I was talking to a coworker this week about the worst presentations I've ever seen and realized that I very weirdly* have a top 3 worst PowerPoint presentations I've ever seen, hands down. So, not that anyone will ever care, but here they are:
The third worst PowerPoint presentation I've ever sat through:
To be fair to the presenter, this was back when I was in college, which was the early days of PowerPoint, so no one really knew what they were doing. And it was before all the tools like blackboard or what have you, where professors could post stuff online for their class. That is why it is only the third worst and I feel quite forgiving.
The PowerPoint was the history lecture for a class on Chinese history in the thousands BC. And the professor was really trying hard to adopt this cool new technology. But the slides--yikes! Crammed with text! I mean, forget margins, every pixel was covered in text. And then, the professor read the slides to us. Which, as a literate college student was quite agonizing. I just wanted to say, "Email the slides to me and I'll study them at home in my pjs." Which would have been great, because the slides would have been phenomenal for studying for the exams.
Second worst PowerPoint presentation:
This was a presentation on customer service, based on the Disney customer service training. And, again, I will caveat this with the fact that I already had a chip on my shoulder because I don't work at a theme park, so doing theme park customer service seemed absurd. I mean, I work in archives, which are about as far as you can get from a theme park.** But, my real frustration with the presentation was that every slide was a pithy little quote that when you really thought about it critically... well, let's just say that rarely have so many words come together to create so little meaning. Outside of bills passed in congress, which I don't know that bills lack meaning so much as they require an interpreter, but I digress.
These were quotes that you would find on kitschy signs and pillows and stuff, and I just read them and kept breaking them down and they were just absurd. And didn't necessarily have a lot to do with customer service or what the presenter was discussing, so much as just trying to be cutesie sayings in a presentation.
But the worst PowerPoint presentation, hands down, was a presentation at a professional conference. Now, the presenter was young, so maybe that was part of it. And maybe they were nervous being brand new in the field and presenting to more experienced people. Or maybe that is just how they learned to do presentations (it wouldn't surprise me).
Anyway, the presenter built the presentation by describing the archival process/project she was discussing in terms of Saved by the Bell. And there were about 75 slides that were all just images from pop culture. About 10 slides in, the entire audience was busy googling the references they didn't get on their phones, which is not the desired outcome for a presenter. But, even worse, the presentation involved a lot of details that really would have benefitted from diagrams and flowcharts and that sort of thing. It was just a mess.
So, I don't know that there's a takeaway, other than I'm really judgy about PowerPoint presentations, but now I'm super curious to know what can beat my worst presentations (I know there's something out there). And that's all, really.
*I think it's weird? Maybe not?
**I guess being a warlord or a serial killer might actually be the farthest, but you know what I mean. I don't work at a place where people come for recreation. Unless they are way into records. Which, some people are and there is nothing wrong with that at all!
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