By Michael W. McLaughlin, Contributing Editor
The corporate environment seems to be squeezing more and more meetings into a day than most of us could have imagined. And where there’s a meeting, it’s a good bet that the speaker will be displaying slides using Microsoft’s PowerPoint.
With the surge in meeting leaders using PowerPoint, it’s become fashionable to bash the software and its makers, implying that a lowly computer program is somehow responsible for the poor quality of many presentations. I just read another diatribe on the evils of PowerPoint in which the ubiquitous software was called to account for its egregious impact on the state of human communication.
Even graphic design guru, Edward Tufte, sternly wags his finger and says that the cognitive style of PowerPoint “profoundly corrupts serious communication.”
Oh, please.
It’s obvious that PowerPoint has evolved into the default method for communicating to groups. Whether it’s a business meeting or a middle school science project, most likely someone is firing up a PowerPoint presentation. In fact, estimates are that audiences sit through 30 million PowerPoint presentations each day around the world.
That’s a lot of slides. After you’ve endured a tedious, slide-laden presentation, it’s easy to blame the software for putting you into a trance.
But the real problem isn’t with the software at all. Blaming software for a poor presentation is like saying you don’t like a painting because the artist used the wrong kind of paint brush. The software, like the artist’s paint brush, is simply one tool for doing a job. What really matters is the speaker’s insights, preparation, and delivery.
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