Pros & Cons of PowerPoint Presentations

It's hard to imagine a professional business presentation without PowerPoint. The program has gone a long way in making information easier to digest by allowing you to divide concepts into small sections, spice it up with graphics and music and even make words spin around if you really want to go crazy. Although it's clearly versatile -- and a big leap forward from the days of chalkboards and old-style slideshows -- even PowerPoint has its limits and may not be suitable for every occasion.

PowerPoint is almost expected in professional settings. Because it has been bundled with Microsoft Office versions for more than a decade, most businesses have access to it and don't have to make a special capital purchase for it. As such, some eyebrows might be raised if you instead did a presentation with an overhead or whiteboard.

Someone who isn't as familiar with PowerPoint, visual presentation software or even computers may find themselves quickly overwhelmed by the program. Even the opening screen's "Click to add title" could have newcomers scratching their heads in confusion. And that's not to mention the many colors, shapes, movies, sounds and other menu options you have to choose from, when all you really want to do is jazz up last week's accounting numbers. Also, to adjust PowerPoint-bound photos for optimum display, you might have to become familiar with other potentially complex editing programs such as Photoshop.

Anyone who has sat through a dull presentation of number after number may begin to perk up if the slides are animated or spiced up with cheery pictures or quotes. It takes just a couple of clicks to insert, scale and align a photo from your computer's library into a PowerPoint presentation. Even basic shapes, such as arrows pointing to important words or showing the directions of your data, can make concepts easier to visualize.

To run an effective presentation, you'll need more than just the PowerPoint show you created on the computer the other night. You'll need a dependable power source for your computer, a projector so everyone can see it, speakers so everyone can hear it and a backup plan in case anything goes wrong, such as a power outage, dead battery, broken bulb or lost laptop.

For anyone who wants to see your presentation again, or at least see highlights of the key points, you can print out slides as paper handouts. Because many people have PowerPoint, you can also email the entire slideshow or put it on a thumb drive to distribute to your audience.

As the presenter, you should be the narrator, rather than using PowerPoint as a complete word-for-word script. Following the words on the screen like a teleprompter, or worse, using tricks and effects when none are necessary, can distract from your message. A serious sales report may not be the time to throw in a humorous cartoon just because you saw it in the clip art library.