Is PowerPoint Killing Your Presentations According to Harvard Research?
- Paul Lucas
- May 4
- 4 min read
PowerPoint is everywhere in financial services.
Client reviews. Seminar decks. Conference talks. Internal meetings. For many advisers, it has become the default way to “present professionally”.
Yet research commonly referenced from Harvard suggests something uncomfortable: slide‑led presentations often weaken clarity, understanding, and decision‑making rather than improve them.
That matters — because in advice conversations, clarity isn’t a nice‑to‑have. It’s the difference between a client understanding, trusting, and acting on your advice… or not.
Here's what the Harvard Researchers did
Harvard's Department of Psychology published the study in the journal PLOS One titled, Does a Presentation's Medium Affect Its Message?
The research compared the effectiveness of the 3 most common presentation formats:
Verbal only
PowerPoint
Prezi
Experienced presenters were asked to design and deliver a presentation to an audience of volunteers via Skype.
The audience members were then surveyed to judge the impact of each presentation style. The results could change the way you present forever.
The results
The study produced some startling results.
Prezi outperformed both PowerPoint and Verbal presentations in all areas.
Participants concluded that talks using Prezi were more original (by 13%), engaging (by 16%), persuasive (by 22%) and effective (by 25%) than both PowerPoint and Oral presentations.
They also rated the visuals from Prezi presentations as more "dynamic, visually compelling, and distinctive" compared to PowerPoint.
PowerPoint rated as no better than a verbal presentation without any visual aids.
Consider that for a moment.
Your audience will be just as happy with your presentation if you do it without any slides at all!
In short, it means your PowerPoint slides are having no impact. All the time you invest in designing your slides is, in effect, wasted.
The study concludes that PowerPoint fails in key areas. It neither improves information transfer to your audience nor creates a positive impression of you and your message. The use of PowerPoint to make presentations neither helps to engage audiences, nor to understand the information presented to them.
In my experience, PowerPoint is often ineffective, not because of the software itself, but rather, because of the way we use it.
It is estimated that over 30 million PowerPoint presentations are delivered daily worldwide. Sadly, most of these are packed with a never ending array of long-winded bullet points and dense graphs and charts.
This is where people run into trouble. The slides are invariably written as notes for the presenter, with very little thought to how the audience will perceive such wordy slides.
The Problem with Bullet Points
PowerPoint encourages bullet points. Bullet points encourage compression. And compression encourages oversimplification.
Complex financial topics — risks, trade‑offs, long‑term implications — is reduced to fragments. The logic that connects the advice is removed, leaving the client to join the dots themselves.
The slide may look tidy. The thinking behind it often isn’t.
This is why clients frequently say, “I’ll need to go away and think about it” — not because the advice was wrong, but because it wasn’t meaningfully understood.
When Slides Compete with You
Clients cannot read and listen effectively at the same time. Yet that is exactly what many slide decks demand.
While a client is scanning the screen, they are not fully listening to you. Attention splits. Processing weakens. Retention drops.
Instead of supporting the narrative, the slides begin to compete with it. And in financial presentations, any loss of attention is a loss of trust‑building opportunity.
Slides Replace Narrative with Sequence
Good advice needs narrative.
A client must understand:
Why this matters
How the pieces connect
What happens if they act — and if they don’t
PowerPoint pushes advisers toward sequences of slides rather than structured reasoning. The result is often a technically correct plan presented without emotional or logical momentum.
It’s why a beautifully built plan can still fail to land. The advice is sound — but the story isn’t.
When the Adviser Becomes the Narrator
There’s another unintended consequence.
When advisers lean heavily on slides, confidence shifts from knowing the material to remembering what’s on the screen. Eye contact drops. Presence weakens. The adviser begins narrating rather than leading.
Clients don’t build confidence in a deck. They build confidence in you.
Slides can quietly get in the way of that connection.
What Works Better
This isn’t an argument for banning visuals — it’s an argument for order of thinking.
Clear advice starts with:
Structured reasoning
Spoken explanation
Dialogue, not display
When visuals are used, they work best when they support one idea at a time — not when they attempt to summarise an entire argument on a single slide.
Put simply: think first, present second.
The Real Takeaway
Most advisers don’t struggle because of poor technical knowledge. They struggle because otherwise excellent thinking is hidden behind tools that prioritise neat slides over clear communication.
PowerPoint itself isn’t the problem; it's unthinking reliance on it that causes issues.
If your advice really matters — and it does — then how you communicate it deserves the same care and craft as how you construct it.
If you want to learn how to become a better presenter, you can find out more from this link.
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