In response to Chris Brogan's post on Lifehacks, Tom Comeau has written a YAPPIE (that's "Yet Another 'PowerPoint Is Evil'") post here, with an interesting quote from his book recommendation, The Cognitive Power of PowerPoint:
Tufte also argued that PowerPoint is what you use when you want to hide information, or want to hide the fact that you don’t have information.
Powerful quote, that. I suspect some folks do put up the charts and bullet points and text-dense slide for the simple reason that they believe the information will speak for itself, so they won't have to do all that pesky work of presenting it in an interesting and useful way.
Here's a hint: IT WON'T. Your job as speaker is not to present information, but to assemble it into one, easy- and fun-to-digest package. Your job is to gather information, organize it, and then juice it down to its very essence (preferably in an illustrative anecdote) so that your audience will walk away not with heads full of bullet-pointed slides but your actual message. Yes, illustrating points to back up your messages are fine, but let them be stories you tell, images you show and case studies you relate.
Don't hide your information (or lack thereof) in bullet points.
