Stop Death By PowerPoint

Bored Dog We have all been to those presentations. A sales meeting, a seminar, or even a church service. The presenter used powerpoint and put everyone to sleep. How can this happen? Isn’t PowerPoint supposed to make presentations exciting? Aren’t the visual queues supposed to keep the audience involved and engaged?

I have put people to sleep during various types of presentations all over the place at different times throughout my career. It goes without saying that I use PowerPoint; I just don’t use it to my advantage. Much has been studied about what works and what doesn’t work in PowerPoint, and it’s high time we presenters started to listen.

Let’s take a few minutes to improve our presentation skills. I did, and after going through the PowerPoint below, I can tell you my next presentation will be much better.

From this presentation, I took away five main things:

Be passionate. Only present on things you care about. If you don’t have any meaning to your presentation, it will be boring.
Use lots of pictures. If you are not a member of a stock photo site such as ablestock.com, consider using creative commons to search for good pictures.
Keep the slides uncluttered. Only put the absolute most important words on the slide, so the point gets across. Keep the focus on you, the presenter. Break wordy slides up into multiple slides.
Don’t follow the conventional rules. It’s best to ignore the old rules about how many slides to have and how many points to put on a slide. Just make it interesting and easy to understand. If you have to scroll through slides more rapidly, thats OK.
Practice Make sure you are prepared by practicing multiple times, checking out your equipment, and knowing your audience. Being prepared will give you the confidence you need to carry the presentation.

Remember: Good presentation = inspired audience = more sales = more money = better economy.

Help out the economy and give some good presentations!

Mike Freeman
I promise not to kill you with my next PowerPoint.