Don’t be a PowerPoint Putz! 5 Principles to help create Slide Presentations your audience will love.
You walk into the meeting room and beaming middle manager Johny has the screen all set up with clicker in hand and it suddenly dawns on you. It’s another PowerPoint Presentation!
PowerPoint!
Let me be clear. There’s nothing at all wrong with the technology. As a piece of software it is actually incredibly powerful, versatile and nowadays pretty user-friendly.
Still, too much of any one thing can make you nauseous, and if, like me, you’ve had to sit through one uninspiring presentation after another full of pie charts, graphs and (my personal bug bear) bullet points, you will understand my antipathy towards PowerPoint (and this includes Keynote, Prezi, and all other slide presentation software options). They don’t call it Death by PowerPoint for no reason.
Yet, it is a great tool and I am supposed to be a public speaking guy, so here are my Top 5 Principles of PowerPoint Presentations.
Hope they help, but promise me you’ll do 3 things before you even power up your laptop and open up PowerPoint.
i) First work out your objectives. What do you want your audience to know, believe or do once you’ve given your presentation.
ii) Assume PowerPoint will no be available on the day, and plan your presentation completely without it
iii) If, after all that, you can see that having a PowerPoint will actually enhance your presentation, then and only then, should you proceed to fire up the software, and prepare your slides
Now, be honest. How many times have you done it precisely the other way round? Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. I confess also to not always practising what I preach. But I’m trying. Please try too!
(have you been to my Elevator Pitch School? www.elevatorpitchschool.com)
Here are the Principles:
PRINCIPLE 1: Use PowerPoint as a Sword and not a Shield
PowerPoint is used as a shield when you hide behind the slides by making them the primary focus of your presentation, rather than you and what you are saying. If you find that the vast majority of your preparation time has been spent using the software, rather than working on your message, Stop!
The outcome if you continue will be that the presentation you deliver will then be all about the slides, rather than your message and objectives.
What will then happen is:
- instead of facing and engaging with your audience, you will face the screen because your own focus is on your slides
- Because you put so much information on the slides, you’ll probably even start reading out the text that is on the screen
- If the IT system fails, which is always a risk, you will be completely lost.
PowerPoint is used as a sword (ie a tool to make your point with) when you use it only to enhance the message that you are already going to give. So a great visual might give a graphic representation of the points you make verbally.
When you use PowerPoint this way, it gives your presentation an extra dimension. This way you will find:
- Your audience notice and remember your message rather than just your slides
- You will talk directly to your audience and engage them in what you are saying, instead of talking to the screen.
- It won’t matter if an IT error messes up the PowerPoint.
Don’t be a PowerPoint Putz like this guy!
He is literally hiding behind his Powerpoint slides.
PRINCIPLE 2: Keep it Clean!
How many slides have you seen that look like this?
When your slide is cluttered and full of text, graphs, charts etc, it makes it hard for your audience to understand, which means you have to spend lots of time explaining the slides and reading the information already on there.
This is better. But even so it still has a lot of text that your audience will have to read and if they are reading what’s on screen, they are not engaging with you and what you say.
Reduce the text on screen to as few words and characters as possible to still make the point.
In this presentation by a manager about a 3.6% improvement in CPU performance, we’ve paired down the text on this slide to just the main point.
But we can still do better!
Add an image to the text and suddenly you have a much more interesting slide that directly focuses on the value of the point you are making.
Here, we are saying that a 3.6% improvement in performance means better computer power, which is great for the experience of the user.
This slide is much more effective! (be sure to choose an appropriate image for you particular presentation.
Keep your slides clean and focused. There are no hard and fast rules, but:
try to have no more than say 6 words per slide; use large fonts and easy to see colours; relevant images are great to help make the point.
PRINCIPLE 3: No bullets, please.
Bullies should stay in guns. There is no real need for them on your slides.
As surprising as it sounds, some of the worst examples of the use of PowerPoint and the overuse of bullet points comes from Mr Microsoft, Bill Gates himself.
If you have to have more than a few words of text on a slide, try to avoid bullet points completely.
You can use the technique of TITLE & Detail ie the heading and then info e.g.
Here the Title is on the left and the detail is on the right. Not a bullet point in sight!
PRINCIPLE 4: Save the tricks for the circus.
The objective of your presentation is to inform, persuade or motivate.
So your PowerPoint slides are just tools to help you achieve that objective. They should never become the primary object of your focus.
Lots of special effects (flying text, bouncing images, whooshing sounds) just means that your audience will stop focusing on your actual message, turning the slides into a distraction, instead of an enhancement.
Save the tricks for the circus. Use your slides only to help emphasise a point you are going to make when you speak.
Remember, if you find yourself spending lots of time worrying about how to get your words flying across the screen or how to make your images dissolve in a cool way, you will be doing yourself, your presentation, and your audience a huge disservice.
PRINCIPLE 5: Spend One Third of Your Time in Practice.
There is no substitute for practice.
Take a leaf from the late Steve Jobs, who despite being an acknowledged master of keynote speeches, would practise endlessly to get it right.
