Two Great Reasons NOT to Print Your Powerpoint Presentation

Microsoft estimates that around 30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered each day, that many of these presentations are delivered to large audiences - and that most presenters still print their slides as handouts.

While this might be an easy way to engage your audience, environmentally it stinks - 30 million presentations times by, say 20 people on average x 15 sheets of A4, is a lot of A4, and that's a conservative estimate. So avoiding the use of paper handouts entirely for the PowerPoint presentations would have a major environmental benefit. But what about you as a presenter? Surely it's an essential tool in your amoury?

Not so. The advice to ditch the print outs helps presenters too, as slides designed to work in paper printouts of presentations are self-explanatory, and using self-explanatory slides is, in fact, detrimental to a presentation according to m62 visualcommunications.

Research shows that audience members read silently faster than a presenter can read slides aloud. Related research has found that it is impossible to read silently and to listen to somebody speaking at the same time. Because of this, if slides make sense without accompanying speech, the audience will read the slides and thus completely ignore the presenter.

So using print outs of your slides will undercut the message of your business or sales presentations, meaning the chances of winning a pitch or procuring an investment can be seriously lessened.

Distributing hand-outs before a talk is even worse, as this means the audience will read the whole presentation without waiting for the presenter to advance slides. Since print-outs of slides simply don’t work, they are a waste of paper. This is a drain on resources and harmful to the environment.

Nicholas Oulton, Founder of m62 visualcommunications, commented: “There is so much current hype on PowerPoint Design that presenters lose sight of the true purpose behind a presentation. Some presenters spend more time worrying about their PowerPoint templates than about whether they are communicating effectively. If the audience is reading slides, they are not
listening to the presenter, meaning they are not fully absorbing the information.

“If slides are not self-explanatory, the audience will listen to the presenter for an answer. In fact, studies have shown that if information is received via audio and visual sources simultaneously, audience recall can be more than doubled. This results in more memorable, and thus effective, presentations.”

The most effective method for passing on information after a face-to-face presentation is to use online presentation software. Some services allow password protection, making it more difficult for competitors to get hold of confidential slides. If it is absolutely necessary for something to be left behind, a separate prose document should be produced, based on the
speaker notes in a presentation. This can then be e-mailed, eliminating the need for paper print-outs completely.