I absolutely love this! I just stumbled across an entry titled Three Tips for Acceptably Bad PowerPoint in Gene Smith’s weblog Writing the Web (Nov. 25, 2003).
Gene was intrigued by my earlier plea for people to stop putting PowerPoint presentations online. He agrees with that general advice, but noted,
“I also try as much as possible to live in the real world, and I have a couple of clients now who won’t stop putting PowerPoints on their intranets. No matter what I recommend, they’re going to keep on doing it. They just don’t have time to repurpose the presentation content so it works on the web. To make the best of that bad situation, I have three tips for turning Really Bad PowerPoint into Acceptably Bad PowerPoint.”
Fair enough since I live in Boulder, Colorado, it’s an open question as to whether I live “in the real world.” (Geographically, folks, not editorially!)
…Anyway, Gene’s advice is well worth reading. If you absolutely MUST put a PowerPoint presentation online, if you can’t be dissuaded from that practice no matter how much I beg, then please read Gene’s article and do what he says.
But especially heed his closing comments:
“Remember, these are just tips to mitigate the essential awfulness of putting PowerPoint online. If your content is really important to your readers, you owe it to them to put it up in an accessible, readable, Web-friendly format.”
Amen, Brother Gene, Amen!