(Jobs practising his Keynote Presentation)
As a rule of thumb for any speech or presentation you have to give, spend one third of whatever time you have allowed yourself for preparation (research, planing etc), one third for writing the content or notes of your presentation and the final third for practising delivery.
Practise. Practise. Practise. Practise until you get it right. If you find yourself taking far more time to create your slides than to practise using them, stop and refocus.
It is you, not your slides that your audience will learn the most from. You should be the center of attention.
PowerPoint – the clue is in the name: either you have the Power or it does. Either you control it, or it will control you.
Good luck!
Kolarele Sonaike
The Great Speech Consultancy
p.s. Is your Elevator Pitch letting you down? Here’s my guide to help.
Hitler discovers that there is no PowerPoint for his presentation!
This scene from the movie Downfall with a mesmerising performance from Bruno Ganz as Adolf Hitler has been the source of many spoofs and parodies.
Here we’ve taken the scene to highlight the perils of PowerPoint presentations.
The 5 Primary Principles of PowerPoint Presentations
“Because it’s there”
This was the famous response of English Mountaineer, George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest.
Similarly, PowerPoint is used in the vast majority of business presentations, not necessarily because it is needed, but because it is there and because it is expected.
Don’t fall into this trap. The first rule of presentations is: You don’t have to use PowerPoint. The second rule of presentations is: YOU DON’T HAVE TO USE POWERPOINT!
But assuming you’re not quite ready to break with convention, here are Five primary principles of PowerPoint to help with your presentations:
1) Keep it clean
Clutter is the enemy of comprehension.
Aside from strong use of images, keep the number of words to the bare minimum. The more your audience is reading the screen, the less it is listening to you. Use large fonts and headlines and don’t be afraid of clear space.
Any detailed text that your audience needs to have, put it in a handout.
Lets take the example of a presentation to announce the performance of a computer chip department (inspiring stuff!). The department has achieved:
- a 3.6% increase in efficiency in the last 3 months
- 195,498 more units sold than the nearest competitor
- it now has a 29% market share
- Production problems in the factory have been overcome giving a 6% increase in production
- Cost per unit has gone down from 37p to 29p
- Department profit was £245,870 in October
Lots of information to get across and the temptation would be to set it out in a busy and detailed slide like this (below). But the more detailed your slide, the less involved your audience will be.
Information overload. Too much text. Charts unintelligible unless explained
2) Words not bullets
Bullet points are a form of slow torture and death for your audience.
No doubt the first 100 times that the bullet point was used in presentations it felt fresh and innovative (what did people do before PowerPoint was launched in 1990), but now it just signals pain.
Yet, you may still think you need to set out and categorise your points. If you feel you must, use words and titles instead of bullets.
They make more sense to an audience and are visually more appealing.
So take our computer chip department. Compare the two slides:
The left slide is text laden with dense and distracting bullet points. The right slide uses title words instead of bullets and headline figures and ticks instead of lengthy sentences. It’s better, but even this still has too much text.
3) Computer will say no
“If it can go wrong, it will go wrong” and technology can and often does go wrong and usually at the most critical point.
Prepare your presentation on the assumption that the technology will fail so that if and when it does, you won’t be thrown.
Principle Number 4 below will help you with that.
Back to our computer chip department. Here is a new slide.
Cleaner & leaner. Minimal text so the audience is not overloaded. But we can still do better.
4) Make it count
Prepare your presentation completely as though you were not going to use any slides at all. Then and only then, create your slides.
This process will also help you with Principle Number 3 above.
Make your slides count. Make them look good. Their form and their function should add a greater or different dimension to what you are going to say anyway.
Consider that a picture says a thousand words. So choosing and using the right image, will allow you to say a thousand words fewer to make your point.
Imagine for instance that you had to give your entire presentation using only slides, without you speaking and featuring no more than a few (five or six) words per slide. You would be forced to focus on the headlines, not details and use meaningful images and words not wasteful meaningless ones. That’s what you have to aim for.
And so to the computer chip guys. To convey the 3.6% improvement in the efficiency of the chip. No bullet points and sentences. No dull picture of what a chip looks like. Lets go further.
We’ve now moved completely away from text as the primary feature to an image based slide. The headline figure of 3.6% is there so the presenter can talk about the 3.6% improvement in efficiency.
But the image also puts into perspective what this improvement actually means in real terms ie a better software experience for the user. This image adds a greater dimension to the words.
5) Practice. Practice. Practice.
Everything about your presentation has to work seamlessly.Your words. Your delivery. Your slides. Know them inside out.
Practice how you will move the slides along (using a remote, asking a colleague, playing on a set loop etc).
Practice so that it works perfectly.
If Steve Jobs, the acknowledged master of the presentation, particularly because of how he used visuals to supplement his words, had to practice for hours on end to get it right, the rest of us need to put in some serious overtime. So learn from the master.
Steve Jobs unveils the Iphone
Don’t leave it to chance. Get it right.
Every speech or presentation, even in a business context, has to make an emotional connection to the audience to be memorable.
PowerPoint can help you do this. But with this great power, comes great responsibility.
Get it wrong and you’re the villain. Use it right and you’ll be the superhero.
Next blog: Finding a great theme for your speech
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