Are you strong enough for PowerPoint?

Because judging from my work with clients, you need to be strong to

use PowerPoint in a meaningful way.

PowerPoint can turn a great story into a great presentation, but more often

than not, it does just the opposite.

It's a tool to turn a great content into confusing presentations.

PowerPoint invites us to skip clarity and fill slides instead.

When we fire up the app, the screen basically says to us, let's go

and start to write everything that comes to your mind onto a slide.

Making bad things worse, we recall having done just that quite recently.

So we go hunting for slides that we've already got from previous presentations.

PowerPoint doesn't care the least bit whether at this point we already

have an understanding of who will be sitting in front of us, why

she will be sitting there and what matters to her in the first place.

PowerPoint favors quantity over quality.

PowerPoint also invites us to set the wrong priorities.

When the slides start to fill up, there are all sorts of buttons waiting for

us to go looking for fonts, choosing colors, drawing diagrams, designing

animations and so on and so forth.

PowerPoint doesn't care the least bit which slides we actually need to make

our point and what these slides need to convey in order to make the point.

PowerPoint is happy to eat up all of your preparation time with filling

slides and tinkering with the design.

I mean after all, a lot of carefully crafted slides look like you've

worked a lot and achieved a lot.

On the other hand, clarity in your thinking isn't visible

at all from the outside.

Yet, audiences prefer a clear story over confusing slides every single time.

PowerPoint will not help you find that clarity.

It wants you to make slides and more of them.

And more.

You will need clarity before you fire up PowerPoint.

I am even willing to take a bet that the earlier you start using PowerPoint in the

process of creating a presentation, the greater the risk of wasting time becomes.

But if you are strong enough to resist, if you answer the important

questions before firing up PowerPoint, then it's a great tool to turn your

story into a great presentation.

Be strong, resist PowerPoint.

Start with clarity.