Bad PowerPoint is ubiquitous. PowerPoint presentations are like writing: anyone can do them, but few people can do them well. And the number of people who think they do them well is much greater than the number of people who actually do.

As anyone who has attended a legal conference can attest, many of us don't have a clue about how to design effective PowerPoint presentations. The result is distracted audiences, confusing presentations, and ineffective teaching.

The fault is not in the PowerPoint tool. The fault is in how people use the tool. As Peter Norvig has said,

PowerPoint doesn’t kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I spoke at this summer’s annual conference of the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI). My topic was How to Ruin a Presentation with PowerPoint. That presentation is now available on YouTube.

My presentation focuses on some of the most common mistakes people make in creating PowerPoint presentations and discusses how to improve your PowerPoint presentations. My comments aren’t limited to the Microsoft product. Almost everything I say is also applicable to other presentation software and most of what I say also applies to graphics created for videos.

My focus is on slide design and content, not on the intricacies of PowerPoint. I don’t try to teach you all the magic things PowerPoint can do or make you a power user of PowerPoint. In fact, many of the amazing things PowerPoint can do aren't particularly good for presentations. Instead, I point out the horrors of bad PowerPoint and give people some simple hints for making more effective presentations.

The hour-long presentation is here, if you want to watch it.

The CALI conference, as usual, included a number of excellent presentations on teaching with technology and innovations in legal education. You can see all of the videos here.

If you're an academic interested in technology, you really ought to attend one of the CALI annual conferences. There's a nice mix of law school technologists, librarians, and faculty. I always learn something new. Everyone I know who has gone has come away wanting to go again.