There are 20,465 books on PowerPoint for sale on Amazon, which means that there are more than 4 million pages of content you could read to learn about how to give an effective PowerPoint presentation! You don’t have to read them all. In fact, if you just follow the 10 tips below, you will consistently be the most effective PowerPoint presenter anyone in your audience has ever seen.

1.    Create two separate PowerPoint slides, one for projecting on a screen, one to email audience members in advance and to hand out after your presentation. Your email/print PowerPoint slides can be jammed packed with words, numbers, text, data points—make it 200 pages if you like—the more the merrier.)

(The following tips apply just to the PowerPoint slides you are projecting)
2.    Use images, charts, pictures.
3.    Focus on one idea per slide. (one means one, it doesn’t mean cram 4 charts onto one page)
4.    Don’t use ANY text. (This is not a typo. You can call me insane. You can complain that your corporate culture demands you to use text. Blah, Blah, Blah. I’m telling you, text doesn’t work when you are projecting on a screen 20, 30 or even 50 feet away from people. This is not how human beings like to read).
5.    Us as many slides as you need.
6.    Don’t use any slide unless it makes your idea more understandable than you simply saying it AND it makes your idea more memorable than you simply saying it.
7.    If you want people to look at your slide, then shut your mouth.
8.    If you want people to listen to you, then don’t have any slide up to distract people.
9.    Remember you are the star of the presentation, not the PowerPoint.
10.    You aren’t prepared to give a PowerPoint presentation unless you can give the whole presentation without the ability to show the slides (because projectors and computers malfunction).

That’s really all you need to know about PowerPoint. There are a lot of smart, successful people in the world who will tell you that you must follow set rules such as use 10 slides and three bullet points on each slide with three words on each slide. These rules don’t work! (Though some of them will make your presentation less painful than the typical data dump) But don’t take my word for it; test for yourself. I have personally tested audiences all over the world for years and the only thing anyone ever remembers are slides with images, graphs or photos. No one ever remembers words—and it doesn’t matter how educated you audience is or how smart they are.

It’s just that our brains are more image processors than they are word processors. What is easier for you to remember if you meet someone once and then bump into them a month later, the spelling of their first and last name that you saw on a business card 4 weeks ago, or their face you saw 4 weeks ago? The person’s face of course; chances are you forgot the name.

The face is an image and that is what sticks in the memory.

Please note that I clearly said you have to have TWO separate PowerPoint presentations. If you only have one with photos and images, then you can and will be attacked as fluffy, superficial, non-substantive, and incomplete. You MUST have the second PowerPoint. This one is to be emailed to people (preferably in advance, but could be send out after the presentation too) and to be printed out and handed to them so they can read it when they darn well please. If you prepare both PowerPoints and the non-projected version has all of the data, numbers and facts that anyone could ever want, then you protect yourself from any criticism and you help people more by giving them a true resource material that they can refer back to for weeks or months later.

What works in one medium does not work necessarily in another medium. You might love reading Harry Potter, but if you went to the movie theater to watch a Harry Potter movie, you’d probably be pretty angry if all you saw was text moving across the movie screen for 27 straight hours. Most business executives would never think to take the text from their newspaper ads and turn that into their TV ads, and yet for some reason we think that text on our computer should work fine projected on a screen a long way away from people. It doesn’t work that way.

There is nothing worse than a bad PowerPoint presentation, but there is nothing better than a great presenter who uses PowerPoint effectively.
Most people use their PowerPoint slides as the poor man’s teleprompter. The foolproof presenter uses Powerpoint fo the sole benefit of his or her audience.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 8:11 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.