Power Point – 7 Barriers to Power Point Presentations Your Audiences Don’t Hate
Do you automatically open your Power Point templates every time you prepare for a business presentation or speech? Power Point has become the medium of choice for today’s business speakers, but most the public will say they don’t like it.
Here are 7 common barriers to making your Power Point presentations work for your audiences, and how to overcome them.
The starting point for every presentation you write is to ask the question, “What does the audience care about?” The answer should be about a pain or difficult situation they are facing and how you can help them deal with it. Once you know the answer, you can overcome the barriers to bad Power Point presentations.
#1) Too many bullets: You load your slides with bullet points because you don’t want to forget something the audience needs to know.
Solution: Be relentless in examining whether they really need to know everything. They will not be tested on your content. Remember that these sayings still apply: “less is more” and “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
#2) The bullets are too long: You write complete sentences with two or three thoughts in each.
Solution: Keep your bullet points short and comprehensive with just nouns and adjectives. “The highest quality help desk” says much more than “We offer highly trained help desk staff and the help desk is staffed 18 hours per day.”
#3) Complicated graphics– Your charts represent each detailed step that you would talk about if you were training someone in the process.
Solution: It goes up to 50,000 feet. Your audience will understand the terrain. Then she spends her speaking time making the whole story interesting and compelling and based on her experience.
#4) Too much information: you are presenting not teaching
Solution: Go back to your answer to the question “What does the audience care about?” So just give them the information that provides a solution to what matters to them. There is no history, no overview, no background. Only content that is strictly focused on addressing your current issue or problem.
#5) Special Effects: the IT people who developed Power Point get their job satisfaction from creating more bells and whistles.
Solution: Special effects belong in the movies, not in their presentation. They force you to distort your experience and ruin your ability to deliver a compelling presentation that works for your audience (see “What does your audience care about?”). Keep it simple: no builds, no flying text, just lots of white space around your carefully thought out short list of short bullet points.
#6) Hard to see: there’s a big difference between what looks great on your computer and what projects well.
Solution: Use the tried and true rules of the road: 12 point or larger fonts; no italics; light text on a dark background; large graphics and photos; non-custom colors.
#7) Poorly presented: Even the best written PowerPoint presentation can fail to move an audience if the presenter is poor.
Solution:
- speak only what you know
- Double the amount of time you think you need to practice
- Do not use pointers. If you must call attention to something on the screen, do it with your hand.
- Remember: you are the presentation and the slide deck is your backup. Talk to the audience and tell them what is important or interesting.
#7.5) Use slides when you don’t need them: It is not necessary to cover all the spoken content with one slide.
Solution: Insert some blank blue slides on your deck in the places where you are going to tell a story or use a prop or invite the audience to participate.