Looking past death by PowerPoint

Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal published a complaint today about the ongoing torture of audiences by PowerPoint. And why not:

Over the years, the software has been blamed for boring people senseless. The phrase "Death by PowerPoint" is common corporate parlance. Some companies and conference organizers have prohibited PowerPoint, and the press perennially skewers it as a thought-free plague. One legal scholar, tongue-in-cheek, proposed a constitutional amendment banning its use.

Now Blackfriars must insist on our Second Amendment rights to bear bullets, if for no other reason that we teach executives how to use them properly. And as part of our courses, we often present our Hall of Shame slides, meaningless and confusing PowerPoint slides collected over many years to illustrate just how many ways executives can go wrong with PowerPoint slides. However, despite our defense of PowerPoint in the right hands, we have to agree with Mr. Sandberg that most PowerPoint presentations are dreadful to the point of ridicule. And over the last three or four years, we've come to an somewhat contrary conclusion:

Microsoft's PowerPoint program is part of the problem.

See, we're a Mac-based company, so we're not stuck with PowerPoint. And over the years, we've used a variety of presentation programs ranging from AppleWorks to OpenOffice. And in the last three years, we've been using Apple's Keynote software, which is bundled as part of its iWorks package. And quite honestly, it puts PowerPoint to shame.

Why do I say this? Because I did hundreds of presentations using PowerPoint as an analyst and always dreaded the experience of creating the slides. And Keynote removes that dread and makes us look better because it:

• Renders slides for maximum impact.. The whole idea behind slides is that they should be visual aids to the presentation, not the presentation itself. With your eyes providing the highest bandwidth path to your brain, those visuals make a huge impression on the audience. PowerPoint slides tend to look pixelated and blocky when blown up to full screen, and the animations tend to stutter or jerk. Keynote slides boast fully anti-aliased typography to remove jaggies, and the animations render smoothly. Most audience members couldn't tell you why Keynote slides look more professional, but they will tell you they like them better.


• Makes it easy to do common things. One of the most common activities for a presenter is to step through a table or graph one element at a time. Yet, because PowerPoint builds its tables in Word and its graphs in Excel, it's nearly impossible to display a table one column at a time or build a graph one element at a time. Both of those functions are built into Keynote because good presenters don't want to overload their audiences with too much information at once.


• Avoids needless clutter. Even when the presenter is creating the slides, PowerPoint tends to clutter the screen with a zillion Office buttons and menubars. And most PowerPoint color themes and templates tend to pull focus to the template, not to the content. Apple's built-in Keynote templates offer minimalist alternatives (such as the black gradient background that has become a hallmark of Steve Jobs keynote speeches) that allow the content to shine. And Keynote has a single menu bar and devotes most of the screen to the slides, encouraging the presenter to focus on making the slide great.


• Helps presenters present well. One of the most important techniques for a presenter is to be able to introduce the next slide before they click to it. Using PowerPoint, that's a technique that requires a second computer and display. Keynote on a Powerbook or Macbook Pro puts your preview slide on your laptop (along with your notes, if you like) while your current slide is up on the screen. Just this one feature allows most presenters to focus more on what they are saying rather than trying to remember what comes next -- and thereby makes them more compelling.

We're not the first people to observe the Keynote effect. Les Posen at Cyberpsych has a terrific blog article titled, "Just what is it about Keynote that is changing the way people present?", where he cites a number of famous presenters who have been won over to Keynote because it allows them to be more creative. And of course, Al Gore did the visuals for his groundbreaking film, An Inconvenient Truth in Keynote. And Garr Reynolds at the site PresentationZen.com notes how the Zen esthetic embodied in Keynote allows Steve Jobs' presentations to have much more power and impact than similar presentations by Bill Gates.

The bottom line: Good marketing demands good presentations. No professional marketer would publish a print ad in Microsoft Word because the quality would be too poor to be taken seriously, yet the CEOs of their companies continue to do presentations the ways they have for the last two decades. If major newspapers are going to bemoan the tragedy of corporate presentations today, perhaps they should start noting that there are alternatives to death by PowerPoint.

Full disclosure: I do own some Apple stock.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Keynote, Marketing, Microsoft, PowerPoint, Presentations, Public speaking