Think about your favorite lectures or presentations. Why do you remember them? I bet it is not because of their slides.
In fact, most of the very good presenters I know rely very little on slides. Some of them actually use what could be considered “bad” slides. The kinds that are not immediately understood by readers, or not extremely flashy with complex charts and animations. Their slides contain just enough to guide the audience (and the speaker), and keep them guessing and paying attention. Sometimes this is not even on purpose. A speaker is so confident in what he has to say that not much effort is put into the slides. The moment I realize that everything important is already shown in slides is the moment I usually stop paying attention to speakers.
I started thinking about this when a coworker was told she needed to take a visuals course to improve the appearance of her slides (and not the content) and more recently when I was asked to review my slides three times for very minor reasons. It is not like we are a marketing agency or consultants drafting presentations that rather serve as reports (though I do believe for presentations such slides are often too much ). We are actually academics. However, being part of a business school, a lot of us have become used to following the script/telling students how it is done in the “real world” and what they’ll have to do once they land their dream consulting jobs. Not that most of us has actually worked in the space (at least not in recent years). Or that the “best practices” of an industry really are the best we can come up with.
This is not to say that I don’t think the current advice to make better slides is not useful. It is and in a way I’m grateful people care enough to share it(even if I do question it). Most people are not natural presenters and the right slides can help them get their point across and the audience to understand where the confused speaker is going. But the perfect slides are not beneficial to everyone. I do think there is a thing such as too much too perfect. I cannot count the times I found myself wondering why I was attending a lecture since the slides already communicated everything the speaker wanted to get across. It just felt like time wasted if such speaker was not particularly engaging or entertaining. Why sit through an hour lecture if I could just skim the slides home for less than 15 minutes…
And this is why I don’t aim for the said perfect slides. If you’re not a particularly engaging presenter, they will definitely get your point across, but at the expense of probably being quite boring. I prefer being known as a cool presenter whose slides can be improved than the presenter reading off the slides. Not that I don’t try to make my slides as good as I can. I do. Considering time constraints, however, and once a sufficient quality threshold has been achieved, I think it is much wiser to invest in improving one’s oral presentation, be it by practicing, new examples, etc.
I also sometimes make deliberate “mistakes ”. Sure people may have difficulty reading a table with twenty columns and rows, but sometimes my point is that there has been enough results to support what I am saying, and not any specific result per see. Sometimes I may also just include a picture with no title just to leave the audience wondering until I reveal what it is that I am trying to say. Following a fixed recipe for slides is antiquate, boring and sometimes just not as effective than taking the free-style approach.
The “perfect PowerPoint” (according to the “experts” out there) is an easy way out to ensure the success of a presentation. They are useful, but they take the limelight away from the speaker and away from any spontaneity. They can give more control to the presenter, but also lead to higher chances of the audience getting bored. If we are talking about great presentations, they are never the main ingredient. Slides are just a tool. Use in moderation and be more flexible and less boring.
