PowerPoint Masters at Microsoft?

I read that Microsoft had its Financial Analyst Meeting yesterday. I was curious what their PowerPoint slides looked like and went their site to view them. Below are two slides from the CEO, Steve Ballmer’s deck. Now, remember I’m a big fan of Microsoft and LOVE PowerPoint. I was disappointed with the results considering they were from the developers of the program. In general, there was too much content on each slide, making it difficult to determine the focus of the visuals. Look at the first slide, where it seems their main message is about making Office 2010 simple, but the slide looks chaotic. Using all caps for the text was not a good design choice – research says upper/lower case is much easier to read than ALL CAPS. One of my rules for good slide design is make it as simple and easy to read as possible.

They should hire one of the PowerPoint MVPs to assist them with some slide design or just call eSlide!

Do you think Steve Ballmer did these slides himself? Maybe I’m just being too hard on Steve and company. What do you think of the design of these two slides? (You can look at our online S.E.E. Design training modules if you want to get some hints about ways they could be improved)

Click the images below to see Steve’s entire slide deck and others presented at their investor conference July 29th, 2010.


Photos copyright Microsoft