Power Point is probably the most important business tool for me other than email and excel. I was an early adoptor when it first came out 20 years ago (1988) and we did not have lcd projector so we printed them out on b/w transparencies. The good thing I could draw on those while presenting. A year later someone came up with a plug in directly from video out from my Apple book (a b/w screen Apple laptop), I remembered I was first using it for a presentation for a sneaker client and I did impress the CEO. I was so happy with the toy and felt empowered because there was something magical about having all the data and secret in my laptop and slowing revealing it.
This year we celebrate the 20th birthday of Power Point. It is now the lingua franca of corporate America from boardroom to training room. I used to run Power Point workshop for my senior staff years ago and today I still carry the reputation of Power King for many years for those who worked with me in past lives. I taught them how to create substance with style and balance presentation and interactions. My personal experience 75% of all senior executives fail the Power Point test. I was teaching them skills to boost presentation effectiveness in just 2 hours.
20 years later, I now use it a thinking tool, a mapping tool, a communication tool and even a design tool. I've used it for my 500 people keynotes and 10 people executive presentations and it serves me well. Many years ago, we (and most global consultancies) have switched out of a big word document deliverable into using power point deck. It is about data and ideas , not number of words.
One widely used estimate places the number of PowerPoint presentations at 30 million...per day. Even at half of that, that's still a heck of a lot of PowerPoint slides. There is a lot of misuse of Power Point and like many of you I cannot stand someone standing with a Power Point but with nothing to say. But we shouldn’t blame Power Point for that. Yale's visual information guru Edward Tufte said "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely." That’s not quite fair.
You might not know PowerPoint was Microsoft's first major acquisition - $14m in cash and first available only on Mac. It was never designed for a wider audience than the sales people. It is a powerful enablement for those who have important data and massage to deliver, just like the printing press or phonograph, it also enable garbage to be distributed. You don’t blame RCA’s invention of the phonograph for much bad music today.
Not sure what’s the next Power Point would be like. Microsoft has been experimenting with something similar in its Office Labs program. Called pptPlex, you can use zooming to jump around to different parts of a PowerPoint presentation instead of sticking to a controlled order. I like to see it moving away from a linear path to a more dynamic way of showing different assets.
A start-up ZuiPrezi is working on a new application that bring the benefits of charting out what order you want the presentation to scroll around in, even if it's all over the map. It is an interesting interface but I am not sure about the map. The service is still in private beta although there are both preview videos and live examples of presentations to play with. Unfortunately I was not able to play with that, from what I see you can create dynamic and visually structured zooming maps of texts, images, videos, PDFs, drawings. I look forward to play with this tool, not that I will give up Power Point, for sentimental reasons.
