Ep 24 Is PowerPoint a Force for Good or Evil?

PowerPoint Is it a source of good in the world or a source of evil?

Speaking the show about effective speaking in public, to the media, at work and in life. Speaking with TJ Walker.

Today's question comes from Jill. She writes in from coming to me from my newsletter list. She says, I enjoy your postings and find them very useful in dealing with my own clients, but I'd like you to address the use of PowerPoint. In 30 years of speaking, I have never used it. I wish my clients and others would stop as well. But she then can see slides which display just one picture per idea or concept are impactful. Otherwise, yuck. What do you think? Jill? Thanks for writing in. So I'm going to devote this program. By the way, this is a special weekend edition of the program. We tend to be a little briefer, shorter on the weekends to give you more time to spend time with family, have friends, get out on the tennis court as I like to do. So this is not going to be all the ins and outs of every single thing to do with PowerPoint. Instead, I just want to deal more with a fundamental existential question about PowerPoint. Should it exist at all? Should we use it? Or is it, as Jill suggests, just a horrible blight shouldn't be used at all? Here's my take on PowerPoint. PowerPoint is like television. Now, if all you watch is Jerry springer and Trash TV or channel159 that just shows what the menu is going to be on a loop for your local school system, you might say, well, TV is boring and TV isn't very good. But if you happen to love World cup soccer and you can't go to the game and you can actually watch World cup soccer on a nice giant TV that's got great clarity and color, well, TV is great. So that's really the issue when it comes to PowerPoint. PowerPoint isn't good or bad, it's how you use it. It's like a knife. A knife is a tool. You stick it in someone's heart and twist and kill them. Well, it's a bad thing. If you use it to cut food, to feed your family and not start it, then it's a great tool. PowerPoint really is a tool as well. So if you don't like PowerPoint, if you're convinced that PowerPoint is awful, you're not wrong. Because in my experience, 99.99% of PowerPoint presentations are awful. But it's not because there's anything inherently awful with PowerPoint. It's how they Used it. If you give me a fabulous, gigantic, state of the art, brand new 4K television and it's 12ft big and it cost $189,000 and you have it installed in my house, but I then switch it upside down, I refuse to plug it in, and I constantly complain about it. I can't believe you gave me this horrible tv. What a garbage tv. Is the problem the TV you gave me, or is it that I'm not using it properly? If I actually plugged it in, turned it up the right side, it would be a great tv. So these are some of the issues I specifically want to deal with today on this program. So thanks for joining me and a moment of business first.

