Slide Deck Slop

[canyonwalker]

My last task of the afternoon today was to review a set of slides we're presenting in a meeting with a major customer tomorrow morning. A colleague pinged me at 4 that he'd finished his pass and asked me to review. ...Oh, my! The production quality of the slides was awful. Five Things:

1. No two slides had the same basic layout. Some had titles, some did not. Some had titles centered, some had them left justified. Some had titles in title case, others had them in sentence case. Some had body text in dark gray (company standard), others used black. Most had our logo in the lower corner, a few had it in an upper corner. A few slides had page numbers, most did not.
2. Every slide in the deck had "Copyright 2019 [Company Name]" in the footer. Has nobody else, in the past 11 ½ months, noticed this and cared? It took me all of 15 seconds to correct it in the slide masters.
3. There were three slides in a row, with fairly dense "wall of text" content, that expressed basically the same thing.
4. Several of the slides contained outdated names for our products.
5. Then There Was My Favorite. The Slide Where Almost Everything was Capitalized. And Half The Words were Bolded. Do you know How Annoying It Is-- to Reading This, Also with Brokens English scattering Throughout the Sentences, Too? What Person Could Possibly Ever Look at Slop like This and Think, "Okay, Let's Shows This to a Customers?"

I don't fault my colleague for most of these errors. By and large he remixed this slide deck from existing company presentations. That actually makes the problem worse, though, because it means all of these problems have slid past by dozens of people, for months, without being fixed. And even worse than that, many of these horrible slides originated from company executives!

Comments

[culfinriel]

Wow. Does your company not have a standardized format for (what I assume are) Powerpoints? We did for academic and conference presentations both within and without the department and the University had very specific trademarked, copyrighted, or whatever standards (color, font, etc.) and you had to use the officially sanctioned logo files and so on.

There was certainly room for creativity and flexibility so you could actually present what you were presenting or teaching, but background, number of bullet points per slide, and logos and their placement were standardized.

[canyonwalker]

We do have a company standard slide template. It has all the features you named, and more. I started drafting a run-down of all the reasons why it's not as simple in practice as that... the list grew longer than my original post, and I wasn't even finished! I may publish that in a separate entry soon. For now suffice it to say that the mess occurs because existing content from different templates gets remixed and edited by people who largely don't care about details of appearance.