j’s scratchpad

Steven wants us to keep talking about PowerPoint and its value or lack-of-value as a presentation tool. I read his post while polishing off a PowerPoint presentation for a journalism class.

For some audiences, it’s totally expected that a presenter will use PowerPoint and have handouts, etc. Using PowerPoint for presentations was just as much a part of my library schooling as was learning HTML. One professor in particular required that all of our presentations were made with PowerPoint. Of course, PowerPoint was relatively new back then, so it was a still bright, shiny, impressive, innovative software. One of the items on my overcrowded to do list is to learn more about some of the PowerPoint alternatives.

If I’m making a relatively short (about fifteen minutes or shorter) presentation that doesn’t require any visual help, I can probably do it ok without PowerPoint and often choose to.

For me, though, there’s nothing more boring sometimes than trying to pay attention to a presenter who uses nothing visual and just drones on and on. I cringed when I read the advice that moderators not let panelists use PowerPoint. If a talk has lots of solid points, highlights appearing on a screen can really help the audience follow along and reinforce what the speaker is saying. It can also help wandering minds get back on track. And, likewise, having an outline keeps me on track when I’m speaking and helps me remember information I should cover. If I’m going to go through the effort of writing an outline, I may as well share it with the audience.

Personally, I think visual elements of a presentation are important to have, if possible. Whether PowerPoint is an appropriate tool or not, I think, is a reasonable debate.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 6:18 pm and is filed under Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.