A few simple truths about business PowerPoint presentations… Part 1

1. Your audience can read faster than you can read aloud. If you are reading text from your slides, stop it. Right now. It’s impossible to read aloud faster than your audience can read from the slides. Because of this, doing so will only annoy your audience…  See #2.

2. If you have enough text on a slide that you feel compelled to read it, you have too much text on the slide. If you have a paragraph on the slide, and you wrote the paragraph, guess what? You know the material. Reduce your paragraph to two or three keywords, and then verbally expand upon it; in fact…

3. Illustrate your point (and your two to three word summary) with a picture, clip art, or graph. Here’s an example:

BEFORE:

Competitor A recently announced it will build a 250,000 sq. ft. manufacturing facility in Salvador, Brazil; this is A’s second facility in the country, the first a mfg. facility/DC located in Rio de Janeiro.

AFTER:

A: L.A. Expansion

As you begin to speak to this point, use Custom Animation to bring a map of Brazil onto the screen, and have stars or bullets illustrate the new and existing facility. And then simply talk to the point you wish to make. Without handling it in this fashion, you and your audience are simply reading your paragraph together. Except they’ll finish reading it before you do.

4. If you MUST include spreadsheets, use animated callouts or a product like Opazity to highlight the material upon which you wish to focus. Spreadsheets are nifty on my computer’s display or in the monthly financial package, but in a PowerPoint presentation they are just plain deadly. If you find yourself putting spreadsheets in your presentation, ask yourself what are the essential points you are trying to communicate. Given that, is the spreadsheet absolutely necessary? If not, ditch it. If you must show it, find a way to draw the audience’s attention to the essential data. I’ve been playing with Opazity lately – showing an entire spreadsheet, and then using Opazity (along with Custom Animation) to blur the non-essential data. Try it…

This is the first in a series of brief posts about using PowerPoint for real world business presentations…  as opposed to conference presentations or Steve Jobs’s new product launches. If you have tips or suggestions for improving PP presentations, please share them by commenting. Thanks for visiting!