[ipython]

Possibly unpopular opinion: PowerPoint is just a tool, and most people not only suck at making slides but are poor storytellers to boot. If you are a good storyteller and can effectively use the medium (as in, not just dump a bunch of bullets on a slide), you can actually convey a lot of information in a combined slide + narrative format.

[conductr]

Also probably unpopular opinion: most people, in business anyways, don't use or even expect powerpoint to be aiding a typical "presentation". I think we conflate powerpoints in meetings as "presentations" just like a Ted Talk is a "presentation". In business, these types of presentations do take place but are hardly a tip of the iceberg in terms of all the powerpoints being made. Under the surface, the lion's share of powerpoints are just talking points for a meeting. They help give alignment on what they want to talk about, points they want to make during the meeting, structure their meeting flow, and importantly - they give people something to read before/after the meeting to and reference back to the meeting topics. They also serve as a medium for data sharing, eg. charts, tables, and such. It also anticipates and answers some questions amongst many other things.

Anyways, I'm not saying this excuses the quality of most of these things but imagine how much effort you'd put into a Ted Talk versus how much you'd put into a 30 minute meeting when you may only have a few days notice. Most meeting topics are simply boring, it's work, or someone else's domain of work, shouldn't need a ton of narrative fluff to make it digestible, and honestly most powerpoints I see in work in the last decade or so are adequate enough for their purposes. I just stopped being critical of people's powerpoint and storying telling skills long ago and try to focus on the discussion/content being made and what I need to take away/double click on.

[datadrivenangel]

And most power points in businesses are actually documents, or worse, dual-purpose artifacts that need to be used as both the presentation materials and an artifact, and fail at both.

[silvestrov]

I think a major part of being bad presenters is that they don't train but think that they can do well with just a quick go-over of the materials.

Becoming good takes a lot of hard work, lot of redoing of stuff. Just like becoming good at soccer is more than playing games. Many successful YouTubers have learned it's hard work to make good videos.

Like Penn&Teller said: The only secret of magic is that I’m willing to work harder on it than you think it’s worth.

[parpfish]

if i'm giving a presentation, i always practice it several times and i always find flaws to fix up(there's no segue from this slide to this one, i need to reorder these so i can introduce X before talking about Y, etc).

but you have to practice the right way.

the terrible, long-winded, confusing presentations you've seen were most likely done by somebody that sees a presentations as merely "talking in front of a group" so their practice would be focused on memorizing lines/facts that want to say. they may sound polished, but it's not necessarily going to be good.

in order for your practice to actually help, you need to go through your presentation while maintaining a strong sense of empathy for the audience. you need to fight a constant battle against the 'curse of knowledge' and force yourself to honestly evaluate what you're doing from the perspective as a first-time listener.

[fleshmonad]

This holds for everything. Everything is a tool and always stating "It's just a tool, people are using it wrong", doesn't constitute an argument. A tool should be judged on it's usefulness and if a tool is "misused" 90% of the time, it may be worth considering whether it is a good tool at what it aims to achieve.

[OldGuyInTheClub]

Tufte addresses that in the postscript. It is the first item in it.

[MengerSponge]

I, a brave and iconoclastic thinker, didn't read Tufte's article before arguing that people, not design, are the problem.