5 Ways to Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Stand Out

How to, Presentation, Small business0 comments

When making a presentation, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of relying on your PowerPoint slides to help get your message across.  Although PowerPoint may be a great tool to help you present your information in a creative and interesting way, it’s dangerous to rely on it fully as this will just turn your audience off from what you’re saying.

Here are 5 tips to help make your presentation stand out from the crowd.

1. Be Compelling

PowerPoint is a great tool to put together eye-catching presentations, but remember that your audience has come to hear you, not look at a slide.  So by all means make your PowerPoint presentation look professional and engaging but don’t forget that your speech needs to be compelling too.  Remember, your slides are there to support your spoken presentation, not the other way round!

2. Keep it simple

Don’t overwhelm your audience with a mass of data, graphics and animations.  The most effective PowerPoint presentations are simple — charts that are easy to understand, and graphics that reflect what the speaker is saying. It’s been suggested that there should be no more than five words per line and no more than five lines per individual slide. Any images, graphs and animations need to back up the information, not confuse the audience.

3. Be Engaging

Many of us have sat through a presentation where we have spent the whole time looking at the back of the speaker’s head!  They have spent so much time reading off the slides, they don’t engage with the audience.  PowerPoint works best with a speech that augments what’s on the screen rather than just reading off the slide. Remember, you need to interact with the audience in order for them to engage and listen to you.

4. Don’t use PowerPoint!

There’s a time and place for PowerPoint.  It should only be used as an accompaniment to the presenter’s script so let the screen go blank if you need  to.  This gives your audience a break, but also helps to focus their attention on what the presenter is saying, especially during the question and answer session.

5. Rehearse and edit

Once you’ve drafted your speech and slides then rehearse your presentation.  Do this preferably in front of someone else to ensure that what you are saying and presenting can be easily understood.  If something comes across as distracting or confusing then get rid of it.  Remember to keep the needs of the audience in your mind at all times as they are the ones who will be the ultimate judge of how successful your presentation has been.

Top tips for successful presenting

How to, Presentation, Small business1 comment

At a workshop recently I heard someone giving a talk which was really interesting and I took away some valuable points from it.  So it got me thinking about what makes a good presentation.   Now, I’ve designed a lot of PowerPoint presentations in my time but I’ve delivered very few of them.  Like a lot of people, the thought of standing up in front of a group makes me nervous.  However, others can stand up for an hour and speak off the cuff about their subject, and make it interesting and memorable.  How do they do it?  OK, there are a few people who are natural public speakers, but for most of us, it takes a lot of preparation to stand up and speak clearly and concisely about our subject.

So from my experience of both creating and listening to presentations, I’ve put together some tips of what I think can make or break a presentation.

Do

• Rehearse your speech and ideally get someone to listen to you or record yourself.
• Know the message you are trying to get across and stick to the key points.
• Keep the colour scheme simple and ensure the text is readable against the background.
• Have the same slide design throughout the whole presentation.
• Put your company branding and logo on the presentation if appropriate
• Keep animations and transitions to a minimum so they don’t confuse and distract the audience.
• Make the information more interesting by using pictures, charts, and animations.

Don’t

• Speak without any preparation or notes unless you’ve done it successfully before.
• Start the presentation without checking that everyone can hear you.
• Wander off the subject.  If you do, let the audience know why and quickly come back to the topic.
• Use technical language, acronyms or jargon unless it is relevant for your audience.
• Read from a script as it can sound stilted and prevents you from making eye contact with the audience.
• Put everything you want to say on the PowerPoint slide and then just read it out.
• Overload the slide with too much graphics or animation.  They should be used to make the message clearer not confuse the audience.

Perhaps you have other tips to add to the list?  However, it’s important to remember that a clearly delivered and well-designed presentation will promote you and your business professionally and effectively to existing and potential clients.