I thought I'd kick-start this new blog by talking about one of my favorite topic: presentations.
Powerpoint is everywhere. Everyone uses it. And let's face it, most Powerpoint suck. A lot. Don't get me wrong, it has nothing to do with the guys in Redmond. We are the one screwing up here. We are the one writing those horrible slideshows which are nothing else but a collection of loosely related and poorly summarized ideas that we put on bullets slides. And the more bullets, the happier we are. More bullets mean we're putting plenty of content. More bullets mean we're doing a good job. More bullets mean our presentations are going to be all the more rich and relevant.
Well, reality check for everyone, those very bullets we so dearly love only achieve 2 things: shooting ourselves in the foot and killing our audiences. Bullet points are the worst invention in the history of mankind (well, at least the one that writes presentations) because they encourage intellectual lazyness and provide an easy way out of the hard, but essential goal of any presentation: getting an idea across.
So if you are working on a presentation now, do me (and your audience) a favor: get rid of bullets. Create one slide per idea that you want to express and keep the non-essential stuff out of your presentation (now you know why you have these "notes" in Powerpoint). It's going to be 10 times better for you to have a few powerful slides on which you'll have a lot of things to say, rather than plenty of bullet-filled slides where all you'll do is read the content of the slide (something that surprinsingly any decent audience is capable of doing by themselves).
And if you want to read someone else rant about how bad presentations are, read this post from Seth Godin.
