Using PowerPoint to Your Benefit

I am not an expert on technical issues; neither have I pretended to be the first to open the world of PowerPoint presentations for a general public. We both technicians and humanitarians have become dependent on PowerPoint as the magic wand, the lifesaver to make our presentation job more relaxing, to save ourselves from stressful time being eye to eye with the audience. The resourceful web designers offer variety of helpful tools plus sound and visual effects even for super selective presenters. And yet, no one has repealed the magic of human factor.

I've been a lecturer for 20 years and I'm strongly convinced that we can only succeed with our talks by having a middle ground switching from technical to verbal side in our personal presentations. The easiest but yet not the most effective way to build a presentation is to collect numerous PowerPoint slides and start bombing your audience lulling it into a zombie-like state, making it insusceptible to further ideas.

Knowing how to use PowerPoint to your benefit not to failure is the aerobatics of a presenter. Let me show you what I mean by sharing a few tips on how to avoid the common mistakes that we tend to make.

1. Not a few presenters place everything they wanted to say on the slides. There's too much to read and this leads to some difficulties. Instead of listening to your explanation the audience is feverishly trying to read everything on the screen, but they fail. Doesn't it make them annoyed?

What is more, there are too many slides. People fidget impatiently on the edge of chairs, missing the point of the presentation. Put yourself into their shoes and walk around before presenting. You have been the audience more than ones, haven't you? Why not learn from the others' mistakes?

Remember that the idea behind giving a PowerPoint presentation is to create a guide for your talk, with supporting images and documents. Choose a few but the brightest slides. Your slides are no more than the dressing for your presentation, not the presentation itself. Their function is to reinforce what you're saying. If you do for some reason put it on the screen, your audience will never excuse your standing with your back to it reading the notes from the slides!

2. Animated objects and sounds can definitely give zest to your presentation, but you look pretty ridiculous if they don't work. I've seen these things fail too many times. If you are not going to use the same computer that you created your presentation with I would urge you not to include any embedded animation or sound files. If you still want to try, you should definitely if at all possible preview your presentation before giving it.

3. Never hesitate to address your audience, either to get them to participate or just to get them involved. It's easy to get very involved with what you do. However it's rather difficult to keep your audience's expectations in mind. Pick a couple of people that seem engaged and ask some questions. Keep the conversation on point, or your audience may start to stray, be relaxed and friendly. Provided you keep your temper even and controlled you'll be just fine.

4. To spare yourself from trouble of switching your mind from talk to technical details of your PowerPoint presentation get a good assistant. In most cases it is your assistant who changes slides. It's the best to make a copy of your report marking the places where to change a slide. Make sure that your helper is on close terms with a computer. Otherwise you will not enjoy the outcome of your presentation.

5. Take care of your slides design, all those things that make them friendly to public eye: dark text on a light background, a sans serif font for a body text and no clutter. Decorative fonts go well only for slide headers!

6. Making last-minute changes is a common thing many presenters do. Even the worse thing is to make changers right in the course of a presentation; the embarrassing thing which cripples and devalues the performance. You can rehearse your presentation; do a couple of practice run-through to make sure that it fits within a certain time frame. And why not provide possible reductions in advance in case the presentation time is altered? What if the audience starts asking questions, too many questions that will eat up a good part of your presentation time?

I remember the day my son rehearsed his PowerPoint business presentation. Our family (there were 4 of us plus 3 teddy-bears) was roleplaying a raggle-taggle audience having all types of its characters: too serious, impatient, talkative, demanding, sympathizing etc. Our comments and questions (sometimes rather provocative) often made our presenter stop, respond, explain, sometimes he had to calm the public down. It gave him the idea to come up with a few relevant jokes, to review his set of PowerPoint slides, to cut off unnecessary explanations. On the decisive day the management recognized that "the guy has really grown up" and praised the presenter.

In conclusion I would passionately encourage those of you who make presentations using PowerPoint safety-net to work hard to be able to control the flow of information and avoid mass boredom poisoning. Is your audience leaving the presentation room being awake? I find comfort in the hope you have just woken up your luck!