Death by Powerpoint:
What to do when you're delivering the wrong kind of 'Killer Presentation'
I’m willing to bet you’ve all sat through a presentation at some point in your lives which is so terrible that your mind wanders to what you’re having for tea, what you’re doing this weekend and did you remember to shut the bathroom window before you left?
As someone who makes presentations look lovely for a living, these death by PowerPoint moments are especially excruciating. My most recently experience was listening to the CEO of a HUGE Midlands firm, announcing something really exciting about what they’ve achieved. However the brilliance of what he had to say was diluted by the delivery. He read in a monotonous tone from his slides on which he’d put the whole of his speech verbatim. And that wasn’t the worst.
He then went on to commit THE ULTIMATE POWERPOINT SIN…he’d used some of those bloody white clipart characters!
Whilst my strengths don’t lie in teaching you how to be better at speaking gigs, I can help with some tips on how to create a killer slide deck to showcase your subject without distracting from your lovely words.
Quality not quantity It’s an oldie but a goodie. Slides are there to support you and not to do the explaining on your behalf. Don’t empty everything that’s in your head onto a slide – that’s what the notes section is for. Notes are a great place to list the points you want to cover, and if you’re a hard-copy kind of person that likes to have your prompts in hand, you can print your slides off three to a page with your notes at the side of each one.
Make it visual Why use words when you can say it with pictures? Check out this deck from xxx minimal words, maximum pix! Sometimes just a single striking image that supports your subject is way more powerful than a bulleted list. There are some great free image resources out there. My go-to for great images is Pixabay – all the images here are free to use (check the licencing) so get downloading!
Do you really need that bullet point? If you really need to bullet point something, keep it to a maximum of five one-line points. You don’t even have to use traditional bullet points. Check out this slide that I created recently for a client. Three important points delivered and not a bullet point in sight!
Essentially, delivering a great slide deck is all about keeping it simple. Your slides are there to support the message you want to deliver, and not to deliver it for you. A great website that I use for inspiration is Note and Point. And if you want to take the leg work out of creating slides, there are hundreds of ready to use templates available to purchase over at Creative Market.
If you need a great slide deck creating and you’re not sure where to start, then I’d love to help.