Good and bad PowerPoint: what makes the difference

PowerPoint: rubbish or wonderful? Wonderful, in my view, but only under the right conditions. And there are three of them.

• The presenter knows how to use PowerPoint in a professional way.
• The presentation itself is built correctly.
• The presentation is pleasant to look at, in other words, aesthetic.

Miss any one of these and even the best content starts to sink. Get all three right and your slides quietly lift everything you say. So let me make your life a little easier the next time you sit down to build a deck, by walking through what "bad" tends to look like, and what to do instead.

The slide that tries to say everything

The most common sin of all is the slide crammed with full sentences and whole paragraphs, the kind you find yourself reading out word for word. The moment a slide holds everything you are about to say, your audience stops listening and starts reading, and you have quietly made yourself redundant. Strip it back. Let the slide hold a handful of words at most, and let you carry the meaning.

The slide that fights itself

Then there is the slide at war with its own design: a clash of colours, three different fonts, a photograph next to a piece of clip art next to a graphic pulled off the internet. Every one of those mismatches is a tiny jolt of confusion for the person watching. Consistency is kindness. One family of colours, one clear typeface, one style of image, all pulling in the same direction.

The slide that means nothing

And finally, the slide that is simply decoration, a pretty picture that supports nothing you are saying. Every element on a slide should earn its place by giving strength to your message. If it does not, take it off.

None of this is really about PowerPoint. It is about respect for the people in the room, and about getting out of your own way so that you, not the screen, are the thing they remember.