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Black is Back

Black is Back

You have several options to create additional eye contact. The best and most effective one is to Black out the slideshow. You can do this by pressing the letter ‘B’ on your keyboard while running a PowerPoint slideshow. Go ahead and try it now, open any PowerPoint slideshow and then press the letter ‘B’. You can achieve the same affect by inserting Black slides in-between your slides. This gives off the illusion that the screen as gone ‘off’.

There are other bad habits and tendencies to avoid: Having sound effects and or animation (whizzing bullet points in etc) usually insults the audience. You cannot tell me that someone is impressed because your bullet point looks and sounds like it’s being created by an invisible giant typewriter!

Some brave souls have even ventured to try to time their presentations so that the slides automatically change at the precise moment the presenter reaches their next point… Unmitigated disaster. They usually stumble in the first 60 seconds and that throws out their timing for the rest of the presentation. Heaven help them if someone in the audience calls out a question!

The true secret of using visual aids is the age old adage “Less is More”. The less bells and whistles the more streamlined the presentation. The less words, the more listening. The less slides, the more eye contact.

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