Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Some advice on using Power Point

Just came across an excellent and rather pointed article on the BBC site concerning the use and (often) misuse of Power Point. A couple of quotes are in order:

"If there's nothing but text on the screen, people will try to read and listen at the same time - and won't succeed in doing either very well."
"This highlights the biggest problem with slide-based presentations, which is that speakers mistakenly think that they can get far more information across than is actually possible in a presentation. At the heart of this is a widespread failure to appreciate that speaking and listening are fundamentally different from writing and reading."
"...we've known for years that audiences don't much like wordy slides and don't find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids."