How to avoid 'death by PowerPoint'

Most people who've endured a terrible PowerPoint presentation will have experienced boredom, followed by frustration, then anger that it took up an hour - or possibly even more - of their lives that they will never get back.So why, in the age of the internet and millions of digital images, do slide presentations seem to belong to an older, duller decade?And what can the business people of the future do to jazz up their presentations and leave their audiences feeling a little less like zombies?

Swedish crowd-sourcing photo database, Pickit, recently teamed up with professional PowerPoint designers Eyeful Presentations to pick out the top 10 images to avoid in presentations.Their findings are summarised best with the use of bullet points - that stalwart of PowerPoint presentations. 

Things to avoid:

• cogs

• images of people holding hands around a globe

• stacked pebbles

• thumbs up

• archery targets (with optional arrow)

• jigsaw piece being fitted into puzzle

• handshakes

• rosettes

• groups of business people staring intently at a monitor
• businessperson poised to run a race

These days, there are plenty of alternatives to PowerPoint - Keynote, Slides, Prezi, Slide Rocket, Easel.ly, Emaze, Slidedog, to name but a few - many of which are freely available online.But Microsoft's software, launched in 1990, still dominates the market - with an estimated 1.2 billion users worldwide and millions of presentations made each day using the software.Unfortunately, the phrase "Death by PowerPoint" has also become part of our lexicon.

In an attempt to change that, Microsoft offered new tools last month that will allow people to make presentations look better.Morph allows users to create animations by moving objects around slides, while its Designer feature makes it easier to add photos to slides.