Cataloging the Worst Presentations Ever (rankings and better names to follow sometime later).

Picture Guy:

He was an avid lover of nature and decided to incorporate photos of nature from his state into his presentation. These weren't his photos; he used some from a professional photographer. He spent a significant amount of time describing the picture instead of describing his work. Normal people would have dropped the photo into the side or the middle of the slide. He made the photo the background and changed the font color to match. I have yet to decide whether the white text on yellow grass (yes grass), green text on green grass, or the black text on snow and deep red grass was the least legible.

The Paper Might Have Been Shorter:

She recognized her accent was somewhat thick and the audience may have a tough time understanding her. That was no excuse for pasting entire paragaphs (probably from her paper) into the slides. The text became so dense and small as to be difficult to read, so she had to recolor some of the text to highlight the salient points. She failed to recognize that we couldn't read her slides because of the text size, not the color. She also spent too many slides defining her terms and not enough on actual analysis, a fatal flaw for a 20-minute presentation.

Imagine That:

He failed to recognize why much of the world moved to Excel and PowerPoint a decade ago. His foils required spending 20 minutes tracking down a light projector. Because he didn't completely understand how his mathematics package worked, he hadn't resized the fonts before printing and he couldn't properly plot one of his performance graphs. He told us to imagine the line shifted upward because his performance was really better than that shown. I wished I'd thought to do that during my own presentation: "Imagine these numbers, but 20% better."

Why Bother:

Like Imagine That, he also failed to recognize the brave new world of the 90's. His foils contained numerous paragaphs and quotations clipped from his favorite authors. He didn't expect us to actually read the slides, he just put them up to impress upon us that he knew about these authors. His foils also demonstrated the limitations of foils. Namely, that if you forget to add something, you have to write it in with Sharpie, which doesn't work so well if your Sharpie is wearing down, you have terrible handwriting, and the thing you want to add is another paragraph.

(In fact, I would like to flog anybody who pastes paragaphs into their slides, but I saw so many of those on Saturday that I realized it would take too long to take care of all the offenders.)

(Also, after The Paper Might Have Been Shorter, I realized that pasting in paragraphs from other authors' papers is slightly less egregious than pasting in paragraphs from your own paper, which forced about a dozen presentations off this list.)

Exhaust Them so They Don't Ask Questions:

She shrank the margins and line spacing, but not the font size as much, so she could fit more text on the slide. The result was the first and only presentation I'd ever attended where I actually got tired reading the slide. If she hadn't worked for a government agency and could productize this, she could put all those sleeping pill manufacturers out of business.