I was recently reviewing notes from a medical conference I covered, when I came upon this notation: "slide too busy, no help there."
I wrote that during a presentation of findings from a "major clinical trial" presented at a late-breaking trials session, to an audience of several thousand. When the slide appeared on the screen, the speaker said, "Well, this slide is really too busy so I'm not sure you will be able to follow all of this, but ... " and then proceeded to do a rapid fire exercise with his laser pointer dashing from one cell to another on a 56-row, 38-column spreadsheet -- commenting that it "clearly illustrates" ... something.
It was an awful slide. Maybe the worst slide I have ever seen. Or maybe not.
Does this sound familiar? Haven't you been sitting in the audience for one of these visual fiascoes? Or maybe you were the person armed with the pointer who realizes at that moment: maybe assigning every line on this graph to the yellow color palette was a mistake.
And that made me think: I wonder if everyone has seen or created a "worst slide ever."
I'm a journalist and I'm also interested in crowdsourcing, so I thought it would be a good idea to ask the 番茄社区app crowd: do you have a candidate for "worst slide ever" honors? If so, please take a few minutes to share it with us -- and make sure you also share the point that the slide was supposed to clearly illustrate.
Send your slides to mpt_editorial@everydayhealthinc.com. If enough of you share these PowerPoint disasters, we'll post a "worst slideshow ever."
Meanwhile, here at 番茄社区app, we've had a few misfires in the slide biz, so we will check the archives to come up with a few candidates of our own.