Better PowerPoint Presentation? Give Away Your Computer

Posted on December 12, 2012 by Edward Rice, One of Thousands of Performance Coaches on Noomii.

Here is the plan to help make your next presentation better than it has ever been.

Step 1: Give Away Your Computer

The best way to start planning your slide presentation is to give your computer to someone trustworthy. Make her take an oath that she will only give it back once you are done with Step 3. Good PowerPoint presentations start off of the screen.

Step 2: Speech First and Slides Second

Write out what you would say if you didn’t have any slides for your presentation. What if you just had a whiteboard or nothing at all? Decide on your main point and the needs of your audience. From there, decide on your beginning, middle, and end. During this time, you should also focus on the length of your presentation. Cut your allotted time by 5-10 minutes, and include only the necessary information. Put the rest of the information in a supporting document to hand out after your presentation.

Step 2.5: Ask yourself, “Do I really need a slide presentation?” At this point, you may realize that you don’t need a slide presentation. A white board and a few handouts may be all you need. It’s possible that you will make history in your office by being the first person to do a presentation without PowerPoint slides.

Step 3: Storyboard

One step closer to using Microsoft’s bronze-standard software. Get sticky notes or index cards and make each one into a separate slide. Put them in the order you want for your presentation. Small items force you to put the essential information on each slide and allow you to move slides around for a better sequence.

Extra tip: For slide design tips at this point, only two matter the most:

-One main idea per slide: You don’t want your audience to read 10 long lines of text and ignore your words. Put 1-2 sentences on each slide for your main idea. This type of design will prevent you from turning your presentation into the “normal” type where the presenter reads every single word as their speech.

-Combine pictures with words: For pictures, people remember better when pictures are combined with words. Clip Art is off-limits. A free source of great pictures is “search.creativecommons.org”. Check the attribution licenses with each picture. You can go here for a set of sites that include paid and free sources of stock photographs.

Step 4: Go Find Your Computer

Finally, go get your computer and translate your storyboard slides into real ones. For any photographs you use, go for the full size of the screen and make sure that they maintain their resolution. For font size, make the size large enough for anyone wearing glasses in the back of the room can see it.

Step 5: Location, Location, Location
-Is anyone in the audience going to sit at a weird angle or far in the back? Check your font size to make sure someone with horrible vision can see your slides.

-What does the room look like at the time of the day you’ll be giving your presentation? I’ve had the pleasure of sitting next to a wall of east-facing windows at 8 AM in the morning during a slide presentation.

-Where will you be standing while giving it? I was in a conference room at a pretty fancy tech company, and they thought it was a good idea to put the conference table up against the full length of the screen.

Step 6: Practice

Get someone else into the room to watch. Even for a 5-10 minute speech, you need to practice far more than you think. Practice individual parts that give you trouble. Make sure you practice the whole thing 15-20 times (if not more). It sounds like too much, but do you want to be giving your presentation for the 21st time or the 1st time? Your words and planning are your presentation—your slides are not. Slides are there to support what you are saying. Always ask yourself when planning your presentation, “If the power goes out, could I still get my main point across to my audience?”

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© Edward Rice, Silver Podium LLC