Avoid Death by PowerPoint
Death by PowerPoint. If you work in corporate America, you are probably familiar with the experience, if not the expression. Death by PowerPoint is a dark room with a big screen and a manager sitting with his back to the room, addressing his or her computer terminal as the attendees behind him or her fight to stay awake. PowerPoint has its place, as do slides, charts and handouts, but these tools must be used judiciously.
- Don't rely on PowerPoint as a crutch. Develop the meat of your presentation first and let the slides assist. Remember the purpose of the medium: it is a visual aid to reinforce what you are saying, and it is very helpful for reaching people who are visual, rather than auditory learners.
- Use the PowerPoint to highlight the key points. Remember those 3-5 concepts your attendees absolutely must remember if they forget everything else? Those things need to be on a PowerPoint (or chart, or slide, or handout).
- When the slides go up and the lights go down, conversation stops. Try to keep at least some of the lights on in the room, especially in the early morning or after lunch when people are sleepy. If your objective is to get people talking and thinking together, then keep the lights all the way up, and keep the PowerPoint text minimal. If you want interaction and you have a small group of people, you might be better off using flip charts instead of prepared slides.
- Turn around. Hey, you wrote that presentation. You don't have to read it off the projector. Face the people who have come to hear you speak. Better yet, stand up and smile at them. To flip slides, use a remote mouse or practice with the auto-timing feature of the program.
- Use the notes feature. Earlier in this course, we talked about writing out the script. PowerPoint has a wonderful feature that allows you to put all your notes right in the presentation without letting your audience see all that text. So, if you really, really want to make sure every single word you want to say is included in the PowerPoint file, then put it in the notes section.
- Learn the program well. When first learning this software, many people are so thrilled with its potential that they try to make it do everything it can, throwing in a lot of "fun" animation and graphics to "jazz up" the presentation. Result: you look like a kid with a new toy. Just because you can use cute gif's on every page doesn't mean you should. Take a PowerPoint course, learn what it can do, and then judiciously use its powers to contribute to your message.