I love PowerPoint. It's the greatest tool ever. It is fantastic for speakers and great for audiences. Do you agree? Well, I'm being a little bit facetious. I do like PowerPoint.

I use it myself, sometimes five days a week. However, the big problem with most PowerPoint presentations is they're so deadly dull. All they do is put the audience to sleep. They have become sleep aids because they are nothing but a boring data dump of text. They become the teleprompter for the speaker. Now, a news anchor using a teleprompter can be effective because you don't actually see the words.

The news anchor appears to just be talking to you. But when all the words are up there, and you see the person kind of turning their back and Blah, blah, blah. It destroys the whole effect it becomes incredibly boring. So the first thing you've got to realize if you're going to use PowerPoint effectively is you can't use it. Just as your teleprompter, the poor man's the poor woman's teleprompter because if you do, you're just going to put everybody to sleep.