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Visual presentations are critically important in the workplace, but very few people know how to do them well, according to the woman who helped created Al Gore's traveling slide show, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Nancy Duarte is president and CEO of Duarte Design, and author of the new book Slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations. The following is an edited transcript of my interview with Duarte.

DUARTE: We have a very putrid PowerPoint pandemic. It's done so poorly it really doesn't take that much effort to stand out among your peers or for your cause. A little bit of extra effort done well makes all the difference in the world because the norm right now is so bad.

GORDON: What's common to all bad presentations?

DUARTE: The presenter stands with his back to the audience and he reads the content. I think it frustrates audiences because they look at the presenter and they feel like, I'm smarter than him because I just got through his content quicker than he did. I read faster than he read to me. It makes the audience have less respect for the presenter. Putting dense words up there doesn't help the audience have a visual mnemonic device to remember and have visual recall of what they are saying. That's the biggest tragedy -- more so the way the presenter interacts with his slides than what's one slides themselves.

GORDON: What are the elements of a good presentation?

DUARTE: A really good presentation takes rehearsal. It takes time. It takes the presenter backing away and saying, hey this isn't about me getting my message across, it's about what does the audience in the room need from me to make them better, to make them do something that's actionable, or to help them change the world. Whatever your message is, you have to think about who's sitting in the audience and what's going to resonate with them.

GORDON: So this is very much a visual medium and yet people don't always treat it that way, right?

DUARTE: Right. There is no training in business school. Back when we were finishing school it was the memo that was the primary means of communication. Now PowerPoint is. And it's a visual tool. We're not taught how to display visual information in a way that conveys meaning.

GORDON: Presentation software, PowerPoint in particular, is the butt of a lot of jokes. But it's not the fault of the technology, right?

DUARTE: Right, it's not really the problem of the technology, it's the users. But I also feel like there hasn't been any good best practices written about how to use the tool. The default of PowerPoint does lead you down the path of building something that's more like a teleprompter than an actual presentation. We have to get to where we ignore the default of what PowerPoint feeds us when we open a new document and actually start to think outside the box and come up with a different way to present the visual information.

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For examples of good PowerPoint presentations, go here.