Last night I read an article in Management Team about the birthday of Microsoft Powerpoint. The tool is celibrating its 20th birthday this year. As a teacher and consultant I have been raised with the tool, but I must admit that what was stated reflects my feeling as well and I hope I will never fall into the pitfalls they mentioned.

The article stated that people are getting lazy when they need to present something to an audience. When someone needed to do a presentation before  Microsoft Powerpoint existed, they had some overhead slides, some pencils and they just wrote down their information for the listeners. People needed to know what they were telling to write somethings down and tell the listener their story. Preparing for a presentation was rehearsing in front of a mirror with a small, mostly written, note (or big report) to remember the story.

Then came the copiers and printers that were able to prepare nice fancy overhead slides for them. People were moving towards a typewriter / computer based written presentation. Pictures where much more easy to prepare, since they did not need to be drawn on the overhead slides during the presentation. In my opinion this was the start of the moving from real presenters to technology driven speakers.

After the overhead projects were exchanged for beamers and the pencils became a mouse and software, it got worse. People were indeed not preparing their story but preparing a visual show. Instead of slide contributing to a story it became a story contributing to the presentation. Every nerd nowadays can prepare a nice presentation and just press the F5 button to show people what they have been preparing by using slides with bullits, graphs, video’s, etc. the night before… 

Bookmark to: