PowerPoint Mistakes to Avoid
Business Technology | July 13, 2012
I’m sure you’ve had to sit through uninteresting PowerPoint presentations before. It seems like they go on forever and you hardly retain any of the information. What a total waste of time right? If you agree, make your next presentation more interesting with some of the ideas below.
Don’t Forget Creativity
PowerPoint is very easy to use, but this doesn’t mean you ought to be lazy where creativity is concerned. Try to come up with innovative ways to make your slides more interesting. Maybe use a memorable quote that pertains to your subject, or use a mnemonic device to help retention. Don’t just put a bunch of slides up that have bullet points on them.
Come to your sales pitch or company meeting armed with interesting and useful information. Don’t just slap some sales numbers on a series of slides. Preferably, describe what these numbers mean.
Come with Solutions
You’ll also want to come armed with ways that your company’s employees can boost these sales numbers. Another fault of many PowerPoint presentations: they provide information. But they don’t provide useful strategies for how employees can use that information to better the company’s performance.
Also, if the purpose of your presentation is to simply educate, add some interesting details to the data. Tell them why there was a sudden spike in revenue last quarter, or why sales suddenly dropped. The more well rounded a picture you can lend to your data, the more likely your audience will remember it.
Don’t Get Too Fancy
While you ought to be creative when you create your slides, don’t opt for all the bells and whistles. A frequent mistake managers make is using excessive graphics and pictures, thinking this pop of color will draw the attention of the audience. What it typically does is distract. Furthermore, many people simply read their slides to the audience, this is redundant and can bore, if not irritate, the audience. They will just read your points. Alternatively, focus on the most significant item and go in depth. Otherwise you could have just emailed the presentation to them and saved your breath.
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I’m sure you’ve had to sit through uninteresting PowerPoint presentations before. It seems like they go on forever and you hardly retain any of the information. What a total waste of time right? If you agree, make your next presentation more interesting with some of the ideas below.
Don’t Forget Creativity
PowerPoint is very easy to use, but this doesn’t mean you ought to be lazy where creativity is concerned. Try to come up with innovative ways to make your slides more interesting. Maybe use a memorable quote that pertains to your subject, or use a mnemonic device to help retention. Don’t just put a bunch of slides up that have bullet points on them.
Come to your sales pitch or company meeting armed with interesting and useful information. Don’t just slap some sales numbers on a series of slides. Preferably, describe what these numbers mean.
Come with Solutions
You’ll also want to come armed with ways that your company’s employees can boost these sales numbers. Another fault of many PowerPoint presentations: they provide information. But they don’t provide useful strategies for how employees can use that information to better the company’s performance.
Also, if the purpose of your presentation is to simply educate, add some interesting details to the data. Tell them why there was a sudden spike in revenue last quarter, or why sales suddenly dropped. The more well rounded a picture you can lend to your data, the more likely your audience will remember it.
Don’t Get Too Fancy
While you ought to be creative when you create your slides, don’t opt for all the bells and whistles. A frequent mistake managers make is using excessive graphics and pictures, thinking this pop of color will draw the attention of the audience. What it typically does is distract. Furthermore, many people simply read their slides to the audience, this is redundant and can bore, if not irritate, the audience. They will just read your points. Alternatively, focus on the most significant item and go in depth. Otherwise you could have just emailed the presentation to them and saved your breath.
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