{Disarmed} Now it turns out that using PowerPoint for a presentation is a bad idea: Harvard researchers warn of its disadvantages

If you want to express an idea or talk about a project, nothing better than to do it with a good presentation behind it , they say. A scheme that helps you synthesize, organize ideas and condense the focus of the issue.

That seems to be the reality behind the absolute success of PowerPoint in this area, but now Harvard researchers warn: having that visual support does not help, but makes things worse and diverts attention . Better to speak directly, from you to you.

Powerpoint, loves and hates

It is difficult today to come up with a presentation of any kind and do it without the help of PowerPoint . The Microsoft application - which is also used to create surprising illustrations - has become the absolute benchmark thanks to its experience, but of course it is not alone in this segment.

If anyone knew how to take advantage of presentations - whether or not they were with PowerPoint - it was Steve Jobs.

In fact, Apple has also been promoting its own solution, Keynote, for a long time, and there are dozens of alternatives, including Prezi, Impress (part of the LibreOffice suite), Google Slides or highly web-oriented platforms such as Revealjs .

In xiaomist.com 141 Microsoft PowerPoint templates to organize EVERYTHING

All of them raise the same thing: the possibility of spicing up the presentations with visual elements that theoretically help to convey an idea.

The problem is that they do not always succeed, and although there is a whole legion of users who support this solution - not to say the entire industry and jobs / income generated from PowerPoint - there are also those who defend that PowerPoint (and its alternatives) does not help to convey ideas, but quite the opposite .

{"videoId":"x7zstty","autoplay":false,"title":"Infinite Office: así ve Facebook el teletrabajo con realidad virtual"}

It doesn't matter that you no longer have to depend on those big slide projectors or acetate slides. The benefits of PowerPoint were obvious to organizations, but according to Matthew Fuller, professor of cultural studies at the University of London, they had another side effect : they made middle managers reveal their shortcomings .

In Genbeta 23 PowerPoint Presentation Templates to Explain It All

For other analysts such as Sarah Kaplan, from the University of Toronto, "I noticed how people built their strategy around PowerPoint. The slide itself becomes the end goal, no longer are the ideas or analysis embedded in it" . In fact, Kaplan recalled how Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, ended up banning them because they were precisely distracting from how the idea was communicated.

Bit- and Byte-Free Presentations

Already in 2007 the University of New South Wales carried out a study in which the psychologist John Sweller discovered that when you show the audience on a screen the same words that you are speaking, you are not improving the understanding of that speech, but making it worse .

The problem with saying the same thing that puts a text that you have on a screen behind it is that people are not paying attention to a single thing (what they read on the screen or what you are saying to them, which after all is what same), but both: that does not help them to retain the idea, and in fact it makes those words more easily forgotten and not retained.

In Genbeta On this website you can download dozens of free and professional PowerPoint presentation templates

Harvard University has also joined in this attack on the validity of PowerPoint , a tool that according to its conclusions "was rated (by online audiences) as [a tool] worse than verbal presentations without visual aids."

Be careful, because that same study does not say that all visual tools are harmful when presenting an idea. For example, presentations made with Prezi - another well-known alternative - were more organized, attractive, persuasive and effective than PowerPoint presentations and oral presentations.

In xiaomist.com Let's expel the powerpoint from the university: it worsens the classes, the students and the teachers

There is a whole book dedicated to the subject: it was written by Franck Frommer in 2012 and it is titled 'How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid'. It discusses how the visual tools of Powerpoint " have supplanted the traditional tools of persuasion and argumentation, resulting in the corruption of language and the humiliation of society."

They are somewhat strong words, but the truth is that they make us consider the validity of a tool that is omnipresent in presentations of all kinds, from school and academic to business. If you use PowerPoint, perhaps you should consider trying your next presentation without that help .

Image | Unsplash
Via | Inc

-
The news Now it turns out that using PowerPoint for a presentation is a bad idea: Harvard researchers warn of its disadvantages was originally published in xiaomist.com by Javier Pastor .