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PowerPoint to start telling you that your presentation is bad and you should feel bad

Lee D Silver badge

I have yet to see a Powerpoint of any worth.

Whether it's a (entirely third-party) YouTube video per slide, or just a bullet list that someone reads out, or just long blocks of text that have nothing to do with what's being said and are skimmed/skipped, I see no value in Powerpoints whatsoever.

The presenters who need them just need a prompt, that's all. The presenters who don't, don't need anything at all really.

There is nothing worse than having read the entire slide, getting the point, but being held to that wait-for-the-clicker moment to read the next one while people waffle on.

Honestly... if you want to do it... say "There'll be a summary Powerpoint sent to you after the talk, so don't worry about missing anything, let's just dive right in".

Similarly, however, I actually can't remember the last time I was in a room where someone was powerpointing where the *entire meeting* wasn't worthless. Either full of lies that never materialised, contained no useful material of interest and/or was not relevant to the majority of people there and could have been handled better with smaller individual meetings or even emails.

As someone whose job involves *setting up* for those kinds of presentations, that just baffles me. I've yet to load something up for someone who's giving a talk and thinking "Wow, that's pretty cool/useful/interesting".

Were I a CEO in charge of a company, emblazoned in place of the corporate "mission statement" would be a set of commandments instead:

- Thou shalt not Powerpoint.

- Thou shalt not conference call.

- Thou shalt not Skype/Whatsapp/Videocall.

- Thou shalt not call a meeting involving more than 5 staff without prior authorisation.

- Thou shalt confirm everything in email, even if a meeting took place.

- Thou shalt use email groups appropriately and in a targeted manner.

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