PowerPoint doesn’t get a lot of love. It is reviled for overuse and misuse. But it’s still the guilty secret of legions of course designers. Why is this?
- It has a wide, installed base; if you’ve got MS Office, you’ve got PowerPoint
- Lots of people know how to use it (whether it’s used well is a separate issue)
- It makes a pretty handy poor man’s graphic editor
- It can integrate animation, video, and audio features within a presentation and with each new release these features become richer an more robust
- Its templates allow a common look and feel for presentations throughout an organization
- eLearning programs, such as Articulate Presenter or iSpring, can publish its content in eLearning format
PowerPoint is actually a pretty powerful application. Therein lies the problem. Because you can do so much so easily, it is very easy to create breathtakingly bad content. Poor design, dense text, bizarre colour schemes, incomprehensible font choices, pointless animation, the list of potential sins is virtually endless.
Here’s a humorous take on How Not to Use PowerPoint.
To use PowerPoint well requires two skill sets: Technical and Design. Most people have the first (at least to some degree). Far fewer have the second.
Here are a few links to help with design skills:
What is good PowerPoint design?
10 Design Tips for Producing Powerful and Effective Presentations
