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I've noticed two diametrically opposed views on PowerPoint driven presentations. Presenters love it. It can help to greatly reduce the fear of delivering a presentation by providing constant prompts for the presenter, which handily double up as a handout for the audience to take away. Audiences hate it, many describing presentations as 'death by PowerPoint', 'information overload' or having no power and little point! I have been training and coaching people in Presentation Skills for 20 years and lost count many years ago of the number of business presentations I have sat through. Concerning the use of PowerPoint for visual support, following just a few simple rules will help you to avoid the negative effects so often experienced by audiences. The first golden rule is that the audience does not need to see everything you say. Supporting everything we say with the written word or images is an unnatural (and therefore alien) way of communicating. If I came up to you at your desk and said "I hear you are an expert on quantitative easing, I don't understand how it works, could you explain it to me?" I don't think that you would ask me to go away and come back in two hours, so that you can prepare 20 PowerPoint slides to talk me through it. I think that you would simply tell me what I needed to know. But what would you do when you got to a complicated bit? You would grab a notepad and biro and draw me a diagram, or take me through a calculation, so that I could 'see what you mean'. Why would you do this? Because it's natural communication and it works! So, resist the temptation to produce a slide for everything you are going to say. Visual aids are a visual aid to understanding and should be shown only when the audience NEED to see them. Notes are for you, to remind you of what you want to say and are of no interest to the audience whatsoever. When does an audience need to see a visual aid? For two reasons only. Firstly, when what you are saying is too complex for just words. You may then need a diagram or a graph, so that the audience can see what you mean. Secondly, you will need visual support to help the audience with short-term memory issues. If you are talking the audience through a six-step process, it greatly helps the audience if you can show the headings for each of the steps as you talk about them. If you don't show the audiece the headings; when you are talking about the fourth step, they will all have forgotton what the first step was. If you do not need visual support for either of the above reasons, turn the PowerPoint off. This is easily achieved by using a slide coloured completely black or pressing the 'B' key on your computer. This will 'turn off' the screen and leave the audience with the best visual aid of all. You!
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