the sheet.
A free presentation hint I’ve found works really well:
Throw a lolcat or two in after particularly dull or dry sections- or sections you’re actually not that clued up on. Assuming you’re in an environment where you can get away with it, of course.
People will remember the “funny cat picture” and not the fact you had no idea what you were talking about, or that what you were talking about was so boring it would make otherwise sane people want to gnaw off their own legs.
I put the objectives in both places–
- “Here’s what we’re covering today.”
At the end– - “To help you fill out the [generic] evaluation forms, here are those objectives again.”
This weekend I taught a 12-hour professional training. The objectives were posted on the website where participants registered. I still had someone come up during a break and criticize me for not covering content that was very different from the objectives for the presentation. I pointed this out; she argued with me; we pulled up the registration page and she agreed that she had misunderstood. On the eval, she rated me as having met the objectives. Had I not had the objectives in my presentation and confirmed on the registration page, she wouldn’t have gone back to the page to check–she was sure that she was right. Instead, she would have rated me as not having met the objectives, which can affect whether I’m hired to present again.
I like having an objective’s slide.
It lets me know how long until its over. For the same reason I like slide numbers.
Would that be 15 slides talking about how great the presenter is, then a couple slides saying “You should be able to figure everything out yourself, and me telling you anything would just be encouraging your weak dependence on others, so there is no content in this presentation.”
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The conference I’m involved with has a required “Purpose” slide the point of which is to say why the audience should care, and what the goal of the work was. It is useful, especially when the first part of the talk consists of background material.
Let’s not knock PowerPoint - let’s knock poorly put together talks and presenters who are clueless about engaging the audience. Before PowerPoint this conference used 35 mm slides. The program committee member in charge of a paper got to review it and ask for corrections, but they were expensive to make and there was no way of guaranteeing the speaker would listen to you. Now we have a required template, and the PC member can fix bad slides - too crowded, poor use of color, lettering too small, etc., etc. We track audience feedback, and it is much better.
What we can’t do is to turn bad speakers into good speakers. Just like acting, some people have it and some people don’t. We have parallel sessions, and the audience often increases when a known good speaker is talking. A good speaker can make a set of slides that contain only bullet lists interesting, a bad one can make a presentation with one bullet and a picture on each slide boring and confusing.
If the objective slide can stand in for the outline slide, someone is doing it wrong.
You can’t tell by slide numbers either. At a workshop once the session chair gave me a time is almost up indication, and I told him “one more slide.” What I didn’t tell him is that the slide had only a title, and it was the cue for me presenting a short fairy tale illustrating the point. Time per slide is not constant!