7 deadly sins of Death by PowerPoint and how to prevent them

PowerPoint presentations are the core of how we sell, how we get our message across to an audience, how we showcase our work. Unfortunately, we have all set through a “Death by PowerPoint” presentation which seemed to go on and on….

So how do you avoid making falling into that Slide-Trap ? A good PowerPoint presentation is all about being able to control the audience and keeping them focused. Keeping the audience attention is a combination of the speaker’s ability to present but also the way information is presented in the slides.

7 deadly sins of Death by PowerPoint and how to prevent them:

Tip 1 – Keeping Focus

Key fact to remember is that as soon as a slide is on the screen, the audience begins to read. Therefore, the more there is on the screen, the less reason there is to listen to the presenter. Conversely, the less information there is on the slide the quicker the audience’s focus shifts back to the presenter. Need to find a balance between putting too much on the slide and not putting enough to even grab the attention.

Tip 2 – Fonts, Alignment and Animation

When you use text in the slide adjust the font side to ensure that it is easily read from the back of the room. Align all text to the left as that makes it simple for the eye to follow and avoid having text that is centred, in italics or pretty strange fonts and colours. While on the screen these looks artistic, on a presentation it does not always translate well especially in a room that is too bright.

Avoid having text fly in from any part of the screen as these animations just devalue the presentation.

Tip 3 – Stop & Explain

As a presenter you set the speed and tone of the presentation. Therefore, only show one item at a time on your slide and then stop & explain. Reveal the next point only when the audience is ready to move on. A common mistake is to reveal several bullet points and begin to explain each one while the audience is clearly reading the points ahead.

Tip 4 – Less is much more

Slides should be used to focus attention on a specific comment. Many presenters overload a slide with entire paragraphs of text and then begin to read the text to the audience. This is a big no-no. Audience immediately lose focus when there is too much text and will ask for a copy of the presentation so they could read it later. Audience is no longer on your side.

Tip 5 – To Image or Not to Image

A picture paints a thousand words and this is certainly true in PowerPoint presentations. Use pictures to augment the talking point and to highlight key messages. A pro-tip would be to avoid using the default built in clipart images that are shipped with PowerPoint so that the audience doesn’t recognise standard images.

Tip 6 – Graphs/ Diagrams

Instead of having loads of stats and figures on the screen, use Microsoft Excel to create graphs/ pie charts/ diagrams. Use big bold headings that are descriptive to an audience that will see the information for the first time.

If highlighting differences between figures ensure your graphs uses bold opposing colours and not different shades of the same colour. Shades of the same colour on a large screen in a bright room will simply look the same losing the meaning of the graph.

Once the graph is complete, simply copy-and-paste it into the PowerPoint slide. What is great about working with Excel and PowerPoint is that as you make a change to the Excel spread sheet which changes the graph, it will automatically change the graph in your PowerPoint presentation.

Limit your slides to having one graph per slide. This keeps the audience eyes focused and not trying to decipher the meaning of the second diagram. If you do need to have a second graph, keep it hidden until you are ready to discuss it and only then reveal is. This is controlled with PowerPoint’s animation.

Tip 7 – Fail to Plan, Plan to Fail

The best presentations are those that seem completely unrehearsed and yet those are the ones that are most planned. PowerPoint has a Rehearse Timer Tool which records how many minutes you spend on each slide. This is useful to not only tweak the presentation but also allows you to set it to automatically change slide after the set-time elapses. This keeps the presenter on point and doesn’t allow for side-tracking.

*images from Shutterstock.com