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Last month I gave my last ever Powerpoint presentation. It was on the findings of a new public opinion survey commissioned by the German Marshall Fund, where I am currently a non-resident transatlantic fellow. You can view it or even listen to a recording:

I gave slight variations of this presentation in Brussels, at the WTO in Geneva and finally at the Houses of Parliament in London. The knowledge that this would be the last time I would ever have to run the most desperately woeful application of the Microsoft Office suite gave me an unexpectedly wholesome and satisfying feeling. Bad Powerpoint has done much to kill the art of communication. How many times have you sat comatose while a speaker reads through 20 slides, each featuring an almost identical bulleted list, as if the slides were the main act and the speaker is merely the prompt, standing hidden in the wings? Is this the power of rhetoric? Is this the way to communicate with fellow human beings?

In our era of Web 2.0 and endless ‘rolling’ television news, it could be argued that face-to-face communication is an old medium from a bygone era. I would argue exactly the opposite. The ubiquity of digital media (and the horror of bad Powerpoint) is actually increasing the potential gains for those are prepared to devote some time to honing their ability to stand up in front of a bunch of people in a room and make an impact, tell a story, start a conversation. Think about it, how often does a website designer or a newscaster know that she has the undivided attention of the audience for a full 20 minutes or more?

Look at An Inconvenient Truth, former US Vice-President Al Gore’s feature length documentary about the threat of climate change. It’s just a man giving a talk. But in box office terms it’s the third biggest documentary of all time. And in terms of its impact on the debate on climate change, it’s done more than the grandest of policy reports could have hoped to achieve. Imagine if the Iraq Study Group had published a 90 minute feature film rather than a 160 page report. Maybe even with some South Park-style cartoons like in Fahrenheit 9/11. Would President Bush still have ignored it?

As someone who likes to get involved in debates about issues I care about, to communicate the work I do to a wider audience, I should be taking note of all this. While it might be tempting to return to the ways of Socrates, Gladstone and Churchill (all of who managed very well without slide shows), modern audiences still seem to expect something visual and it can actually be quite useful to use graphics to supplement words, so I’m not proposing to abandon visual aids completely. Not just yet.

No, but instead I am going to rid myself of the bland, depressing and deeply frustrating Powerpoint in favor of Keynote, Apple’s more subtle, elegant and powerful application, which just coincidentally happens to be Al Gore’s medium of choice (fair enough, Gore is on the board of Apple and so he may enjoy a lucrative product placement deal).

Maybe it’s just a bad workman blaming his tools. Am I like the amateur cyclist who splashes out on a Lance Armstrong replica carbon fibre bicycle in the hope that it’ll propel him up those high mountain passes. But even if it’s just symbolic, from this moment onwards, the slides are going to illustrate my talks, not dictate them. And I hope that with Keynote I will have fewer moments of rage against the machine than I did with Powerpoint, when my bulleted list refuses to align or the font I am using suddenly converts itself into Sanskrit.

Wish me luck, I’ll let you know how I get on. Now where’s the alternative to Microsoft Word?

Apple’s Steve Jobs is well-known for his elegant and effective style of public speaking…

…but it looks as though Microsoft’s Bill Gates still has some work to do.