8 PowerPoint Train Wrecks

In the "so bad it's good" category, we honor eight PowerPoint slides that will make you say, "Holy $#@%, What were they thinking?"

By Thomas Wailgum

We've all been there: Sitting through PowerPoint presentations (and the slides that support them) that are so densely packed with data, so unintelligible and so unintentionally funny, that it's impossible to fathom exactly what points the presenter was laboring to make. Bad PowerPoint-enabled presentations can make you want to cringe, scratch your head in confusion, or just use the time to take a nap (like this poor guy did).

In honor of PowerPoint's special brand of badness, we've dug up eight PPT slides that are legendary for their terribleness, and rated them on a five-point Snooze Scale (ZZZZZ) (one Z isn't so bad; five Zs is the absolute worst).

Bill Gates in the Clouds

PowerPoint slides are there to help presenters solidify the point they are trying to make—not to confuse the audience with tons of logos, computing hardware images and arrows pointing here, there and everywhere. Bill, let us guess: You're alluding to "cloud computing"? Experts universally say: Keep the images to a minimum (like, one image per slide) and keep the text as brief as possible.

Snooze Scale: ZZZZ (Bill, you should know better.)
Image credit: Niall Kennedy / flickr