What's Wrong With PowerPoint?

It is the most severe criticise I have ever seen on PowerPoint, which has been widely used. What's wrong with PowerPoint and why are people still using that since it has so many shortcomings?

According to Edward R. Tufte, PowerPoint is created with the following problems. So little information could be presented on each slide, due to the format and size of the words, which should be clear enough for the audience. As a result more lides are needed and it's hard to display the relationship between slides and maters mentioned. Another problem comes from the design, such as bullet outlines, which can dilute the contents if misused or used too much. And some users focus too much on the design of the slides, paying attention to the sound effects, the cartoon numbers, the pictures and flashes, rather than contents. Most important, some materials are not good for PowerPoint presentation, like statistic graphics. However, how are we going to improve our presentation? Use PowerPoint wisely, making better contents with the use of PowerPoint functions and don't be the slave of the functions.

This article made me think of my experience with PowerPoint as a teacher before and I realized huge mistakes spreading on the campus, the more multimedia in the classroom, the better. So the teachers, especially the young ones, are trying to teacher every course using PowerPoint, regardless of the outcome of he class. One example is my coworker, who had problems with the students only because of the misuse of PowerPoint in her Intensive Reading class. After reading the article, I figured out the reason, which is she made the slides too detailed. Every time she raised a question, the students had no time to think and respond, the answer would jump out on hte screen, thus the only thing students need to do was to take notes quickly as the slides sometimes flashe over. Another example fell to a lady,teaching British History. What she did was to give a copy of all her PowerPoint slides to the students at the very beginning of the semester, and two weeks later, he students refused to go to her class any more as the teacher only read out everything on the slides, which the students had already got.

I used PowerPoint slides in my two courses too. Even though I survived without complaint from students, still I realised my mistakes, which are similar to the other two, too much design and too detailed.

Since there are so many restrictions of using slides, can't we just stop using it? Obviously no. There is nothing wrong with PowerPoint itself but people who use it. There is bullet but it doesn't mean it should be used all the time everywhere.

When preparing a presentation, we should think carefully beforehand if it is suitable to use PowerPoint, as sometimes a simple Word article would be better than slides. Secondly, we may need to think how to make the content clear, how much information will be presented in slides, and which format will be adopted. And we still need to take the audience into consideration. How to switch from computer screen to listeners and how to interact with them? The last thing is the design and how to make the slides presentable.