Powerpoint is one of your everyday business life's favorite software. I say "your" because as a blogger I don't need it very much. Except when I have time to spend to read all the "funny" pps I recieve in my email. Sometimes I wonder where on earth are hidden all that creative people who make that pps stuff ? Come on, have you ever met someone who told you he made one of these .pps joke ? If you do, please let me know one, I have some questions to ask him/her.

I did not practice much of that wonderful microsoft tool, but there are few things I dug from my cubicle mates. And there are a lot more I understood from assisting to never-ending dull and brainsucking presentations.

1. You are not a movie maker when you use powerpoint

So please spare us with all that motion effects and co. You don't need to make a fireworks of your slideshow. You are not compelled to try to compete with Spielberg or the whole Pixar Studio. You will be ridiculous anyway.

We just want to see what your ideas are. Not to discover how familiar you are with the microsoft funny gadgets they put all over their softwares to make them cost more.

And if you don't have any idea, it's no use to hide this lack of thinking between perfects slide transitions and dazzling animations. You won't fool us for long.

2. Powerpoint is not fit to be your lecture notes

If you make all your speech text appear on the screen, it will have three consequences :

- Firstly, we will read it instead of listening to you. And we will read it faster than you can speak, so we will know by advance what you are going to say. So you will look stoopid because you will have nothing we can learn from you.

- Secondly, you will end reading your text instead of speaking to us. You would look like a boring teacher entangled in his course, with a monotonous voice and nothing interesting to say. So If you can't get to remember what is your presentation about, it's time to see a doctor about your mental retention problems.

- Thirdly, you will be compelled to use a very very tiny font. And everyone will get mad at you for barking his eyes.

3. Powerpoint is not for killing people

So why use bullets ? Bullet points are sometimes useful for listing information but not everything in life can be organised in bullet points. You don't need to

- shoot people with ideas one after another
- make them think your reasoning is just a sum of facts that follows in a linear way (till they die)
- show that you can list everything related to a subject in one slide (rather than really demonstrate where you want to go)

Capito ?

So please avoid what I have just done. You could be more clever than this to explain what you have in mind. (unless your mind is a bullet point one. If so, you can contact some fundamental research lab on brain structure, you will be very helpful to them)

4. Powerpoint is not made for making people hallucinate

You want to make a good presentation, defend something you believe in. Right. So why do you try to recreate an LSD experiment with all these acid and snazzy colors ? You believe you will have more people attention if they will like they are completely stoned ?

I guess you don't. Be kind to use "normal" background and color scheme, everybody will appreciate to have a moment of relief in this time of visual harrassement.

5. You are the one who's is going to talk

Quoting great people can be great if you have nothing to say. It can help to make the pill go easier.

Ok, sometimes a good quote is useful to illustrate what you mean, but don't switch the order. Quotes are not here to do the thinking for you.

6. Graphs are painful after lunch

Everyone will tell you that graphs could enlighten a powerpoint presentation because they are figurative. Well. It depends.

I have seen some ugly figures that could easily find their place in a postmodern art gallery.

If you absolutely want something that is close to a scheme, a graph or a table, do make it clear. Not everyone in the room is a electrophysician able to read evolutive and multiple connected datas in a blink.

The more simple it is, the less you will see people looking outside to check what the weather's like.

7. You can change the titles of your slide

Maybe you don't know but even if you used a ready-made summary from the microsoft assistant (shame on you), you can have meaningful titles. Yep. Wonderful isn't it ? Context, environnement, strategy, and so on, are exactly what are below in the slides, it's true. But I think people deserve better than just a description of the content. You can adress them a message through the title, so why avoid it ?

Well, if Joanne Kathleen Rowling had named all his works just "book", I guess she wouldn't have been so popular.

8. Powerpoint is not made to write books and you are not able to speak at the speed of light

Remember that it takes about 2 minutes per slide. Now recount all the slides you made and try to figure out how you could squash the 78 slides you made in a 15 minutes presentation.

So unless you and your audience are robots coming from a far way future and able to transmit and understand information at the speed of light, you should reconsider your work and shorten it a little bit.

9. Powerpoint is evil

It's not me who say so, but a professor emeritus of political science, computer science and statistics, and graphic design at Yale, Mr Edward R. Tufte. Somebody who knows what he is talking about.

You have to keep that belief in mind while you prepare your powerpoint. Try to make a presentation which will be the less evil it could be and your audience will thank you for that.

10. Focus on what is your objective

It should have been the first point, but I prefer let it be the last.

If you use powerpoint to knock people out (which can be very useful if you want them to agree to one of your cunning plans), just do the opposite of what I've just told out and you would do great.

If you don't, ask yourself why exactly are you going to stand in front of all these people ? What are you intending to say to them ? Has it real meaning for them ? and for you ?

And then throw away what doesn't match with this objective. Even if it's the whole presentation that you are throwing away.

Sometimes, the best powerpoint presentation is when you don't need to make a powerpoint presentation.