A number of months back, I wrote a post on how to avoid “death by PowerPoint.” My theme was that most PowerPoint presentations are way, way too long. (Like some of the 35 to 50 slide monsters I’ve worked on for a couple of major Silicon Valley giants who shall go unnamed.) In it, I talked about PechaKucha, a 20 slide x 20-second format devised by architects Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham. PechaKucha’s goal is concise, fast-moving presentations that don’t put the audience to sleep or make them want to leave the room.
This post owes thanks to Adrienne Tange of Write on Time Solutions, who recently blogged about “7 Tips to Create an Engaging PowerPoint Presentation.” Everyone engaged in creating or editing slide presentations needs to remind themselves of these simple yet powerful ideas.
Here are my top three favorites:
- Know your Audience ‒ Duh. But how many presentations have you sat through where the audience focus wasn’t clear. A good tip-off is use of terminology.
- Write an outline ‒ Yep. Just like for those high school term papers of yore. As Ms. Tange puts it, “You need a logical flow with an introduction, middle, and conclusion. For a deck with more than 15 slides, I recommend breaking the content into logical sections divided by separators.”
- Break your content into (short) bulleted statements ‒ If you need to expand on your thoughts, put additional content into a handout. Otherwise, the audience will be frantically reading text-heavy slides when they should really be listening.
As always, I recommend that you satisfy your curiosity about Ms. Tangeos other ideas by reading her post.
What are your PowerPoint peeves? One Women in Consulting colleague mentions “reading the slides to the audience” and presenting a plethora of data but leaving the audience to wonder “So what?”
What annoyances would you like to share?
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