Oh no! Not another boring PowerPoint Presentation! My eyes, my eyes…!

            “Oh no! Not another boring PowerPoint presentation! My eyes, my eyes…!”

            One thing’s for sure, the presenter doesn’t know how to make a good presentation (the one that doesn’t hurt your eyes).  Don’t worry, if you follow these simple steps, you can have presentations anywhere!

   

   1.  A little planning goes a long way.

Plan on what you are going to present. Since the point of your slides is to illustrate and expand what you are going to say to your audience, you should know what you intend to say and then figure out how to visualize it.

2.   One thing at a time.

Use only one topic per slide.  The moment that you change your slide with many topics inside it, the audience will be reading all what you have done instead of listening to what you are saying.  Keep th3e presentation bulleted and remember, don’t let the audience advance to the next topic if you are still in the first.

3.  Be simple.

Where most presentations fail is that their authors, convinced they are producing some kind of stand-alone document, put everything they want to say onto their slides, in great big chunky blocks of text.

Congratulations! They’ve just killed a roomful of people. Cause of death: terminal boredom poisoning.

      Don’t let them get bored by those miles and miles of text, instead, cut out the unnecessary words and focus on the main topic of the presentation.  Use big fonts (but not soooo big that the audience would focus on the font and not on the topic) for headings and regular fonts for body texts.

4.  Make it formal.

PowerPoint and other presentation packages offer all sorts of ways to add visual “flash” to your slides: fades, swipes, flashing text, and other annoyances are all too easy to insert with a few mouse clicks.

Avoid the temptation to dress up your pages with cheesy effects and focus instead on simple design basics:

·         Use decorative fonts only for slide headers, and then only if they’re easy to read. Decorative fonts are hard to read and should be reserved only for large headlines at the top of the page.

·         Use good contrast to the presentation.  Put dark text on a light background.  If you must use a dark background – for instance, if you would want to use a standard template with a dark background – make sure your text is quite light (white, cream, light grey, or pastels) and maybe enlarge the font size up two or three notches.

·         Align text left or right. Centered text is harder to read and looks amateurish. Line up all your text to a right-hand or left-hand baseline – it will look better and be easier to follow.

·         Avoid cluttering. A headline, a few bullet points, maybe an image is enough for your message to stand out.  Anything more than that and you risk losing your audience as they sort it all out.

5.  Use images sparingly.

            Use images only when they add important information or make an abstract point more concrete.

No, no, no! Don't use this!

            While we’re on the subject, absolutely do not use PowerPoint’s built-in clipart. Anything from Office 2003 and earlier has been seen by everyone in your audience a thousand times – they’ve become tired, used-up clichés, and I hopefully don’t need to tell you to avoid tired, used-up clichés in your presentations. Office 2007 and non-Office programs have some clipart that isn’t so familiar (though it will be, and soon) but by now, the entire concept of clipart has about run its course – it just doesn’t feel fresh and new anymore.

6.  Think outside the screen.

            Remember, the slides on the screen are only part of the presentation – and not the main part. Even though you’re liable to be presenting in a darkened room, give some thought to your own presentation manner – how you hold yourself, what you wear, how you move around the room.  You are the focus when you’re presenting, no matter how interesting your slides are.

7.  Have them wanting for more.

            Like the best writing, the best presentation shook their audiences early and then reel them in. Open with something surprising or intriguing, something that will get your audience to sit up and take notice. The most powerful hooks are often those that appeal directly to your audience’s emotions – offer them something awesome or, if it’s appropriate, scare them. The rest of your presentation, then, will be effectively your promise to make the awesome thing happen or the scary thing not happen.

8.  Communicate.

            Questions arouse interest, attract curiosity, and engage audiences. So ask a lot of them. Build tension by posing a question and letting your audience stew a moment before moving to the next slide with the answer. Quiz their knowledge and then show them how little they know. If appropriate, engage in a little question-and-answer with your audience, with you asking the questions.

9.  Speak in a friendly tone.

            Especially when you’ve done a presentation before, it can be easy to fall into a drone, going on and on and on and on and on with only minimal changes to your inflection. Always speak as if you were speaking to a friend, not as if you are just reading a script. If keeping up a lively and personable tone of voice is difficult for you when presenting, do a couple of practice run-throughs.

10.  Break the rules.

            As with everything else, there are times when each of these rules – or any other rule you know – won’t apply. If you know there’s a good reason to break a rule, go ahead and do it. Rule breaking is perfectly acceptable behavior – it’s ignoring the rules or breaking them because you just don’t know any better that leads to shoddy boring presentations that lead to boredom, depression, psychopathic breaks, and eventually death. And you don’t want that, do you?