If you have been to seminars or workshops, you might find most PowerPoint presentations are too dull and not focusing on the topic itself. Most common problem (refer to worst PowerPoint slides) is that many of the presenters are too tempted to use to default PowerPoint slides by adding too many bullet-points that can beat the purpose of PowerPoint software as a efficient presentation tool. Here’s some tips from Penn State University communications professor Michael Alley:

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You must have tried giving mock presentations in front of ‘fake’ audience before giving out your presentation on the actual day. In order to add ’spice’ in your preparation, here are two ‘bizarre’ PowerPoint presentation skills training tips that you can try out:

Tip #1: The Slide Rotation Technique

Here’s the idea from Ignite Detroit!

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? – link

Watch this clip to see how this presenter reacted upon this slide rotation technique:

Source: Ignite Detroit!

Tip #2: The Kidnapping Random Slides Technique

Besides rotating your slides without your consent, here’s the overview of ‘Kidnapping Random Slides’ technique:

A spectacular way to practice a PowerPoint presentation would be to have someone eliminate one of your slides, or a section of a slide. Then, run through that altered presentation and see if you can compensate for the missing material – link

Therefore, this method is actually test on your degree of preparedness – it’s important that you have to be familiar with the whole topic of your presentation, not solely based on the contents of your slides.

Start working out with these tips above before you let your slides roll!

Footnote: You can also try setting out your own stage for your presentation – read: Presentation Skills For Beginners – Free Yourself Up On Your Own Stage

Note:

• The animation is auto-disabled in embed player mode
• View this presentation with animation – link
• I’ve chosen Shelby’s theme because it resembles Randy Paush’s Last Lecture slide layout

Here’s what I think about Google Docs’ own “PowerPoint” feature – review is solely based on its user-friendliness and simplicity, not an one-on-one comparison with Microsoft PowerPoint 2007:

Pros:

• Distribute my slides easily to my other Gmail contacts
• Invite others to my slide show and conversation (it’s useful for short meetings or any impromptu discussions – link)
• Use it as my backup slide presentation creator when my Microsoft PowerPoint crash (you can export your Google Docs’ presentation files to your computer) or I’m using other people’s computer who haven’t installed Microsoft Office yet
• Create slides when there’s no computer around by using cellphone (I haven’t really tried this out yet)
• This way of creating slides is more suitable to create One-line PowerPoint Presentations

Cons:

• No “shadow” text feature – I’ve found it difficult to display texts on some colored slide layouts
• Inserting shapes (by using the “Drawing” feature) isn’t that user-friendly enough – I cannot scribble directly on the slide
• Poor animation feature – lack of animation schemes and order/timing features

Try out Google Docs to create simple presentations here.

Source: via Lifehacker

Watch this clip on how comedian Don McMillan makes fun of worst PowerPoint presentations in front of his audience. You would probably seen these sample presentations in real life – during business meetings, seminars and training sessions etc. However, these common mistakes mentioned are often repeated in most presentations and there are still some that Don didn’t mention – Read: How to Create Worst PowerPoint Slides

Here are some important “How Not to Use PowerPoint” tips from Don’s “Life After Death by PowerPoint” talk:

1. People tend to put every word they going to say on their PowerPoint slide

This is the best option for ‘lazy’ presenters as they can read their presentation from their slides. It has been a common method for fast slide preparation in order to allocate more time for improvising speech presentation. If you insist to adopt this develop this habit – try using the quotation marks method.

2. Typo – Always check for spelling errors

Spelling errors are not that amusing as it seem to be. You need to preserve your professionalism by giving out accurate details. Since PowerPoint has the spelling check feature, it’s not a good excuse of neglecting proofreading your text – like Don said “If (you) got a red line under it – RE-CHECK THE SPELLING!”

3. Avoid excessive bullet points/key points

The key points of your presentation become less outstanding if you put excessive key points within one slide. Ideally you can use 3-4 bullet points in a slide (depends on the word length of your key points) – refer: How to Create Simple PowerPoint Presentations

If you agree with Don’s remark about the origin of the term “bullet points” (watch 1.04) and you want to enhance your PowerPoint presentation without any bullet points, check out these posts:

• The Art of Making Simple Business PowerPoint Presentation Slides
• How to Make a Simple and Elegant Business PowerPoint Presentations

4. Bad color schemes

It’s completely pointless if you display your text on an unsuitable slide color layout. I’ve once mentioned about it, especially placing your text on a multi-colored layout or picture – 3 Steps on How to Create Simple One-line Business PowerPoint Presentations (Read “Step 3: Place your one-line point on proper slide layout”)

5. The more PowerPoint slides you have – the less useful your talk actually is

Unfortunately, the myth about “preparing more slides improves the quality of your talk” is still adheres to the mind of many presenters. The effectiveness of your talk can be enhanced with less PowerPoint slides like Steve Job’s or Randy Paush’s style of presentation.

