Creating a PowerPoint presentation is seemingly simple – you just have to pick the appropriate template, collect some information and organize it properly, and then just distribute it along your PowerPoint slides in a presentable fashion. Yet there’s always a lot more to it than that. Giving a presentation is an activity that takes a lot of practice to get right, and its success depends not only on the contents of your presentation, but also the way you’re giving it to the audience. Anyone can put together some information and put it up for show – but there is a huge difference between just showing something to people, and having them remember it.
The most common mistake made by beginners is to overload their audience with information. You’ve crammed several charts (some of good charts you find here) into a single PowerPoint slide, and on top of that you unleash a verbal stream of knowledge at them while they are trying to comprehend what they are looking at. Care to guess how much of it all they’ll recall five minutes later? If you guessed anything above 0%, you have some really misaligned expectations.
The trick is to make your viewers curious about the things they’re seeing – show them a piece of the picture but not everything, leave some parts out – when the room goes silent as everyone is eagerly listening to you to get the missing parts, you’ll realize how much of an impact this can have. Of course, leaving out too much can have a detrimental effect and leave your viewers confused – so you should strike a fine balance.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words – but what they don’t tell you is that it can be completely worthless as well, depending on the context. While it’s true that the appropriate picture can really boost the effect of your Power Point slide, relying on images too much can bore or distract your viewers and prevent them from taking in the important bits from your presentation. Use an image in the fashion we described earlier, to give viewers a piece of a puzzle which they’d then expect you to reveal completely.
Timing is king in the whole process of giving your presentations – knowing how long to keep each slide on the screen is priceless. The best way to do that is to test it yourself – get a stopwatch and start going through your Power Point template slides, noting how long it takes you to read each one completely. Write this down for yourself somewhere where you’ll have it handy afterwards, when you’re giving the presentation – and you’ll be able to control the audience with the greatest degree of success you could wish for.
In the end, it’s not just about what’s on your slides – it’s how you present it to your audience. The right tone, pacing and attitude can make all the difference between success and failure, but sadly there’s no real way to learn those invaluable skills other than practicing them – so get out there and start giving presentations!
