You're Failing at PowerPoint Presentations

I love a good presentation, whether it's in person or virtual, because a good presentation usually means someone is about to tell me a good story. I'm a visual learner so a few images or moving graphics are a plus to help me stay engaged. With that said, presenting PowerPoint slides is a lot like Red Velvet cake. It's either very well done, or poorly done, and rarely somewhere in between. Here are some reasons why your presentations fall flat.

1. You're using the wrong presentation view

I cannot tell you how many times I have been in a meeting event where the presenter calls up their presentation deck and I have eagerly awaited the full slide show experience, only to be disappointed.

The Normal Presentation View is useful for editing, especially shared editing. You can easily rearrange the slides by dragging and dropping from the left rail, see the slide order without leaving the slide you're editing, and add/view presenter notes. Unfortunately for the audience member, there are too many distractions. We are looking at the list of slides on the left, the notes, the toolbar at the top, and trying to understand why the zoom is set to 57% instead of paying attention to the actual content.

Do your attendees a solid and use the slide show view or at minimum, the reading view. The benefit of the slide show is your audience can see the main production view while you reference your notes in a separate window. Both views will run any transitions or animations you've added, and give your audience the full screen experience, but if you're presenting in an edit view, you don't have any of those elements in your slides anyway. Shame on you.

2. You don't have any animations or transitions

For many professionals, creating slide decks can feel like a useless endeavor. Throw some words on a slide, maybe a couple of graphics, and voila! The problem is, your audience can tell when there's no heart in your slides.

A nice slide transition or animated intro of words and graphics adds just enough flare to keep your audience tuned in and focused on the right content during the presentation.

3. Nothing but words

If your slides are all words, it could have been an email. That's right. I said it.

Words on the slides are necessary. But the brilliance of a well put together slide deck is the presenter's ability to elaborate in their own words in their own style. If the audience needs to do all of the reading, do they need to meet or need a presenter to do it?

Use built in templates that create visual separations in the text. And for the sake of good barbeque sauce, please use appropriate animations. In the example above, you might animate the entrance for each column, but not each individual bullet.

4. You don't practice

The best advice I ever received was from David A. Brown when we did a co-presentation on Agility and in our run through, he recognized how heavily reliant I was on the slides. David asked, "What if the technology fails..." and I can't present the slides to the audience? Sure enough, there was a technology glitch and we had no slides. (David, I think you jinxed me.) But thanks to that piece of advice, I began practicing the art of what I like to call The Talk. Even when I have the visualization of slides, I make it a point to practice telling the the audience a story where the slides are the supporting cast member, not the star.

Get comfortable with the story and take your presentation skills to the next level.

5. You take your animations and graphics too far

Full disclosure, this is a note to myself. Whether it's PowerPoint or some other presentation tool, I have been guilty of tossing in too many visualizations. Fortunately, I have worked with wonderful User Experience professionals like Ariana Sutton and Leilani Boyce who have reigned me in when my slides went a step or 10, too far. Too many graphics, animated entrances, and exits are disruptive to the eye and the audience checks out just as quickly as they would when there are too many words.

The idea is balance and using graphic and text elements with purpose. If you aren't sure if you have the right balance, phone a friend... better yet, phone a user experience or design expert.

PowerPoint is the tool of choice for many large companies. But if your presentations are poorly prepared and executed, the tool is not to blame. Prezi, Canva, and other tools which may make it easier to create presentation content can produce poor presentations just as easily.

I hope these tips will help you knock your next presentation out of the park. Your watching audience will thank you!