If you want to know how to do PowerPoint presentations effectively first consider this question?

Have you ever been in this situation?

You get an email inviting or telling you to attend a presentation with the PowerPoint presentation attached. When you arrive at the presentation, on your chair is the print out of the PowerPoint presentation which you idly flick through whilst waiting for the presenter to start.

The presenter then goes through each slide merely reading from the PowerPoint.

What a waste of everyone’s time. This is rubbish, boring presenting. Also, known as Death by PowerPoint.

And you know what, if this is your boss. Guess how you are going to present? In some businesses the presentations are so boringly generic they are actually costing the business in wasted productivity.

If you are thinking about doing this. Stop. Do not waste everyone’s time tell them to read the PowerPoint from the attachment and get back to you if they have any questions. Just so you know, they won’t read it and they won’t have any questions and you will have achieved nothing.

Now I am not against PowerPoint at all and if used well, it can help to bring the presentation alive. But there may be other choices that you can use as well as or instead of PowerPoint.

Flip charts help people to understand your concept much more easily than PowerPoint because they can see you create the concept as you write down or draw your idea in front of their eyes.

If your presentation is about a thing, if possible make sure the thing is there in front of them. Something tangible that they can touch instead of a PowerPoint picture of it will gain far more engagement from your audience.

PowerPoint Rules

• One slide for every two minutes of presentation time. Yes really, in a ten minute presentation that’s 5.

• You do not need a page with your details and title of your presentation on it. You can say that.

• Please no the end or thank you slide. You can say that.

• An image can paint a thousand words. A slide full of writing is hard to digest, an image makes looking at it easier.

• No sentences on PowerPoint slides. Take everything down to bullet points. If you don’t you will read from it.

• Use graphs rather than numbers and pie charts are the best.

If PowerPoint is a must and you want to do it well I suggest you take a look at my review of presentermedia.com

I hope this has been useful in helping you to prepare your PowerPoint slides. If you have any questions or want specific help just leave your comment below and I will get back to you as soon as I can

With Grace and Gratitude

Karen