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Too many people are quick to Simply write off PowerPoint because the last 20 PowerPoint presentations they saw were awful. And I understand that emotionally. If someone coughs and then kicks you in the head 20 times in a row, next time you hear somebody cough, you're going to duck and run. You're going to get very anxious when you start hearing someone cough. Pavlov's theory and all that. We do get conditioned. So I understand why most people are conditioned to, to hate PowerPoint, I really do. But again, the problem is in PowerPoint, it's how it's used. Here's something. And I'm gonna anger some of my friends in the presentation skills business. I'm gonna potentially anger some potential sponsors here. But here's what I have found in doing research all over the world with audiences, and that is if you put up a PowerPoint slide with a bullet point and text in words, and you narrow it down to just three words per bullet point, and you narrow it down to just three bullet points per slide, and then you give the presentation, you test afterwards. Guess what? You thought I was going to say that works and that's best and so limited to three, right? Well, no, I found the opposite is true. That is people do not remember text. Doesn't matter if you have 50 bullet points, full paragraphs, or three bullet points and three words per bullet point. Human beings, if they're in a room watching you stand up and speak, listening to you, and you're projecting a PowerPoint slide with text, they do not remember the text. Now, I know some of you say, well, tj, you're projecting your own biases on there. Some people are visual, some people are audio, some people are kines. There's all these things, theories. All I can tell you is I test audiences all over the world routinely on what their own colleagues, their own peers show in their presentations, their speeches, their talks, their PowerPoints. Nobody ever remembers text. They remember images. They remember pictures. In fact, as Jill pointed out, slides which display just one picture per idea or concept are impactful. Interesting theory. Don't take my word for it. Don't take Jill's word for it. Test. That's the easiest thing to do with PowerPoint slides is you don't have to rely on my theory or anyone else's theory. Because, my goodness, if you go to Amazon and you type in PowerPoint, you're going to get thousands of books all purporting to be from expert authors who've won graphic arts designs on their PowerPoint slides. And my response to all of them is, maybe, why don't we test whether it works? Here's all you really need to know about PowerPoint, and this is to the if you're using PowerPoint and you're giving a PowerPoint presentation to 50 colleagues or prospects or clients on Thursday, find one or two people, friends, colleagues, someone down the hall, maybe someone who works in a similar business in a shared office space, and tell them, hey Sam, Sally, do you have a moment? Half an hour at lunchtime. Tuesday, lunch is on me. Give them a sandwich. Give them your PowerPoint presentation. Present it. Show it just as you would to the larger group. Thursday, when you're done, ask them every slide they remember and ask them the message associated with it. Any slide they remember, and the message, the numbers, the facts they remember from that. You now have 100% empirical evidence that that slide is great. It works. It's fantastic. Keep it. On the other hand, if you show a slide and they don't remember the slide, and they don't remember the message to the slide because they don't remember the slide, you now have 100% empirical evidence that that slide is completely worthless. I want you to take that slide, tear it up, and throw it in the trash can. It doesn't work, folks. It really is as simple as that. Now, I've written short books on PowerPoint, I've written chapters in books, I have done two hour courses on various online platforms on PowerPoint, and I could probably talk for three days on PowerPoint, and I use PowerPoint all the time, but it really all does come down to that. If you actually take the time to see what your audience remembers and you keep what they remember and you throw away what they don't remember, nobody's going to complain about your PowerPoint if you do what most people do. You're not going to test your PowerPoint because you're too lazy or because you think, well, I'd love to test, but there's no time because you're adding bullet points and you're adding words and you're changing font until 10 seconds before the speech is to be given. And then there's no time to test, then you're winging it, and then you just have to sort of hope. Why do you want to hope so? That's my biggest thought, Jill, about really with PowerPoint, the biggest question, at some point, it all comes down to a fundamental basic question that every speaker has to face. And you got to ask yourself, am I doing this speech? Am I doing things like the PowerPoint, the slides? Is it for me to make life easier for me, or is it to help my audience understand ideas, remember them, so they can use them? It's a fundamental divide in the room. And in my experience, Basically all bad PowerPoint slides come from people who've made a decision of I don't really care about my audience. All I care about is me, me, me, me, me. I want to have stuff to say. I don't want to forget what to say. I want the audience to think I'm smart. I want to cover my. You know what? I don't want to give anyone any opening for criticizing me for leaving something out. So I'm just going to gather every single fact, every single number, every single bullet point, every single complex chart graph, do Hickey put it in as many slides and then try to speak quickly and then constantly apologize. I don't have enough time to go through it quickly. And that's going to be my presentation. That's the attitude. It's the mindset that destroys the PowerPoint. If your mindset is a speech is about the greatest number of facts, the greatest number of words and messages and numbers, and I could cram it all on a slide. You are destined for failure. You're guaranteed. You may still be a successful person, you might still be a billionaire hedge fund manager, but it's not going to be because your presentation skills. But if your focus is first and foremost of what does my audience really need to know the most now, how can I use the time available and any resources available to make those ideas come alive? And the most powerful tool you have is not the AV equipment, it's not the PowerPoint slide, it's not the computer processing. It's you actually speaking, sharing your experiences. That should be your first focus. After you've narrowed down your messages to the top five. And fleshing out your messages with stories, examples, case studies involving conversations with real clients, real customers, about real problems that you've solved, that should be your focus. If you're going to use a PowerPoint presentation, and I'm not against it, I use it all the time. Your focus has to be on what image can make that idea come alive and be most interesting and memorable to the audience. Text letters are not memorable. Pictures are memorable. Don't take my word for it. Test. So if your message is Alzheimer's is increasingly affecting affluent elderly Americans, regardless of social, economic, political status, you could put that all up in a bunch of words and bullet points and text. Or you could say, even this guy gets it. And then you put up a picture of Ronald Reagan. People will remember the picture of Reagan and the message behind it. They will not remember text and words. That's my theory, folks, based on testing audiences all over the world. Again, I do not want you to take my word for it. I might be full of baloney. There's one way of finding out. Test, test for yourself. Figure out what works and what doesn't work. And that's the real answer. So, Jill, I'm going to respectfully disagree with you. It's not that PowerPoint is bad and people shouldn't use it. People should not use bad PowerPoint. People should use good PowerPoint. If they can come up with images that actually help their audience, that's really the solution. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me on this Weekend Edition. Thanks for joining me every day. I'm here for you every single day, seven days a week, whether you're listening on itunes or other podcast directories, watching on YouTube, Facebook or any other platform. Please please send me your questions about any aspect of public speaking, speaking to the media, speaking during a crisis, and I will answer them for you right here. May all of your speaking opportunities in life and all of your PowerPoint presentations in life be a success.

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