PowerPoint is 25 years old! What started as a tool used by DTP experts to animate presentations which transferred from overhead transparencies has now truly democratised presentations. Anyone can use PowerPoint and everyone does. In fact, with a slide deck and a few notes, anyone can become a trainer, can’t they? Well no – as anyone who has sat through many presentations will know, PowerPoint can be a boon to some presenters but equally can be a major barrier to communication in the hands of someone who uses it indiscriminately. You can read some of the most heinous and oft repeated crimes here http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8207849.stm. So what is the answer? As learning designers we often deliver PowerPoint files to our clients – ones which they can use to roll out training programmes we have designed for them to be delivered locally. Our approach is a variation based on the concept of Beyond Bullet Points http://www.beyondbullets.com/. Essentially what Cliff Atkinson advocates is three things: 1. A title for each slide which is a sentence giving a key message 2. Clear images which reinforce the message – diagrams, pictures, models 3. Extensive use of notes to ensure that what the presenter says adds value to the slide being shown rather than using the slide as a script to be read from. I like to augment the approach by including three other useful techniques. The first is to summarise every 6 – 8 slides with a bullet point screen (rules are there to be broken) containing the key messages taken from the slide titles. My advice to the presenter when they use these summary slides is to shut up and let people read! The next is the inclusion of prompt slides asking for responses from the audience – questions and provocative comments. One way PowerPoint lectures have served to give the software tool itself a bad name. The third technique is to use animations sparingly but where words are needed on screen to animate them on and off – perhaps using techniques which lead to text on screen looking like a tag cloud. Wherever possible though these slides should self build rather than require a mouse click to advance between animations. Beyond that, unless you are building a process diagram, leave the animation function alone! I’ve found a couple of other benefits from this approach. The first is the capacity of local deliverers to translate the slides relatively quickly into the language of the group – translating ten bullet points takes ages but with a bi-lingual trainer, the notes can remain in English and the main slides use so few words that it takes a matter of moments to transform a presentation into any language. We need to make sure that diagrams which incorporate words can also be translated rather than being non editable pictures. The other unexpected benefit is the pretty rapid conversion to e-learning, where both a workshop version of the materials and an e-learning programme are required for different learners and groups. We’ve found the conversion process to be reasonably straightforward so long as we use the prompt questions to trigger exercises. This leads me to a final musing on this subject which is the use of authoring tools. In recent years, there have been a plethora of authoring tools which enable subject matter experts to create their own e-learning. What was once the preserve of a specialist techie, is now democratised. Sound familiar? 25 years ago when Mr Gates launched PowerPoint on an unsuspecting world only specialists would create slides. Whole businesses were created to build your presentations. Then when we realised it wasn’t that tricky, everyone started doing it and the reputation of PowerPoint and its misuse by presenters became legend. Guess what happens with authoring tools? As Donald Clark said: “Mastering an authoring tool no more makes you a learning designer than mastering MS Word makes you a novelist”. http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2008/11/rapid-tools-more-bubble-machine-than.html Happy Birthday PowerPoint. Some of the things I have seen people do with you have been incredible – most have been incredibly bad. Let’s hope we learn from those mistakes as authoring software becomes equally ubiquitous.