July 16, 2008
Q. Any guidelines for PowerPoint presentations? Sometimes it’s downright brutal to sit through a seemingly endless stream of these during board meetings and conferences.
A: We understand your pain! We’ve seen many excellent PowerPoint presentations, but just as many poor ones, unfortunately. A PowerPoint presentation can be effective and interesting if it’s used as an aid, not a crutch. Here are some tips for designing and delivering a good one:
Use just a few slides as visual aids to support and illustrate your key messages. If you have too many slides, it’s easy to get tangled up in trying to get through the slides rather than focusing on reaching your audience with your key messages.
Rehearse aloud and time your PowerPoint. This is a crucial step. Avoid cramming too many slides into a single presentation. Better to leave your audience wanting more. Allow two – three minutes per slide.
Photographs, easy-to-read graphs, cartoons and other graphics are the best use of a PowerPoint slide. The slide should enhance or illustrate what you are saying to the audience.
Look at the audience when you speak, not the screen. Reading your presentation from PowerPoint slides is a definite no-no.
Use a slide to reinforce a key message by putting the key message, word-for-word (no more than 15 words), on the slide. As you prove your message with facts, examples or stories, you can reveal these in short bullet-point fashion under the message.
Avoid putting too many words on the screen or a graph that can’t be read from the back of the room. Your audience will stop listening to you as they struggle to read the screen or they will give up and lose interest entirely.
Distribute handouts to the audience after your speech with details and graphs that can’t be displayed on the screen.
Hopefully, these tips will take your PowerPoint presentations from brutal to brilliant!
Need advice? Send your situations to Dome.
Paula Blanchard Stone and Patty McCarthy are partners in McCarthyBlanchard, an executive training firm specializing in key message development, presentation skills training, media interview training and executive presence. Copyright © 2008 McCarthy Blanchard. | Website
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