Life After Death by PowerPoint 2012 by Don McMillan

Newly edited and improved version of Don's classic bit "Life After Death by PowerPoint". with Spanish subtitles

There are some things I hate about PowerPoint,
and I figure it is my duty to point them out.

Here are some common PowerPoint mistakes.
Number one;

People tend to put every word they're going to
say on their powerpoint slides. [crowd cheering]

Although this eliminates the
need to memorize your talk,

ultimately this makes your slides
crowded, wordy and boring.

You will lose your audience's attention
before you even reach the bottom of your...

uhhh... first slide.
[laughter]

Please don't do that anymore...please.
[laughter]

Number two most common:
Many people don't run spell 'cheek.'

[laughter]

Big 'mistak.'
[laughter]

Nothing makes you look stupider
than spelling 'erors.' [laughter]

If it's got a red line under
it, recheck the spelling!!

And then finally, I hate this,
avoid excessive bullet-pointing.

Only bullet key points.
[laughter]

Too many bullet-points
and your key messages

will not stand out.
[laughter]

In fact, the term "bullet-point" comes from

people firing guns at annoying presenters.

[laughter and applause]

Hence the bullet-points.

Bad color schemes. Not good!
[laughter]

Clashing background and
font colors can lead to:

distraction, confusion, headache, nausea,
vomiting and loss of bladder control.

[laughter]

I can't stay on that on too long.

Here's something I've noticed.

The number of powerpoint slides you have
in your talk the less useful your talk actually is.

Unfortunately my presentation is right there.
[laughter]

I've also noticed this, people love
to pack data in their presentation.

They shove more and more data
thinking it is better, but it's not.

The more data you have, the harder it is to
read your slide and the effectiveness plummets.

You can improve the effectiveness by adding
some shading and some 3D effects

and some second order
and third order effects.

I know, let's add some labels!
That will help a lot. [laughter]

And that's pretty much every marketing
slide I've ever seen right there.

[applause and cheering]

Then some VP of Marketing is standing there and going:
'it's real clear in Q4.' What the hell are you talking about?

Now, I'm.. I'm into animation. People become animators in
PowerPoint. You can have things flying all over the place.

And that can be good.

If you're a visual learner that will improve
the effectiveness of your performance.

But if you're easily distracted, more animations and
people will have no idea what you're talking about.

They're just: 'Wow, that is cool, wow.'

And there's regions here by the way.
There's the simple but effective region.

There is the active but confusing region,

the effective but boring,
the active but ineffective,

the dull but static region, busy
but useless, the ADD only region.

the useful but amusing,
stupid but confusing,

the dull triangle, the hyper triangle,
the sleepy square, the dizzy pentagon,

and everything else I just call 'pointless motion.'
[applause]

That slide right there took me
an hour and a half to make.

PowerPoint can just suck
the life out of you! It's amazing.

I've also come up with this. It's a kind of a
little science I invented called font analysis.

Basically, the font you choose says
something about who you are as a person.

There's a huge list of fonts and you choose
one and that says something about you.

So be careful the font you choose.
For example, if you choose 'Courier new,'

it happens to be my favorite, you're
probably organized and structured.

If you choose "Matisse"
it means your artistic.

And if you choose "Times New Roman" it means you're lazy,
apathetic, unimaginative and you always use the default.

[laughter]