6. Information overload and overuse of visual tools

Visual tools like graphs and charts help us to present data in more organized manner and over-displaying data on these visual tools can actually confuse your audience in terms of getting the right information.

7. Overuse of animations

It’s right that Don said that all audience is not equal – some of them are not visual learners. These type of learners would easily distracted by improper animations. In fact, it’s not compulsory for presenters to use animations in their slides as the concept of effective PowerPoint presentations lies in simplicity. Furthermore, using animations would affect the amount of time taken to prepare your slides beforehand.

8. Font analysis

My point here is rather different than Don’s “Font analysis” – it’s not about determining one’s character from the font used. It’s about using the right font at the right time (or slide) – read: How Do Fonts Affect Your PowerPoint Presentations?

One thing that we can learn from Don’s talk is that PowerPoint presentations can be funny and serious at the same time – as long as your presentation is not out of topic and you have considered all the points mentioned above.

In English grammar, quotation marks (a.k.a. inverted commas) are commonly used in many written materials as a way to identify a conversation or quote one’s saying. Another function of quotation marks is to keep the words of one speaker from becoming confused with those of some other speakers. Now, I’m not discussing further about how to use quotation marks – The main thing is about using them to enhance your PowerPoint (PPT) presentations.

Here are some ideas of using quotation marks to display the following points:

• Mission statement or value that your company or product has to offer
• Sales target or sales goals
• Imperative or a strong statement that no one cannot disagree

If you have a slide which has a short message to convey, insert a related picture as the background of the slide.

Fig.1 Putting quotation marks around an italicized short message

Fig.2 Non-italic short message without any quotation marks

For example, use the quotation marks on default italicized Calibri font for this quote – “Think out of the box”. Definitely, you have to insert a picture of a box as the layout of the slide. Most viewers tend to focus on italicized text with the quotation marks – as if it’s a form of conversation.

Most books – fiction and non-fiction books have quotation marks around direct quotations so that it makes the contents livelier. It also applies on your PowerPoint presentation in which putting quotation marks on your short message (or direct quotation) can be livelier than one that doesn’t have any quotation marks.

Is it necessary to insert related picture when put quotation marks around a direct quotation?

The answer is – No. You can use quotation marks on a direct quotation even if your slides have no pictures at all! You can create a template to display your direct quotation such as your mission statement, goals and important facts. Like a normal PowerPoint – it has a title (without any quotation marks) and the content (which is italicized and enclosed with quotation marks).

Fig.3 PPT slide template with text enclosed with quotation marks

Fig.4 Sample of a mission statement in a PPT slide

Fig.5 Sample of a sales goal in a PPT slide

You can see that the message displayed on your slides tend to look less monotonous with quotation marks. In fact, you’ll use less time in preparing your slides as looking for suitable pictures would be time consuming – that’s a great thing to boost your productivity.

There’s another way to improve your productivity for preparing your PPT slides. It’s a total faux pas to copy all the contents directly from your report or any written materials and paste all of them into your slides. No one would really want to read excessive texts on your slides within short period of time.

If you prefer using this method of preparing your slides (especially for those who refer to their slides while they are giving out their presentation), you can use quotation marks to emphasize important lines (or phrases) from the lengthy texts on your slide. Play around with the font-size and colors to highlight the important lines and make the remaining texts less significant. In other words, it’s like letting your audience what you want them to see although the texts displayed are a bit lengthy.

Fig.6 Worst PPT slide that you’d ever seen

Fig.7 Sprucing lengthy texts up with quotation marks

Lastly, you can make use of quotation marks on motivational or leadership quotes in your PPT slides.

Fig.8 Putting quotation marks around the motivational quote

In this case, you use “Steve Jobs’ template” to display your selected quote. Choose a dark colored gradient fill (preferable black or dark blue) for the slide layout and light-colored and shadowed text for the selected quote. For instance, I would use black colored gradient layout and white colored shadowed text for the motivational quote in order to make the quote more appealing to your audience.

My elementary school days were not dull and I’ve gained much priceless experiences from it; particularly my presentation skills – like most newbie, I remembered my first time presenting in front of the students, it was terribly awful and raw that I can hear sounds of students yawning and disengaged with my presentation.

I barely remember what was I presenting but I would normally receive criticisms or feedback from teachers (or friends) about my presentation and that was indeed the hardest part to endure. Now, these criticisms have turned into “secrets” which is the core of creating the best PowerPoint presentation.

