PowerPoint’s been around longer than the World Wide Web easily by a country mile. When use of the Web became popular, URLs started invading slide decks. Sometimes they were inserted so the audience could write them down later, or if the slides were abused as handouts, the thought was they could be copied into the [...]
“Get your presentation, complete with slides done this afternoon. You need to present tomorrow morning.” I’m sure we’ve all had this thrown on us. Slap something together and deliver it. PowerPoint’s easy to use, so why would you need more than an afternoon, right? How about a whole day to make a slide deck “more [...]
We’ve all seen slides like this. It’s your standard title and bullet list slide. The title is “Agenda” and below it is a detailed list of each topic that will be discussed. Oh, don’t forget the Q&A at the end. Why do we see these slides all the time? They’re not really helpful. They encourage [...]
This sacred cow is roaming the halls where I work. It’s old. It’s loud. It smells. It’s abusive. It’s obnoxious, and it rudely disrupts nearly every technical presentation I have to sit through. Unfortunately, we’re not unique in our suffering. This parasitic bovine is present everywhere you have technical people. Fortunately, there are treatments for [...]
This sacred cow is such a no-brainer that it begs the question of whether it is in fact a sacred cow or that it’s just poor amateurish judgement. It’s one of the reasons why many people hate slideware. The answer to this isn’t so clear-cut. In many cases it is the latter. In those, it’s [...]
I’ve discussed this particular sacred cow before, but it bears repeating. All too often, meeting organizers distribute copies of the slides ahead of time. Many even consider slides an official record of what was discussed. The former competes with your presentation and the latter is just ludicrous. In either case, this is a sacred cow [...]
Public speaking can be terrifying. Many fear standing up and speaking before an audience more frightening than even death itself. Many people in my neck of the woods, and I’m sure yours too, make the conscious decision to speak sitting at the conference table as a way of coping with that fear. Sure, it could [...]
Lately, I’ve been having a blast reading Death To All Sacred Cows, by David Bernstein, Beau Fraser, and Bill Schwab. In it, the authors make the point in a very humorous way, to resist blindly doing certain things because over time, that’s the way it’s been done. We all encounter these bovines on a daily [...]
