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.
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