What is the “secrets” that I learned from my elementary school days?

Back to my elementary school days, I remembered that I had to list out the important points on the (dark green colored) blackboard. Obviously, poorly written points – perhaps illegible and size-small hand writing on the board is hard to read. These points are meant for the audience – not the presenter.

Same applies to your PowerPoint presentation slides; the points that you want to convey to your audience – it has to be reasonably big enough for your audience to read.

Your point has to be reasonably big for your audience to read

Sample of a unreasonably big point on a PPT slide

You’ll get several complaints if you use fonts are illegible and hard to read – it’s not a good excuse because there are several fonts available to use.

Comparison between two slides with different fonts – Calibri and Rage Itallic

Calibri-font PPT slide

Rage Itallic-font PPT slide

It doesn’t mean using “fancy” fonts able to capture your audience’s attention. One thing that matters most is that the fonts that you choose are readable at the first place. Your message has to be short and simple in which your audience take less time to read and focus on your speech presentation. Find out – How Do Fonts Affect Your PowerPoint Presentations.

Besides that, I had to learn to speak loudly and utter my speech presentation as clear as possible. Basically, a speaker has to use his own tone – there’s no need to develop a fake accent if you don’t really have one. If you’re worried about your intonation problems – one thing you need to do is speak slowly and control your nervousness when you’re facing your audience.

In contrast, when you speak too fast if you’ve intonation problems, you would expect getting bad rapport from your audience and this can actually affect the whole presentation regardless how good the contents of your presentation are. At times you need to elaborate points that are lengthy; you need to pause for awhile before you proceed elaborating further.

For instance, imagine that you’re in a singing performance and you have lack of breathing skills, you would expect the outcome could be either:

• You could be singing out of tune or tempo
• You could find it hard to continue singing

Always remind yourself to give yourself some time to breathe in before you continue elaborating your points. Furthermore, your speech accuracy will unlikely to falter as you’ve some ample time to think or recall what you need to say. Read more about Presentation Skills for Beginners – Free Yourself Up On Your Own Stage.

Apart from that, most school projects had certain deadlines. Some projects required presentation and I had to allocate some time to prepare for my presentation. Therefore, time management is crucial in order to get things done the right way.

My biggest mistake back then was that I didn’t allocate time for improvising my speech presentation. It’s like flying a real airplane without undergoing a simulation test beforehand. This is an actual way of putting the whole presentation at stake – even though you’ve put enormous effort of preparing good PowerPoint slides.

Coaching is needed when we want to develop certain skills in order to accomplish some difficult tasks that require certain experience and skills. It can be done to unleash the potential of the trainees in which they are the assets of an organization. However, Powerpoint presentations for coaching sessions are not properly utilized in which cause trainees unable to perform to the fullest and disengage with the learning system.

Powerpoint is mainly use as an e-learning template during the coaching session. Normally, these presentation slides are converted into Flash format in which contain self-checks, quizzes, tests and surveys and then uploaded into integrated Learning Management System before this online coaching courses are created. These tasks can be done with ease by using rapid e-learning tools.

Read more about it here.

Google Docs.

You have attended many seminars, business meetings and workshops that are dragging your quality time. You’d wished for earlier dismissal of these particular functions because of lengthy presentations with complete boredom. If these presentations able to be shortened and optimized it with effective Powerpoint presentations, your audience’s time and effort will not be wasted. It means that productivity can be increased when proper solutions are given without hassle your audience’s quality time and work. These effective solutions are commonly known as lean solutions.

What do lean solutions mean?

Find more about it here – Click here

This is a response to one Powerpoint user who wants to remove pictures during presentation once item identified in his/her Powerpoint presentation.

Here’s a list on how to create value for your Powerpoint presentations in order to create slides that people want to see:

1. Write short/brief points/compact meaning
2. Use no/less bullets
3. Optimize the use of text box for your text-contents
4. Use simple layouts (refer: How To Make Simple And Elegant Business Powerpoint Presentations)
5. Use more pictures (related ones)
6. Avoid using complicated animations – bring you most of the problems
7. Allocate more time for your product promotion
8. Present your ideas like a storyboard – boost creativity.
9. Use suitable fonts that increase the impact of your slides
10. Don’t overuse hyperlinks (refer: The Five Minute Business Presentation Ideas)
11. Minimize the amount of slides used (should not exceed 100 slides)
12. Put more related quotes in your slides (preferably, inspiring ones).
13. Make a simple self-introduction by creating business card-like template. (refer: Creating a Business Card Introduction For Your Business PowerPoint Presentations)
14. Use simple graph and charts to summarized your data.
15. Use suitable body language which includes facial expression.