I've seen my share of bad PowerPoint presentations in my day. Sure, I'm just a student; I haven't seen any of the horrors committed by office workers. But I've seen what happens when a teacher assigns a PowerPoint presentation to a class. Imagine twenty high school students, with no more technical knowledge than is needed to talk on AIM, forced to put together a detailed presentation on a dry subject in history or science. Trust me, you don't want to be there.
Now, most of these presentations are pretty bad. But the thing is, they aren't as bad as they could be. For example, they might use one type of bad design, but not another. This is clearly evidence of their creators' lack of experience. We could do better. I, with my aforementioned experience, could create a much more appalling PowerPoint presentation. This presentation could make one's eyes water with just the first 5 slides. Fortunately for you, dear reader, we will not do this. I will just go point-by-point through how we could, if we wanted to, design the worst PowerPoint Presentation ever.
The most important characteristic of a bad PowerPoint presentation is variety. After all, we want to make this an interesting presentation, no? So, we can start out by using a different backgrounds for each and every slide. Using the same background for any two slides would be boring, and we want to interest the reader.
While we're at it, why keep anything the same on the slides? We can vary the font face, the font color, the general format, the size -- the possibilities are endless! We can provide so much variety that our viewers can't help but love our presentation!
What else can we do? Of course! Colors! We could make every single color clash with every other color, so that our viewers will stay awake. Remember those varying backgrounds and font colors we're going to have? We can make all of the backgrounds color gradients with colors that clash! And then we can make the fonts clash with each color in the background! And if we have pictures, they'll clash with everything as well! We can even make sure that the colors on one slide all clash with the colors on the next slide. With all these colors, all of our material will just stand right out for the viewer.
About those pictures. Let's use lots of them. We can make borders on slides using a mosaic of pictures, or stick one in each corner, or all along the bottom, or fill up empty spaces left near the text -- the more pictures, the better. And it will reduce the amount of space available for text, forcing us to shrink the font down even more, and giving us that all-important "cluttered" look. It goes without saying that most of our pictures must be irrelevant, redundant, or both. For example, if we happen to mention agriculture, then we should put five or six pictures of different type of farm animals, instead of just one picture of a barn. With pictures, we can make sure there is not blank space in our whole presentation.
We could also use pictures to the opposite ends. We could make one third of our slides only pictures. Maybe, if we feel like it, we can add a caption, vaguely relating to the topic of the picture. This way, people will get to see our pictures up close, and absorb them. After all, if a picture is worth a thousand words, than it is far better to add in a few pictures than to actually explain our topic using words.
You know those transition things, which fly the words in using different animations? Aren't they so cool! I can't decided which ones to use. I know! We can use them all. Each slide will have a different transition! This adds even more variety! We can even use different types of transitions on one slide (say, having the headline and the text use different transitions). That will make it so much more interesting.
While we're at it, we can make the transitions even more fun! For example, there's an option to add sound to a transition. We could make a little trumpet call, or a camera click, or a "vroom" sound. Or we can do something even better! We can set it to only make one letter appear at a time, and then make a typewriter sound for each letter. It will be just like the computer is typing the words! I'm sure our viewers will love to sit there and wait five minutes per slide as it loads. It will be so much fun!
So, with all these wonderful design elements, what should we actually put on our slides? Well, first of all, bullet points are out. They won't give our viewer enough information. We should instead make one huge paragraph per slide. And of course, to give them more information, we'll make this paragraph twelve to sixteen lines long, so that when it appears on the screen, it has font size 8, and can't be seen at a distance of more than 18 inches without binoculars. After all, since the people in the back row of the room won't be able to read it without special optics anyway, we may as well require that everyone bring in a telescope to read the words.
Also, we should put everything in out whole presentation onto the slides. We should then just read directly off of them when presenting. Some others have suggested that we only put the main points on the slides, and then provide more detail in the actual verbal part of the presentation, but this is clearly a bad idea. We want to use our incredible new toy, er, tool, to present everything! Who need to talk, when we have PowerPoint? Everything we say must be in there.
OK, I think we're almost done. Just one brief check over the presentation to make sure it's good. Have we, at any time, used the same background twice? Even if it's 25 slides apart? If so, we need to change one of them, so that no two slides have the same background. If two slides have similar backgrounds (say, two color gradients with the same colors but different directions), then we'll need to make sure the font face, font style, and slide formatting are different. Now, let's combine some slides together onto a smaller number of denser slides. That way, we'll have fewer slides to work with. Even though it might make the dense slides unreadable. It'll be worth it, certainly. Do we have lots of pictures, to clutter and confuse the viewer? Good. Now, have we added an annoying sound to every transition, and made sure to use different transitions for every slide? Even better. I think we are done. We have created the PowerPoint presentation from Hell.
