With great power comes not so great stomach-churning slide presentations. PowerPoint gives us toys and we beat each other up with them — they feed into our most primal weaknesses.
Let me explain by way of example: Many years ago, my wife and I were visiting the Chattanooga Aquarium with our two young children. I highly recommend Chattanooga and it’s aquarium by the way. What I don’t recommend is sending your 5 year-old daughter into the gift store with the innocent sounding instructions to “pick something”.
After an excruciating amount of time with much frantic discussions (actually arguments and yelling) we finally decided on one of the thousands of stuffed toys.
It was a horror show.
This is remarkably similar to what happens when you give a normal, responsible adult the power to apply any of the millions of transitions and animations in PowerPoint. It is beyond their ability to control. After all we are but simple creatures.
My advice: Do not “zoom”. Do not “push”, “split”, “reveal” or “random bars”. Or any of the others.
Unless you are a Pixar animator put down the mouse and accept the fact that you can’t handle this type of insane power.
Two quick suggestions.
- Try adding a simple “fade” transition between slides. Shorten it up to about .25 seconds. It’s nice.
- If you must use a particular transition or animation, do it only if it adds to the meaning of your content.
Don’t overdo it. Be aware that what you think is cool is very quickly perceived by your audience as childish, amateurish or down-right nasty.
Remember, PowerPoint was created by evil sorcerers. Be very, very careful.
