PowerPoint should be ditched?

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?
Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Nothing sucks the life out of a presentation like a slide packed full of text. Except maybe three or four of them in a row. Even if, to that point, the talk has been going well, text-heavy slides can be a killer. You can often feel the audience sink in their chairs, knowing that the presenter will feel obligated to slog through the entire set of points. More than that, these slides are a burden on the presenter - getting through all those words is a lot of work!

This story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that people learn more poorly if they receive information in both the written and spoken form at the same time.

John Sweller of the University of South Wales went so far as to declare that "The use of the PowerPoint presentation has been a disaster. It should be ditched." Sweller also suggests that it's more effective to present the same information in very different format, such as a graph or picture.