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SALT LAKE CITY -- PowerPoint is designed to help people make clear and interesting presentations. But some recent comments and a recently released slide by the military shows not everyone is using it the right way.
The slide was about the complexity of the military's plan in Afghanistan. The picture was complex, all right. It was a big jumbled mess.
PowerPoint is partly being blamed for some people not understanding military strategies there. The New York Times quoted the Joint Forces Commander saying, "PowerPoint makes us stupid."
IFI Training Vice President of Solutions Scott Wood says, "All of the branches of the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, the Navy, they've all kind of complained about the complexity and the level of detail."
Wood says the military isn't the only group of people making PowerPoint presentations too complex. Aerospace engineers go overboard with it, too. Wood says one aerospace company almost lost a $37 billion project because its PowerPoint presentation was 150 slides long, filled with overly complicated data, and it didn't really answer the questions some audience members had.
"You've got these engineers that are designing very complex systems and they're making assumptions that their customers want that level of complexity and detail," Wood says.
Too many people use it as a crutch, according to Wood. He says the software is supposed to be something that supports a presentation, not something that becomes the presentation.
"People are just reading slides or just flipping through these complex visuals," he says.
So, how can you avoid "death by PowerPoint?" Wood says people who use it should follow the "six by six by six" rule for each slide.
"Six factoids, six line of text or six bullets and six words per line," he explains.
Wood says presenters need to closely watch their audience while using PowerPoint. If someone just reads verbatim off the screen, the audience will zone out and not remember a thing. He says presenters need to involve their audience in the overall lecture and get them to write notes so they can retain information more effectively.
E-mail: pnelson@ksl.com
