PowerPoint Activities – Overview
[This section should take you around 10 minutes to complete]
As a university student, you will often need to give presentations. One of the most popular presentation programs is Microsoft PowerPoint, created in 1987 for Apple Macintosh. It lets you create slides to display on a large screen as an electronic slide show.
This topic begins our exploration of creating and delivering an effective PowerPoint presentation.
PowerPoint can be a very effective way to deliver information to an audience, with several potential advantages over a traditional stand-and-deliver presentation method where the speaker reads from a long text.
Unlike the traditional approach to information delivery, PowerPoint slides can engage the audience using several audio-visual resources.
But there are also a few disadvantages to using PowerPoints, which can lead to what is commonly referred to as ‘death by PowerPoint’. The term ‘death by PowerPoint’ refers to a phenomenon caused by the poor use of presentation software. Critical contributors to death by PowerPoint include confusing graphics, slides with too much text and presenters whose idea of a good presentation is to read 40 slides aloud (TechTarget Contributor, 2013).
Another Death by PowerPoint [Image], by freepic.com
(https://www.activepresence.com/blog/the-death-by-powerpoint-myth).
Accordingly, we can often tell exactly when ‘death by PowerPoint’ is happening, simply by looking at the audience and how they are reacting to the presentation.
PowerPoint [Image] by David Roberts, 2015.
(https://inspiringsocsci.pressbooks.com/chapter/life-after-death-by-powerpoint/)
While we will don’t focus on how to present a PowerPoint, the construction of the PowerPoint itself can contribute to death by PowerPoint if not done well.
The following TED Talk Video by David Phillips provides an excellent summary of how to construct an effective PowerPoint to avoid death by PowerPoint. Please take the time to watch as you will be introduced to the fundamentals of creating an engaging presentation.
Watch
How to avoid death By PowerPoint | David JP Phillips | TEDxStockholmSalon
Before proceeding further let’s take the opportunity to review key ideas.