Why can't you just email us the slides to read on our own then? What is the point of a meeting when you just drone on reading off every bit of text from every slide with no other commentary?



The best presenters use the slides as a guideline but don't just read them back to everyone.

"I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides."

- Steve Jobs

https://bing.com/search?q=Stev...ion+about+powerpoint.

Back in 2007 or 2008 I had to take a certification course for my job. It was a 24 hour course taught over a weekend.
The first instructor, on Saturday did nothing but read word for word off the screen.
I said to the other people I was with if that instructor was going to be teaching on Sunday I was leaving.
Thankfully on Sunday we had two instructors that were much much better. When we mentioned about the Saturday instructor to our Sunday instructors they were aware of their teaching techniques and the complaints from past classes.

On occasion I end up having to do our new hire orientation, when my cohort is out or unavailable.
Pretty much reading 2 slides of IT info to crickets.

Pointless, but has to be done

Tim Cook, schooled under Steve, had some pretty good tendencies on PPT as well.

Link to article

The minimalist approach does require you to know and be able to tell the story of each topic/slide well, but if you can't do that you are already going to suck as a presenter.

I teach a lot of classes. The slides are a guide for the speaker. They should have minimal text. The speaker should be doing MUCH more talking/explaining than what is on the slides. It drives me nuts when people just read them. SPEAK, don't read. Vary your speed and inflection. Move around, make eye contact (and maybe some jokes!), engage the audience. It's not rocket science.

We put "speakers notes" on our fundamental presentations. With those, as text to guide a presenter, the powerpoint file can stand alone as a reference document. But, the presenter is giving a more engaging show, with minimal text on screen.

I work for the govt. Once a year we have a “Safety Stand Down” which is a near all day infusion of canned, repetitive safety slides and videos in a PP presentation.
Every year someone is volun-told to “present” the material.
The slides get read. Ugh.
My turn came. I read the slides, sure, because that’s the job. But I interjected some extra commentary and a few anecdotal incidents I had experienced.
Guess who gets asked to play MC every year now? I’ve had to start scheduling medical procedures around this event.

Moral of the story: careful what you wish for.

Ahh , retirement . No more corporate bullshit . No more power point torture for everything from safety to First Aid to DEI . The company I worked for thought Power Points were the answer to everything . It made experts out of idiots ..

quote:

Originally posted by hudr:
I work for the govt. Once a year we have a “Safety Stand Down” which is a near all day infusion of canned, repetitive safety slides and videos in a PP presentation.
Every year someone is volun-told to “present” the material.
The slides get read. Ugh.
My turn came. I read the slides, sure, because that’s the job. But I interjected some extra commentary and a few anecdotal incidents I had experienced.
Guess who gets asked to play MC every year now? I’ve had to start scheduling medical procedures around this event.

Moral of the story: careful what you wish for.

Don’t ever show competence in something you don’t want to do!

Because a Senior Director wants us to read PPT slides to him in a meeting we all hate.

The Pentagon had a PP culture where slides were animated, had transitions that pushed the limits of the PP ability. Last I heard, so much effort and resource were wasted, it was ordered stopped.
On the other hand, the school I taught at had “ Blood Born Pathogens” as a subject. The ladies presenting it had a catchy little ditty and we ended up doing the chorus with them.

In the same vein, when I was working, the majority of scheduled meetings could easily have been addressed by a short email. But in my company, meetings were a popular way of looking busy while doing nothing.

I got to the point where I would respond to the meeting invite with 2 questions: 'What tangible outcome is this meeting supposed to accomplish?' - and 'Who are the confirmed attendees?'

They almost never had a good answer to the first question. The second was always a good barometer because if there were no management decision-makers attending, the meeting was guaranteed to be a waste of time.

I declined 80% of the meeting invites I got.

I've many times heard it called "Death By Powerpoint".

Join the military, Powerpoints are responsible for more deaths than combat.

I’m pretty sure it comes down to not knowing how to speak effectively, or too scared to try. I am a horrible speaker. I will never again address a room full of people. But there’s no way in hell I’d read slides to a crowd just so I can say I gave a lecture.

Something that helped me a great deal was Presentation Zen and Garr Reynold's TED talk on storytelling. Changed my PowerPoints in a very positive way!

Twenty years ago a short, brilliant essay by Edmund Tufte, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" eviscerated this type of information presentation.

It's available on the internet, so I won't go into details, but I do like this throw-away line from near the end [italics his]

quote:

PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend they are giving a real talk, and audiences to pretend that they are listening.

In my past personal experience with PP (and the gubment), PP slides were speaking guides for the presenter, as well as "cliff notes" for the recipients. Much of the annual business I was involved in (base management / civil engineering) depended on a regular cycle of PP meetings, to get decisions / approvals from leadership. There was and is a PP slide format that is used from base level to higher headquarters and has been effective for several years.

I have sat through thousands of presentations using slides for decades, since the early 80s. Back then they were using 35mm film slides and Kodak Ektagraphic projectors, and the presentations were far better. They used more photos, more graphs, and less slides overall because it costs money; professionally made text/bullet slides cost $25-35 each back then. Once PP came into vogue, the presentations went downhill. What I hated, and the rest of the audience noticed as well, were the people who used "presenter view", basically a teleprompter on a laptop, to read through their entire presentation. Thank God I retired and don't have to sit through that crap again.