PowerPoint can be an essential tool to land ideas with an audience. Still, all too often, we see presenters sap the energy and attention of their audience with some common PowerPoint mistakes. If you want to share your ideas powerfully, keep your audience engaged, or help others present, here are 10 helpful and practical tips to improve your PowerPoint presentations.
1) Slide Density | Have you ever seen a slide and felt your brain shut down? Chances are you were seeing a slide that was too dense with information. When the human brain can't easily interpret visual data, it stops trying. To fix this:
Look at a slide; it is likely too dense if you can't understand its point in less than 15 seconds.
If your slide has more than three ideas you are trying to land, this is also a good indicator you have too much information on one slide.
Write out the idea you are trying to land on the slide, then look at the content of your slide. Anything that does not significantly support that idea, remove.
Look at your slide, does it have 25% - 50% white space? If not, it's too dense.
2) Notes Slides | One of the most common mistakes I see in PowerPoint presentations is people putting their notes on their slides. Public presenting is a top fear, and people often use their slides to remind them what to say. The rub is the human brain can't listen and read simultaneously. If you put text on a slide, people stop listening to you and start reading your slide OR listen to you and don't even look at the slide. Both of these defeat the purpose of PowerPoint. To fix this:
Be critical of any slide with only text and ask yourself, "Are these my notes of what to say?" If the answer is yes, put the points in your notes and drop the slide.
Use the Note feature of PowerPoint to include your notes. It is located at the bottom of the slide view in Normal View and says, "Click to add notes."
Are you scared to speak without seeing your notes? Use Presenter View, sometimes called "Speaker View". This shows one screen with your presentation and your notes, your current slide, and your next slide on another screen. Pair this with point 9 below to break the notes slide habit.
3) The Rule of 3s | Brains appreciate help organizing information. To help with this, organize key ideas into threes to help your audience retain what you are saying. CEOs often use this trick when speaking as it helps tell an organized story, "That's a great question. I see three major trends in our market landscape...". To implement this:
Assure there are at most three points you are trying to make per slide and three ideas you are trying to land per presentation. Anything more than that, and it is likely you have too much.
After doing point 10 below, practice your presentation with a peer and ask them to write down the three big ideas they took away. The farther apart your peer's takeaways are from what you intended, the more work you have to do to land your ideas.
Don't force three ideas or points if you have only one or two. Three is a max, but less is more.
4) The Power of a Blank Slide | Books like Presentation Zen will encourage you to use visuals, not text, to emphasize your ideas. Still, presenters should only use visuals if they enhance or make your idea memorable. What do you do if you need to say something but don't feel a visual enhances your point? Use a blank slide and rely on your notes and rehearsal to say what you need to. Your audience is there to hear you after all. To implement this:
Use blank slides when you want your audience to listen to you rather than see something on screen. This trick is magical, and when implemented correctly, you can literally watch your audience's attention shift from the screen to you.
Don't just put up a black or white blank slide, as this can cause an audience to think there is a technology error. Instead, create a simple branded slide with your company logo on a black, white, or company-colored background so the audience sees it as part of the presentation.
5) Forced Sequence | The average person reads at 230 words per minute but speaks at 130 words per minute. Even if you narrow down your ideas to less than three, if you put them all on a slide at once, your audience will likely read ahead, which means they aren't listening to you anymore. To fix this:
Use Animations to force when information is visible on your slide. This will allow you to control when your audience sees information without needing more slides.
Don't use elaborate animations as this can distract.
Only hand out and distribute slide decks after you present. Otherwise, your audience will read ahead and forget about you.
6) Be On Time | One of the most significant ways to lose your audience and your presentation is if you run long. There is only so much a brain can process at a time, and if you disrespect your audience's time, how can you expect them to respect your ideas? To fix this:
Take the total time you have with your audience and divide it by the total number of slides you have, shown in the bottom right of PowerPoint. Doing this will give you the minutes you have to talk per slide. Anything less than 2 minutes you should heavily question. For example, if I have 20 minutes with my audience and have 30 slides, I will have 40 seconds to speak per slide, likely not enough time to show or say anything your audience will remember.
Allow ample time for your audience to engage. Presentations are more effective when they are a two-way flow of information. Allocate time in your presentation where you aren't speaking to foster a discussion, questions, or thoughts from your audience.
Have a visible timer where you can easily see it to keep your audience. There are tons of free presentation timer apps.
7) Preview, View, Review | Tell them what you will cover, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them. Repetition is a powerful tool to help brains remember and can enhance your audience's ability to recognize the big ideas of your presentation. To implement this:
Start your presentation by providing a brief overview of what you will cover and what your audience will walk away with.
Summarize significant points after you unpackage them. If you just spent 15 minutes unpackaging two ideas, include a summary slide of the two key ideas before you get to the next one.
Always end a presentation by reemphasizing your big ideas. "We've discussed a lot today, but if you remember two ideas, it should be: sustainability is part of our customer's decision criteria and how we will incorporate sustainability measures into our product marketing over the coming two years."
8) Break the Fourth Wall | If you want to be memorable, consider breaking away from that presentation on the wall behind you. Consider a non-PowerPoint-based visual element supporting your big idea and connecting your presentation. To implement this:
Think of something you can bring on stage which is the Red Thread to tie your presentation together. Physically bring it with you on stage and use it to tell your story outside of your presentation.
Consider using a whiteboard, flip pad, or a live tablet drawing session to represent ideas rather than a slide. For amazing examples of this, see how Simon Sinek often presents.
9) Rehearse | An effective presentation is equal parts content and delivery. You can have the best presentation in the world, but you will lose your audience if your delivery fails. To implement this:
Practice your presentation at least twice before you present. Every practice you do will improve your overall delivery.
Rehearse in front of someone alive. It can be a peer, a spouse, a partner, or a dog. Ideally, you want someone who will be radically candid with you to see what you may not see in your delivery.
You want to master your most important presentations. Mastery does not mean memorization, but some must first memorize before they can master. The bar for Mastery is that you are so comfortable with the content that if someone asks you a question mid-presentation, you can answer it and bring it back to the points you are trying to make.
If you can, use prompters. You would be surprised how affordable and easy it is to implement. In a pinch, you can use a tablet with apps like Keynote.
10) What's the Big Idea? | The whole point of your presentation is to have your audience remember something. A great way to focus your presentation is to write down the one sentence you want your audience to walk away with. This is your north star, and you should ensure all your content is rooted in this big idea. Savagely cut any content or ideas that don't help you land this one key sentence. If you want to see how strong your presentation is, rehearse it in front of someone else and ask them to write down the one big idea they got from it. The closer what you wrote down matches your receiver, the better your presentation.
I have seen the 10 tips above save audiences from PowerPoint misery and presenters from rebellion. Please don't take them all on at once, but start with one, master it, and then move to another. Over time, your presentations will be memorable, repeatable, and impactful to those you share them with.
Fun Bonus Fact: Did you know that the inventors of PowerPoint, Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin, created the software to show graphics? They never intended the program to show text but instead to replace the laminate slides, overhead projectors, and photo carousels of the day.
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