Some aspects of PowerPoint enhance presentations tremendously, but common mistakes also detract from many PowerPoint presentations.  Below are critiques of the three PowerPoint presentations found on this page: Dolly, Traumatic Head Injury and Juvenile Justice (click on the links to open/save the PowerPoint presentation).  These critiques comment on how some common practices for using PowerPoint negatively influence the delivery and structure of PowerPoint presentations and comment on the visual design of individual slides.  They also highlight slides that exemplify PowerPoint’s potential.  

Since the critiques below refer to specific slides in these presentations, you may wish to print out this document so you can open the PowerPoint presentations on this site.

Dolly
Delivery:  This presentation probably should have been delivered without the assistance of PowerPoint.  Since the slides contain only text, and the text is in complete sentences, the speaker is reduced to reading to the audience.  If the speaker were to abandon the PowerPoint, they could devote their attention solely to the audience, and more easily interact with them.

Structure:  The structure of this presentation is revealed in slide #3, “Topics of Discussion.”  The use of the word “topics” indicates that the speaker is thinking of this presentation as a series of discrete packets of information under the general topic: Dolly.  The categorization and depth of each topic is necessarily affected by the amount of information that the speaker can fit on each slide.  

This presentation is an informative, rather than analytical presentation.  This may be in part due to this arbitrary system for organizing the information that would be analyzed in a persuasive presentation.  It would be difficult to analyze a problem by breaking it down into such small categories (in this case 7 topics and 13 slides) and by proceeding through them without commenting on how they relate.  Would the speaker have designed a more analytic, cohesive presentation if they did not use PowerPoint?

Design:  The “volt” traveling through the background design of each slide is distracting and adds nothing to the content of the presentation.

Do you think the bold type face is too heavy, and is difficult to read?
 
Traumatic Head Injury
Structure: The title page is colorful and somewhat interesting, but it is the PowerPoint equivalent of “Hi, my name is speaker X and I’m going to speak about Y.”  It’s dull.  The first 3 sentences of any presentation are the speaker’s opportunity to grab the audience’s attention.  Interesting beginnings peak the audience’s interest without revealing the precise topic of the presentation (but this mystery should not persist much beyond the first few sentences!).  You may want to check out the iPenn presentation on this site for a PowerPoint start that makes the audience curious about the topic, without immediately revealing it.  Even though such interesting beginnings are possible with PowerPoint, in most cases the most compelling beginnings will be delivered by the speaker.

Since the first five slides after the introduction present visual information, and use text only to illuminate the graphics or cite sources, it is likely that the speaker delivering this presentation will interact directly with the audience and will refer to the slides when necessary.  These slides are merely the evidence or information that assist the speaker in communicating with the audience.  The speaker may organize the oral component of the presentation any way they like, because they are not bound by the amount of text that fits on individual slides.

In later slides, text is kept at a minimum and serves only to remind the audience of difficult numbers or vocabulary and how small concepts in the presentation are ordered.  Still, text may be overused in this presentation.

**This speaker makes great use of slides to provide citations throughout the presentation.

Design:  PowerPoint is at it’s best when people use it to bring complex graphics, such as the one shown on slide #15, into their presentation.  This graphic contains a massive amount of data, which is arranged to easily tell the audience what sort of relationships exist within the data set.  This slide could be improved by removing the text at the bottom since it is unreadable and adding some explanation to the color scale at the left so that the audience knows what each color represents.  Note:  when a color scale merely represents variation along a continuum, replace it with a gray scales or varying intensities of one color.  This allows the audience to see relative values immediately, without repeatedly returning to a legend to figure out what each color represents.

The cross-hatching and lines in the various sections of the picture on slide #16 makes the whole picture “busy.”  Varying shades of gray or varying colors would distinguish each section without cluttering the picture.

It is likely that slide #35 should be a line graph.  View slide #36 to see that changing this graph to a line graph highlights two conclusions: suctioning requires the greatest ICP at all stages, and all activities require the most activity in the “during” phase.  The title could also call attention to these conclusions.  The elimination of the third dimension (which does not represent anything in slide #35), the grid lines and the legend also simplifies the picture so that the audience can immediately focus on the most important relationships.

Juvenile Justice
Structure:  The ideas in this presentation have gone through the PowerPoint sieve, which separates the argument from the evidence/information.  Often the argument is then tossed out, but in this presentation it does return at the end:  “The juvenile justice system needs to be reformed.  The system should address issues social and economic within the home.”  Certainly one excellent way to arrange a persuasive case is to ask a question at the top such as, “Does the juvenile justice system work?”  This questions serves as the thesis while the presentations sorts through questions and information to reach a conclusion: “No.  If the juvenile justice system is to reduce juvenile crime it must reform itself to meet social and economic needs of the children it serves.”  Eliminating the text in the presentation and re-writing this presentation from scratch would likely solve this problem.

Design:  

• Slide #3 is an example of a good graphic.  It shows us information for all 50 states, allows quick comparisons, and highlights differences by region—all in one picture
• The colors in this presentation look pretty good on a computer screen, but I would definitely test the light blue writing on a projection system before public delivery
• Of all the Bart Simpson icons I’ve seen on PowerPoint slides, this may be the first presentation where he is topical.  Some of the sound effects are topical as well, as when Homer says on slide #23, International Perspectives  “Hey, If you don’t like it, go to Russia.”  These effects add humor, but may be overused in this presentation and could detract from the speaker’s credibility
• As you click through this presentation you’ll notice that all the fly-ins slow it down substantially