Ultimate Geek Fu

 
Is there PowerPoint in Hell?

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I recently had the pleasure of recording a massive information dump by a cluster of experts in a particular highly technical and rather esoteric field, for the purpose of capturing images and knowledge to be repurposed later for web delivery. This information dump took the form of six hours of PowerPoint presentations—thankfully, spread out over several days—and after sitting (and standing, squirming, fidgeting, etc.) through these presentations, the following ideas seem painfully clear to me. If you are going to be preparing and delivering a PowerPoint presentation, please:

1. Have someone else read your slides before you present them, to catch the glaring tpyos and grammatical goobledy-gook you're too close to the presentation to see.

2. Read through all your own slides before you present them, so that your audience will not be alarmed when you seem surprised by something that pops up on the screen.

3. Speak loudly. Enunciate clearly.

4. Talk to your audience, not to the slides on the screen.

5. If it's a teleconference and people are listening in while running a copy of the presentation on their own computers, call out when you change slides.

6. If it's a teleconference, or if you have the only microphone in the room and are taking questions from the audience, repeat the question for the benefit of those listening in. Likewise, if you take a question from someone on the phone, repeat it for the benefit of the audience in the room. (This also buys you time to formulate an answer without having to blurt out a couple of err's and umm's.)

There, that's my short list. What would you add to it? And beyond that, I'd like to ask a rhetorical question: is there PowerPoint in Hell?

Or is it PowerPoint that makes it Hell?

Let the arguments begin.

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ULTIMAGE GEEK FU runs every Wednesday. Have a question that's just bugging the heck out of you about Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Battlestar Gallactica, Farscape, Firefly, Fringe, Heroes, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Smallville, The X-Files, X-Men, The Man From Atlantis, or pretty much any other SF-flavored media property or other übergeek issue? Send it to slushpile@thefridaychallenge.com with the subject line, "Geek Fu," and we'll stuff it in the queue. I suppose if today's topic proves popular, pretty soon we'll be running a Linux help desk out of this column.