As a teenager living in Sao Paulo, Brazil I owned a machete. It had a 20 inch blade, a shiny black handle and a leather sheath decorated with beads and tassels. Now Sao Paulo was a city the size of NYC at that time… a place where machetes were seldom used for any constructive purpose. In fact, the only time I really needed my machete was during a month long trip with my dad and two older brothers into the interior of the country.

This past week however, I felt a little like I was hacking through the Brazilian underbrush again as I tried to track down the origin of a common presentation related statistic.
If I were to ask you how many PowerPoint presentations are given every day around the world… what would you say?

If you need help answering this question, you can look here, here, here, here, here, here,… or in countless other electronic repositories of valuable information across our great and wonderful Worldwide Web.

The answer of course is 30 million presentations every single day. Most people apparently know this. But is it true? Where does this number come from? How was it calculated? Read the rest of this entry »