I get to see a lot of presentations. Plenty of Powerpoint. I would rate most of these performances as somewhere between awful and intolerable, with an occasional mix of meh.
But it’s so easy to fix. Here’s the key thing:
Make one visually engaging point per slide.
That’s it.
One point.
See the above?
That’s one of my main points when I give talks about clarity.
Now, I accompany this slide with a handful of statistics. But those, I read off my notes (or from memory, if it’s a good day).
I DO NOT MAKE IT A MIND-NUMBING SERIES OF BULLET POINTS ON THE SCREEN!
Your goal with each slide should be instant comprehension, graphically seasoned with a bit of humor, beauty, surprise, or interesting-ness.
Let bullet points, outlines, and verbiage be part of any take-away summary. Keep that death-dealing data delivery off the screen.
You’re there to engage, entertain, and energize. Slides should be for illustration and story-telling, not information-dumping.
I recently saw a handful of capabilities presentations for a high-profile, high $$$ project. Only ONE was actually engaging. The others were a bullet-point bonanza.
You want to be the one that stands out from the noise…
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