Comments on: Stop blaming PowerPoint. Learn how to kick some arse with it

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 04:39:37 +0000

Haha. And I’d be pretty sad to live in that world. A better decision would be to educate how to avoid accidents than to shut down roads and thus much of our society.

Similarly, we shouldn’t outlaw presentations but should educate people to better apply them. Hence this post :-)

By: tc

tc — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:35:58 +0000

“Outlawing PowerPoint is like avoiding the roads because some people get in accidents.”

Their reasoning is that, on average, Powerpoint does more harm than good. If more people got in accidents than arrived safely at their destinations, you’d probably see calls to outlaw roads, too.

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:20:20 +0000

Thanks for your thoughts, Gavin and Dave! Hope to see you both at a conference some day with some kick ass visuals.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 15:50:41 +0000

Great post. I’m also a big fan of Garr Reynolds at http://www.presentationzen.com

By: Gavin Meikle

Gavin Meikle — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:13:44 +0000

Hi Jared
I totally agree. If people like us keep banging out the message, sharing best practice and walking the talk by demonstrating great presentations allied to great visuals we can change the world one presentation at a time.

Gavin Meikle
http://www.inter-activ.co.uk/gavins-blog

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:52:52 +0000

Wow, Colleen, thanks for this really great advice!!

I’ve long been a fan of Duarte, Godin, Mann, and TED–it’s funny how small a world it is. I hope my readers check out your delicious links.

I may be bugging you about some of my own communication ideas very soon…

By: the communicatrix

the communicatrix — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 02:14:18 +0000

Another person to look to for great advice on presentations is Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design (they did Al Gore’s show). She wrote up some tips for WIRED’s wiki: http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Make_a_Presentation_Like_Al_Gore.

Hell, I think THE best thing is to just watch a lot of *good* presenters. Make sure you’re at least listening to an audio track of the person presenting while you watch the slides; personally, I like to see the person’s whole body (or most of it) while they’re presenting. Seth Godin is a phenomenally good presenter. Merlin Mann is shaping up into one. And of course, there are all those TED talks.

If you’re looking for resources, I have a ton of shows, tips, and other presentation-related nerdery bookmarked at my del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/communicatrix/presentations

And if you dig into people’s “presenting” tags, you’ll probably find a whole lot more.

By: Jared Goralnick

Jared Goralnick — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:10:54 +0000

Funny man you are, Greg! I couldn’t care less what platform was used to create the presentations…but will just say that they’re all pretty powerful :-).

I happen to think PowerPoint is darn groovy, but I look forward to playing around more with KeyNote. Maybe next time we get a drink…

By: Greg Cangialosi

Greg Cangialosi — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 21:15:52 +0000

Great post. I couldn’t agree more that good presentations don’t make a speech, but do compliment the speaker. My only question is, were those presentations above done in Power Point or Keynote? :-)

- G