Please don’t poison your presentation with PowerPoint.

Imagine you’ve just paid your twelve dollars to see a new Steven Spielberg picture. You have your soda and you’ve taken your seat. The lights dim and the curtain goes up. The movie has begun.

But instead of hearing a John Williams score accompanying the images, the soundtrack consists of the actors’ dialogue, and the grimace-inducing sound of a child loudly practicing Chop Sticks on the family piano. It goes on and on, only occasionally changing to some other equally dreadful and dreadfully played piece, such as Glow Worm or When the Saints Go Marching In.

You’re torn.Your first impulse is to get up and leave. But then, you paid good money to see this movie. And you can just make out, over the cacophony, that the story line has potential. So you soldier on, trying as best you can to glean the good from the horrible.

This is how I feel during the great majority of business presentations I have endured that are accompanied by PowerPoint presentations.

Why, oh why do otherwise intelligent, well-meaning people – with valuable information to communicate – stink up their presentations with PowerPoint? In nearly every case, this devilish program does nothing except distract and detract from the messages they are attempting to convey.

He or she may as well be juggling knives

while they speak about conversion rates.

The utter inanity of most PP slides is apparent to everyone in the audience. Here are some of the most egregious errors:

• Posting a slide with text, which the presenter then proceeds to read to the audience. This borders on an insult, implying that no one can read. In fact, the audience reads the text in a fraction of the time it takes for the presenter. What a waste.

• Posting a spreadsheet or some other image so detailed that to properly decipher it would require each member of the audience to approach the screen for a close look.

• Posting a single sentence that says something so patently obvious even stating it insults the intelligence the audience. (e.g. “Determine your customer’s needs.” )

• Not rehearsing. Slides out of order. Not being able to operate the equipment properly.

• Don’t get me started on Venn diagrams, pyramid graphs and the use of trite clip art or stock photographs.

The people in the audience want to hear what the presenter has to say. In many cases, the audience members have paid big bucks to be there. Instead, they are expected to listen, while the presenter simultaneously puts up distraction after distraction. He or she may as well be juggling knives while they speak about conversion rates.

Since I don’t give presentations too often, but I do attend them quite frequently, I don’t have advice. I have a plea: If you are planning to give a presentation and feel that you must include PowerPoint as part of it – resist that compulsion.

Just don’t do it.

The chances that your presentation will be enhanced with PowerPoint are dismal. The chances that PowerPoint will detract from your message are exceedingly high. Do yourself and, most important, your audience a favor and just talk to us.

If part of your presentation absolutely requires you to show a graphic of some sort (a picture of a piece of art, a building or a new logo or something) then go ahead and show just the graphic briefly, then turn off the projector and go back to speaking.

Now I know someone is going to contradict me and say that they can put on a great PP-enhanced presentation, or that they once saw a great PP-enhanced presentation. To that I respond that there perhaps are a few people out there who know how to use PowerPoint effectively. Just as there are a few people out there who can compose film scores for major motion pictures. But unless you’re the John Williams of PowerPoint, keep your hands off the keys.