5 STEPS TO AN AMAZING POWERPOINT PRESENTATION

Did you know that May 22nd is PowerPoint’s birthday?  Most of the world now uses PowerPoint and business leaders are beginning to create engaging visual presentations that break the old mold of boring, death by bullet point slide decks. However, the bar is still low for the majority of presentations. Millions of talks are occurring at this very moment and at least half of them are unbearable. In fact, we’ve all probably been bored to tears by a presentation within the last month. 

In the spirit of creating killer presentations, here are 5 tips from The MOXiE Institute on how to create a professional and engaging visual presentation that may just make you jump up and sing "Happy Birthday" to our friend, the PowerPoint presentation.

Be different Danger! PowerPoint presentation slides can annoy your audience. Step out of the Microsoft comfort zone, and mix it up. Don’t use the expected boring templates or fall into the bullet trap. It’s no longer necessary to kill your audience members with ugly, dull presentations. Look for places in your slides to replace bullets and text with an image that will stir feeling in the audience. Don’t know where to start? There’s no room for excuses with these: Here’s over 58,000 free presentation templates from PresentationsMagazine.com for you to enjoy! Set this up and remember to save it before you begin so you won’t have to customize each slide individually.

Incorporate imagery When your slides rock, your whole presentation pops to life. Visual aids should complement your presentation and amplify the meaning of your words. Use them to help the audience understand your message and select images that expand on it. After all, images can say more than 1,000 words! In fact, studies point to the fact that including a visual image that elicits emotion from your audience will help them retain the information up to 80% more than if you just included text. Pictures should be high resolution and formatted correctly for a polished professional presentation. Infographics also work well visually, are more interesting than tables and text and it’s a great way to put a lot of information in a single image allowing it to be absorbed quickly. Most people are more deeply influenced by one clear, vivid, image than by an abundance of statistical data.

Change your font My name is Times New Roman and I am not original. While you may have turned in countless documents with this font, we can all do better. Create a theme or story and choose a font that falls in line with it. Some fonts are more serious or playful than others so keep your audience in mind. If you want your audience to take you seriously, however, don’t pick a cartoonish font.

Less is more Slides are NOT the same as documents. If you are simply putting all your text on a slide deck, you might as well cancel the presentation and email over the document to your audience. Know this and embrace it. There are 10 million bad, obscure ways to present information and one clear, direct one. Remember, the audience can’t read AND listen at the same time but they can listen and look at relevant imagery. If your slides are too heavy with copy, they’ll be reading them and not listening to you or your message. Slides should feel like a visual experience rather than the presenters notes. Make it simple and keep your audience from daydreaming. Clear uncomplicated slides are the most effective, and as a good rule of thumb should be understandable in five seconds or less.

Don’t read your slides The responsibility to light the fire in an audience, to ignite and inspire them lies in the presenter. There are still some presenters that read their slides word for word. Don’t be that person.  Remember, PowerPoint is not your teleprompter. This not only annoys the audience, it takes away from your ability to connect with them. If you’re reading slides, you’ll undoubtedly sound flat and mind numbing (and are most likely not making crucial eye contact, either).

 What’s the bottom line? An effective presentation contains both logic (the data of your talk) and emotion (visuals, stories and descriptive language).  Our friend Aristotle called this ethos and pathos. Face time in front of an audience is golden and is best used to connect, inspire and persuade. Let's use PowerPoint's birthday as an opportunity to end the bullet point onslaught of the past and create presentations that matter!

At The MOXiE Institute, we know that if your ideas matter, then your words matter. And, if your words matter, then your presentations matter. Organizing your presentation can be challenging. Check out our previous post Presentation Spring Cleaning and How to Organize Your Talk for Greatest Impact to get started.

The MOXiE Institute. Transforming ideas into action.