Decks: why they're so awful, plus stats and a neat video
This is the second in a series of emails on 'decks', reports written in PowerPoint and emailed to people for them to read at their desk. Last month’s email looked at the awful truncated English from which they suffer, and today's looks at other problems they have. Which means this email (and the next) are mostly negative. They tell you what not to do.
Which is progress, of course. Later I tell you what to do instead. If you do decks, please read the emails. If you get sent decks, read them to get insight into the madness and hubris. If you don’t ever see decks, read and have a laugh. Finally, there's a fun video click-through at the end of this email.
On with decks. First, a declaration of love: I love PowerPoint. I use it constantly. For talks. But not for reports... you see, it is possible to do a decent deck-report, but the odds are hugely stacked against it. Consider the stats: over the years, I’ve seen many, many hundreds of deck-reports - yet less than half a dozen were any good. That's a low hit-rate.
It gets worse though. I've seen many, many thousands of reports, of which about 10% were decks - yet decks are the vast majority of the Twenty Worst Reports I’ve seen. All too often, a deck-report is really bad.
It gets worse again. Of the Twenty Best Reports I’ve seen, not one was a deck. Deck-reports are never really good.
Conclusion for decks: it's almost impossible to do a good 'un, and frighteningly easy to do a bad 'un. And to understand what causes these bad outcomes, below is a list of ‘deck’ traits that create problems (note that not all decks suffer all these traits/ faults).
Wide rows of text that are tough to read: landscape, font size 10 – result: 28 words on a row. Tough. (The optimum is about 10 words on a row.) Also, deck-writers love ‘reversed font’ (white font on funky blue background) – which hinders readability.
Frippery by the bucket-load (and the click-throughs are to previous emails that explain more): chevrons, auto-shapes, arrows, colour (tonnes of it, especially in tables with shaded rows - light red, dark red, light red, dark red, etc). And let's not forget icons, photos, company logos, world maps to show income by territory ("Gosh... that's where USA is!!"). And flags... which help, I suppose, if you know your flags. So much time on frippery, so little time to think about the messages to convey.
Space-greedy branding: logos, headers and footers that take up 25% of the page.
Fragmented information that hinders comparison: a deck-rule seems to be one-topic-per-page. Result: ‘objectives’, ‘targets’, ‘results’… that’s three topics, so it’s three pages, even it easily fits on one page. Readers are forced to flick back and forth between pages. Then there’s group 'org' chart – the before is on page 10, the after on page 12. Tough for readers to make comparisons.
Random font sizes(?!): to ensure compliance with 'one-topic-per-page', deck-writers muck around with font sizes. Got too much on one topic and it struggles to fit on a page? No worries - use font size 6, even though it's hard to read. Got just a sentence on another topic and its page looks a bit empty? Use font size 25! (Add a photo too!! That pads the page.) But font sizes give typographical cues to readers, so it's evil to change them randomly.
Layout (1) - distracting variety: deck-writers get creative. Every page is laid out differently. Cool! Which means every page is a journey of discovery for readers. Readers turn to a page and must acclimatise to it... "Now... where do I start reading? And where do I go after that?".
Layout (2) - untidy pages: PowerPoint lets us shove stuff anywhere. So people do. Result: a mess. (Compare that to MS Word - it has margins that help keep us on track.)
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