Don't let PowerPoint drive the bus

Don't let PowerPoint drive the bus. The biggest challenge with PowerPoint is not making it the most important part of your talk. It's not. Your presentation is the information you are sharing with the audience, it's not the slide deck. In order your priorities should be:

• Your audience
• Your presentation
• Your presence
• and only at the end should you consider your PowerPoint

But too often the allure of this electronic magic proves too powerful. We create a new PowerPoint, "just to jot down some notes," and soon we are sucked into the program, making slide after slide, flips, dips, and spins. No longer is PowerPoint one of several communication tools we utilize, PowerPoint comes to dominate the talk and sometimes even becomes confused for the presentation. How often do you hear someone ask you to "Send me your presentation?" What they mean is your slide deck and if you've done it correctly the slide deck doesn't tell anyone much without you there.

A few cautionary thoughts:

• Less is more. Fewer words and put away the wacky transitions.
• PowerPoint makes a crappy teleprompter. Memorize your presentation and have a few notes with you. Reading your presentation from the slides is an insult to your audience.
• If you've ever said, "Now I know you can't read this..." you've failed. If the person in the very back can't read your slide you should not include it.
• Additional slides are cheap. If you have four points, put them on four different slides and bring them up one at a time.
• Use a couple of key words, not an entire sentence.
• Charts and graphs should be reduced to the absolute basics necessary to communicate your information so they will be more legible. Don't, for instance, show us seventeen quarters of profits when you're only going to talk about the last three. Remove and reduce every bit of information that doesn't have to be there.
• No one ever benefits from the childlike clip art included with the program.
• Learn to blank the screen (hitting the "B" on your keyboard or certain buttons on your slide advancer) and blank the screen whenever you aren't directly talking about what is on the slide. Your audience's attention will move back to you rather than staring at the screen.