To give a great presentation, do you need to use powerpoint? My answer to it is: it depends. It depends on who you are and what you are presenting?
Dynamic and great presenters like Tony Robbins and Barrack Obama, I do not think they need to use powerpoint to tell their stories and illustrate their points. In the following TED presentation given by Tony Robbins, the powerpoint used by Tony was badly prepared and outdated and it actaully hindered him to tell his stories rather than helped him. Also, the powerpoint seemed divert the attention from focusing on him solely.
Also, no doubt that Steve Jobs is one of the best presenter in the business world. He puts audience on the edge of their seats whenever he speaks. See for yourself the difference in your perceptions of the effects between his using slideware to present and not using it.
However, for an ordinary public speaker like me, I believe by using well-prepared powerpoint, it does help me to illustrate my ideas better. I just attended the BODW event held in Hong Kong from 8th – 13th December,2008, it was a great event with famous designers of different fields come to Hong Kong from all over the world to delieve keynote speeches. I attended 6 of them and almost all of them gave impressive presentations which hooked me as a guy not in the designers’ field. They hooked me more because of they all supplemented their keynote with well-designed visuals or video clips and few bullet-point slides were used. These made their speeches easy to follow. Since they are all professional designers in their feilds, they are all very passionate about their projects, which constituted the core of their power-point materials. Good multi-media visuals plus passion is almost a sure-fire ingredients for an impactful presentation. Though there were points for improvement for these speakers, they all kept me stay awake throughout the 5 to 6 hours of listening to them, a situation rearly happening on me for a very long time.
From this experience alone, it reinforces my belief that powerpoint does aid us to give better presentation if we know the proper skills to use it.
