Punch line: Despite a 95% share of presentation software, many companies are now starting to encourage stepping away from traditional power point slide presentations.
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Excerpted from Businessweek, “Death to Power Point!”
No matter what your line of work, it’s only getting harder to avoid death by PowerPoint.
Since Microsoft launched the slide show program 22 years ago, it’s been installed on no fewer than 1 billion computers and an estimated 350 PowerPoint presentations are given each second across the globe.
On June 18, the Iranian government made the case for its highly contested nuclear program to world leaders with a 47-slide deck … Two years back, the New York Knicks tried to woo LeBron James with a PowerPoint pitch, which may explain why James won his first NBA championship in Miami.
As with anything so ubiquitous and relied upon, PowerPoint has bred its share of contempt.
Plug the name into Twitter and you’ll see workers bashing the soporific software in Korean, Arabic, Spanish, and English as each region starts its business day.
Part of this venting may stem from a lack of credible competition:
PowerPoint’s share of the presentation software market remains 95 percent, eclipsing relative newcomers Apple Keynote, Google Presentation, Prezi, and SlideRocket.
Sometimes … PowerPoint slides …do more harm than good. They bore audiences with amateurish, antiquated animation and typefaces and distract speakers from focusing on the underlying structure of their creators’ speeches.
The best speakers at any corporate level today grip an audience by telling a story … The boldest among them do away with slides entirely
Even if you’re a middle manager delivering financials to your department in slides, you’re telling a story.
Many of the top presentation gurus advocate judiciously limiting the role of PowerPoint.
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