A slow, painful death…
Any company with a bit if self respect is producing a vast amount of PowerPoint presentation every day. And granted, the program is excellent for structuring a presentation and to use as a support when the presentation is delivered.
But honestly; how many presentations have you sat through which made you wish for a quicker death because of boring slides in an endless stream?
In order to set the tone, take a break and get yourself a good laugh on how you’re not supposed to do it. Don McMillian is illustrating it rather efficiently here:
So, it’s all about making clear what you want with your presentation, so it doesn’t end up in the category Death by Powerpoint.
Here’s what you can do:
- Think through which story you want to tell. It’s like a story in real life – you start by building momentum, you take your viewers through a process and end up by giving them the solution. This is what your presentation should express.
- Depending on what you want to explain, you can consider using a method used by both Martin Luther King and Steve Jobs, who both knew exactly how to catch their audiences. The emthod is used for speaches, but the logic works for presentations as well. You start out by telling where we are now, then you talk a little about where we could be and then go back to where we are now. This pattern is repeated a couple of times building up to the finale where you reveal the solution, where we should be. This is what you want your audience to remember when they leave your presentation. It may sound a little confusing, but take a look at the drawing, and you will see what I mean (click for a bigger size):
- It’s a very bad habit to create PowerPoints loaded with content. I usually call this Word documents with bigger fonts. What you can do, is to create your presentation in a wordy version, which can be used to send after the meeting. Then you create a version where you shorten it up to only keywords, and this is the version you use in the actual presentation. Remember that your slides should back-up your presentation and not be a full manuscript. If you read from long sentences in your presentations, you have in a way made coming to the meeting obsolete… And your audience will start reading the slides themselves and stop listening to you.
- Som effects are fine, like words sliding in by clicking the mouse, because it’s possible to control when you reveal your content, but use it wisely!
Do you go beserk with presentations in your company?
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