So You Think That's a Presentation

I am utterly fed up to my back teeth with the so-called presentations I see these days. At best they are boring; at worst they miss the purpose of the presentation entirely. What is it that makes people think that just because they can create some PowerPoint slides they don't need training in this fine art anymore?

When will people learn that their slides are not the presentation? If I were to define 'presentation' I would say 'a presentation consists of the words you use to form sentences that convey ideas either to persuade or inform an audience'.

Even Bill Gates can't help Confuse and Over Do the PP

PowerPoint is great tool but it was never meant to be abused in this way. It was always meant to help the presenter convey information, which is difficult to present with words alone; but most people these days write almost every single word they want to say on their slides, thereby using them as speaker notes and the audience ends up looking at slide after slide after slide. Why they even bother to stand in front of people I don't know for they might just as well roll the slides and let the audience read them. Why not? In any case we are in for a 'presentation', which is dull, dull, dull; lifeless, witless and boring and insulting to the audience.

Before PowerPoint, the training company I worked for used to run 12 presentation skills courses per year in the London venue plus 4 per year in Leeds, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham - that's 28 courses each year with a maximum of 12 people per course and they were nearly always full. With the advent of PowerPoint, these courses have dwindled to around 2 per year in London only with at times only 4 people attending - even with sales people covering the UK.

Please listen business people; if you must give presentations as part of your work, you owe it to your company, your audience and yourself to be properly trained in this area. People are often too polite to tell you that your presentation is crap, so you walk away thinking you were OK - you were not, PowerPoint was.

I have promised myself that unless I am training people, I will never sit and waste my time watching a slide show masquerading as a presentation ever again. I am going to walk out because there is absolutely no excuse for a poor presentation.