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Personally, I've never attended a good presentation the used PowerPoint. Although I have attended great presentations using other software/technologies such as PDF's, OpenOffice Impress and Apple Keynote.

I once had to sit through a 90-odd page 'training' slideshow.

The chap wrote down everything he was going to say and read off the slides, verbatim.

It was hell. We were losing the will to live after 30 slides.

I suspect that 95% of the problem is with bad presenters, not bad software.

Yup.

The better presentations just list a few key points and the presenter expands on each one.

I'm sure I read somewhere about the meeting at NASA which had a PowerPoint presentation that stated that the space shuttle would burn up on re-entry, but the information was so heavily buried under meaningless pap that it was overlooked, leading to several astronauts dying.

Or is that a conspiracy theory?

Wouldn't that be more to do with the quality of the presenter and their information rather than the software used to make them?

Indeed. So my theory is, based upon my own experience, is that good presenters choose to use somehting other than PowerPoint, though a few terrible presenters still choose other alternatives.

presentation software - powerpoint or not, is a fancy replacement of the speakers prompt cards. Simple.

I would tend to dissagree. I know Keynote can detect you have a projector/other screen and it can supply the current and next slide along with notes on the presenters computer screen, and I've seen it put to very good use with the presenter never looking at the slides. Indeed when I'm presenting I tend to only look at what's on the big screen when I want to point a stick or a laser at it.

I’m going to be burned for this, but I really think that Steve Jobs’ presentations are pretty good. They use Keynote, but apart from the demos/movies they shown on the big screens, the slides are illustrations for the words being spoken. They will be mostly images with supporting text. Bullet points are used when summarising points already expanded on previously.

The Apple keynotes are well worth looking at from the stand point of how such a technology can be used to enhance a presentation.

A bad workman blames his/her tools.
If your a good presenter you can use nothing and still have the audiance in the palm of your hands.
If your a bad presenter, it doesn't matter if you have naked go-go dancers battling with zombies behind you, you still will be a bad presenter.. though to be honest I would much rather see a presentation with zombies and go-go dancers anyday

Sorry I didn't explain myself very well.

By "is a fancy replacement of the speakers prompt cards" I meant that it shouldn't have every word the speaker is going to say, just key headings to guide the audience and graphics if applicable.

Personally I love Powerpoint.

Power Point hell is me having to carry my full tower PC into uni to do a presentation.
Back then there were no USB memory sticks, no CD-ROM's in the PC's (for some reason known only to the uni) and I wasn't allowed to put my HDD in a uni PC.

I completely agree. I've sat through hundreds of presentations. Some people use powerpoint. Some use overhead projectors. Some use a whiteboard/whitepad.

The best presentations are the ones where the presenter has an engaging personality. They make you look at them, listen to them. You don't care much for what's on the screen. You want to know what's next. The number of people who I've seen do that can be counted on one hand.

The worst presenters are the boring, monotonous ones who simply read their powerpoint presentations, each slide a full textbook of information.

Even today, I sat through four presentations. All were an hour or so long. Three of them had be asleep within the first five minutes. One of them, I neither doodled, nor daydreamed whilst he spoke. I was too scared he was going to pick on me to answer a question. That's one way of engaging the audience - ask them (simple) questions that you can answer initially with a simple answer and then elaborate. Nobody ever falls asleep if they think they're going to be asked a question. It shows the presenter is aware of the audience.

The best powerpoint presentations have the fewest words.

I've long learnt to use pictures, graphs, tables, anything other than walls of text on my slides. I try to avoid writing too much. Where I have to write to make a point, it's succinct.

My best speech was as best man at my brother's wedding... I started off with "I feel a bit naked up here today without my PowerPoint slides"... Got a big laugh and I didn't even look at my prompt notes after that, it just flowed and lots of laughs...

Finished off by reading the telegrams, which brought the house down... "And best wishes from Tity!" Well, I didn't know, I had never even heard of her before I saw the telegram, how was I supposed to know it was pronounced Tea Tea!