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As PowerPoint reaches its 20th birthday, Lee Gomes of the Wall Street Journal reflects on our love/hate relationship with “one of the most elegant, most influential and most groaned-about pieces of software in the history of computers”:

While PowerPoint has served as the metronome for countless crisp presentations, it has also allowed an endless expanse of dimwit ideas to be dressed up with graphical respectability. And not just in conference rooms, but also in the likes of sixth-grade book reports and at PowerPointSermons.com.

He also interviews PowerPoint’s creators, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, to learn their perspective on how their well-intentioned brainchild has changed the world of communication. Surprisingly, he writes, “they aren’t the least bit defensive about the criticisms routinely heard of PowerPoint.” Gaskins, in fact, agrees with the harsh appraisals of infographics expert Edward Tufte, who basically fingers PowerPoint as a key culprit in the dumbing down of our civilization.

Mr. Gaskins reminds his questioner that a PowerPoint presentation was never supposed to be the entire proposal, just a quick summary of something longer and better thought out. He cites as an example his original business plan for the program: 53 densely argued pages long. The dozen or so slides that accompanied it were but the highlights.

Since then, he complains, “a lot of people in business have given up writing the documents. They just write the presentations, which are summaries without the detail, without the backup. A lot of people don’t like the intellectual rigor of actually doing the work.”

One of the problems, the men say, is that with PowerPoint now bundled with Office, vastly more people have access to the program than the relatively small group of salespeople for which it was intended. When video projectors became small and cheap, just about every room on earth became PowerPoint-ready.

Many of us use PowerPoint as both written and spoken communication. We expect our decks to serve two purposes. First, to be a compelling display of visual evidence, and second to be a complete record of our research, analysis and thinking.

Often because of this dual purpose, the visual evidence is actually not visual at all, but rather written in the form of bullet points, which demand that we read and listen at the same time, causing us to lose concentration.

Further, because we expect the document to be clear and useful to someone unable to attend our talk, the data, analysis, and recommendations are often obscured because we write complete sentences on the slides, distracting from the more relevant graphical evidence.

Even more fundamental, the experience of witnessing a PowerPoint presentation can feel like a disconnected jumble of thoughts. The slides are rarely arranged in a way that feels logical to the listener, even though we’re given an agenda. They seem to be separate from each other–they don’t often flow like a story–and so they are hard to remember.

Tufte suggests that PowerPoint decks tend to be NOT rigorous enough for scientific and engineering presentations, while being too busy and congested for some other purposes.

For instance, there is no reason why the CEO has to use PowerPoint when speaking about the values and attitudes he hopes to instill in the people who work for the company.

And scientists, engineers, and researchers ought to prepare a thorough and formal report on their work, and then use PowerPoint simpy to summarize their findings and recommndations.

We continue to use PowerPoint in the way that everyone uses it, except we don’t know if the way everyone uses it is optimal for creating clarity and understanding.

Something needs to be done. Huge amounts of time and money go into the creation of PowerPoint decks, and as far as I know, none of us know whether our approach is effective and efficient.

I suspect we can do better.

I recently bought a book called The Craft of Scientific Presentations by Michael Alley, which begins with a quote from Isaac Asimov.

On March 21, 1949, I attended a lecture given by Linus Pauling… That talk was the best talk by anyone on any subject that I had ever heard…  The talk was more than a talk to me.  It filled me with a desire of my own to become a speaker.

The book belongs on your bookshelf if you deliver scientific presentations, or presentations that report research of any kind.  It provides scores of examples from contemporary and historical scientific presentations to show clearly what makes an oral presentation effective.

What is most intriguing to me is his study proving that the proper use of PowerPoint slides can in fact boost audience comprehension.  Alley calls the most effective use of PowerPoint the “Assertion-Evidence” method. This means that the headline of a slide should be an assertion–a complete sentence–that is proven by the visual or graphical evidence below it.

I know several of my client companies in the consulting business do this, including McKinsey and Health Strategies Group, although the practice is not universally adopted in either firm.  But they are on the right track, according to Alley.  His study demonstrated an 11% boost in audience comprehension with the “Assertion – Evidence” model vs. the standard use of a phrase as the headline–such as “Market Share” or “Toxicity.”

It is time that those of us responsible for communicating ideas and information of strategic importance use PowerPoint in a manner that is based on research, and not on ease of use or corporate culture.

The book is called The Craft of Scientific Presentations.  The author is Michael Alley.  It’s worth owning, if you care about excellence in presenting ideas.

I just finished an engagement developing a presentation to introduce a major Human Resources initiative across a global company.  When I arrived, the client had close to 50 bullet powerpoint slides.  When I left this morning, he had eleven slides, and not one bullet point in sight.

I think what made the difference was moving away from informing the audience about the details of the program, and instead moving toward defining the problem that it solved and arguing why it was an effective solution.

The original presentation answered in great detail the question, “What’s in the HR program?”  The presentation as it stands now answers (with three key points) the question, “What’s in the HR program for the audience?”

You may say this is basic stuff,  and you’re right.  But those of us who have spent an entire year researching and developing a globally useful HR program tend to be blinded by our newly acquired expertise.  We have our new abstract vocabulary (“behavioral competency matrix”), and our knowledge of the incredible complexity and sophistication of the thinking behind the program.  To do it justice, we feel the need to give the audience a sense of its richness.

Meanwhile, back in the minds of the audience, that persistent question we’ve all been taught to answer has to wait for 45 minutes before being acknowledged.  That question rhymes with, “What’s in it for me?”

As for the slides, we took our cue from Cliff Atkinson of Sociable Media, who has argued elegantly that PowerPoint is used most effectively when bullet points are banished.  Basing his recommendations on research in cognitive science, he has helped the business community understand how to communicate in a way that allows people to absorb what’s being said.

We crafted the presentation around images of “The Journey,” starting when a new employee enters the company, and mapping her career through many permutations.  We used the visual element of a beaming young woman being handed the keys to a new car, with the headline saying, “Program X gives you the keys to your career.”

It has not been delivered yet, but I have high hopes for a great success for everyone involved.  I’ll keep you posted.

Jerry Tarver, a speech writer and Professor at the University of Richmond, wrote this incisive limerick that skewers those of us who think that, when it comes to PowerPoint slides, “too much ain’t enough.”

Learn the fate of a speaker named Clive,
Whose PowerPoint ate him alive.
His face was last seen
Fading into the screen,
Which entombed him in chart ninety-five.