Yes. It’s often much better than using overly complicated PowerPoint slides. These low-tech tools are especially effective when you are presenting to groups smaller than 50 where everyone can see you clearly.

The beauty of using a white board or even an old-fashioned chalk board is that you can only draw one line or one arrow or one thing at a time. This slows you down, which is good because your audience can only focus on one thing at a time. If you are drawing a diagram or chart, live, in front of your audience, it forces you to simplify and to focus on just one or two variables at a time. This makes it much easier for your audience to focus and grasp what you are talking about. Your audience can look at the one thing you are drawing at that moment.

Contrast this with the typical PowerPoint graph that has 8 different lines all in different color codes showing weekly sales results in three continents over the last 12 months. Yes, the graph fits on one slide, but it took you two hours to create it and now you expect the audience to understand it by looking at it from a distance for 60 seconds while you are talking to them. Ridiculous!

Again, the problem is not PowerPoint, it’s that some people get too complicated with their PowerPoint tricks for the slides that are projected (it’s fine to have a PowerPoint slide with 8 color-coded variables as a handout because it can be studied and examined at the convenience of the reader).

Another benefit to using a white board, flip chart or chalk board is that it forces you the presenter to stay away from excessive abstraction. By writing or drawing something you are focusing on a thing and not just a concept. This helps make your message more concrete for your audience.

I love PowerPoint but you shouldn’t reflexively use slides just because it is convenient. If you are talking about the problem of oranges freezing, don’t show a slide of a frozen orange. Instead, bring in a frozen orange, hold it up, and then pass it around.

Too many executives and sales people automatically gravitate toward the high tech solution to presentations. Video can now be inserted into a PowerPoint presentation, but it is not easy for most people to do. If you are going to use video you also have to make sure you have the right plug ins on your computer, you have to have speakers. You can’t just store the presentation on a stick and assume it will work on someone else’s laptop. I estimate that 75% of the time I see presenters attempt to use video it doesn’t work and the presenter has to mumble a bunch of apologies. I use video clip in every one of my presentations because I am speaking about speaking, hence I need to show great examples of people speaking. But too many people want to use a video clip for no apparent reason other than to show off or because technology lets them—these are terrible reasons.

When President Ronald Ragan wanted to make a point in his State of the Union that the Federal tax code was out of control, he didn’t use a PowerPoint slide and he didn’t just count the page numbers. Instead he took the tax code which was as thick as a dozen Manhattan phone books and then dropped them on the lectern in front of the world to see. It was a dramatic use of a prop that made his point about the over-complexity of the tax code and was and is highly memorable, decades after it happened.

Regardless of whether you use a high tech tool a low tech tool or an old-fashioned prop, always make your decisions based on what will help your audience understand the most, learn the most and remember the most.

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