TJ’s Insights

In June 2007 the Microsoft program PowerPoint, used for creating graphic presentations, celebrated its 20th birthday. Is this a cause of toasting or despairing?

To me, that’s a ridiculous question, sort of like debating whether or not the invention of the printing press was a good thing because for every work of Shakespeare created, thousands of violent comic books are also created.

Robert Gaskins, one of the creators of PowerPoint software in the 1980s, recently told the Wall Street Journal this in response to criticism that PowerPoint has turned people into bad presenters, “if they do an inadequate job with PowerPoint, they would do just as bad using something else.”

I was doing a last minute rehearsal 20 minutes before I was to give a keynote address at a trade convention. As I pulled up the tenth element in my PowerPoint presentation, a video clip, my computer froze. I tried to advance to the next clip—nothing happened. I couldn’t advance the speech at all!

There is an old Finnish saying, “Fire is a great slave but a horrible master.” The same is true of PowerPoint slides. The problem, of course, is that most people become slaves to their PowerPoint slides. They really, truly, do not want to be slaves to the PowerPoint, but, well, the slides are there, there’s not much time before the speech, and nothing can be done at this point.

Stop! It doesn’t have to be that way.