As a reader you may think this headline is a matter of course. However, this is not the case. Products offered today by the electronics industry, which used to support the lecturer, move more and more into the center of events. I do not want to let the suspicion arise that creators of presentations use pretty charts to cover up substantial shortcomings. But I would still like to point out that the technical possibilities of creating a presentation in regards to picture sequence and text succession could lead to superficiality of the topics to be addressed, which is unintentional but could nonetheless affect the substance of the lectures or presentations in regards to sustainability. Often, lectures and presentations contain too many single topics whose content is processed via a flood of charts.

1. First and foremost one should try to reduce the number of lectures and presentations. The same applies to the number of meetings and conferences. Meetings are anyway conferences of a secondary importance and thus their real necessity should be evaluated. Years ago, our Japanese partners found out in comprehensible studies, that so many meetings, conferences and presentations do in no way qualitatively aid a strict, result oriented, forward manner of working.
2. Truly necessary lectures and presentations should be short and should be geared at one or few points. The flood of information which often distracts us from what is important requires so much of our perception and intake capacity. Thus a lot is lost.
3. An open lecture and a truly lively presentation, where the lecturer is in the center, adds a quality to what has been said, which in general cannot be enhanced any further via technology. Do we not often speak of lectures which fascinated us simply because the lecturer turned the content of his speech into something unforgettable as a whole? Presentations and lectures with or without charts are comparable to a live concert and a CD recording. No CD could replace the original live concert.
4. The majority of training courses for lecturers devote a big part of their time to handling modern technical equipment. It is advisable to think about whether it would not be better for such programs to spend more time on the art of speaking without notes and to subordinate everything else.
5. Charts should only be used very sparingly and then only if they actually add to the presentation or lecture.

Presentations and lectures live from the content, not from the technical framework. This is not going to change anytime soon.