Who can remember the first presentation they ever gave using PowerPoint? Can you remember with any specificity, or is PowerPoint so ubiquitous that you can’t really remember?
For those of use who are over 23 years of age — we are not PowerPoint natives. Some of us can remember a time before PowerPoint existed…and we gave presentations, anyway.
My first PowerPoint… it was in the early 1990’s. As a leader of a corporate IT user group, I was charged with giving the team’s recommendations to the executive staff.
I gave my first PowerPoint presentation a yellow background. I used few words — mostly pictures and headlines — and picked the “dissolve” transition between each slide. I gave it on a computer, as the executive staff circled around the monitor, amazed by the potential to use this whiz-bang new technology to tell a convincing story.
I remember a lot of “oooooh’s and aaaah’s”, followed up by “Neat. How’d you do that? Can we do that for sales? How about training?”
The executive staff approved our proposal. And PowerPoint became a global standard for business presentations.
Are you a PowerPoint native? Where were you when you delivered your first PowerPoint presentation?