Tips & Advice

Death by PowerPoint

Death by PowerPoint

I’m sure you’ve seen it before, ‘Death by PowerPoint’. It’s fast becoming the normal format for presentations and it’s killing off empathy and putting audiences asleep every time. The biggest reason for it is thus: The presenter reads from a comprehensive set of notes, the same notes appear as the slideshow and the same set of notes is printed out and given to the audience as Hand-outs. All three mediums are the same and there lies the problem. All three must be different.

Presenter’s Notes: These should be bullet pointed and list the presentation in a step by step manner. The bullet points act as prompts only and should not afford the presenter an opportunity to ‘read verbatim’ as this decreases eye contact and generates a monotone voice.

PowerPoint Slides: These should contain only the key bullet points which are supported by visuals (graphs or pictures etc.). Complex and or technical maps and drawings are ideally shown in a slideshow format. The PowerPoint slideshow should not contain spreadsheets or tables unless they are being used for impact and or as a guide (map) to a specific section of a handout.

Handouts: These need to be very comprehensive and contain all the detail and finer points. If you refer to aspects in your presentation then this is where the audience can find more detail at a later stage.

Internal Presentations and Conferences: You can use PowerPoint’s hand-out facilities to create the hand-outs. That does not mean simply printing off your visual slides, rather, create a new file.

External Presentations and Conferences: You may wish to consider a more up-market version for handouts, perhaps created in Word or Publisher. It is envisaged that these hand-outs are going to clients, potential clients or peer groups.

Remember: All three must be different. Let’s use Powerful PowerPoint Presentations.
A lot of organisations are not in a position to host in-house corporate training programmes and therefore we will be conducting a public course.

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