I have done 100-150 presentations a year for as long as I can remember. I have done thousands of presentations. But most important, I have also been on the receiving end of thousands of presentations and here is what I believe when it comes to the use of PowerPoints slides: I believe wholeheartedly that the purpose for PowerPoints has been lost on many presenters because of those presenters’ own shortcomings at presenting. Let me explain. For many that do presentations wrong, the idea of putting together a long deck of beautiful slides that are extremely wordy automatically makes them think the presentation will be well received. Thus, the amount of time preparing for what is really important—practicing the words you use and how you use them—has gone by the wayside. In a people business, where people want to connect with people, this is the wrong way of presenting yourself. Creating PowerPoint slides should be secondary and should take you only a fraction of the amount of time that it takes you to think through and rehearse the delivery of your words to the audience. If you have this backward you are simply choosing priorities and needs over those of the audience. There is no way that even a powerful PowerPoint could ever offset shortcomings in the presenter’s word and concept delivery.
How did everything go so wrong? Let’s discuss. The predecessor to the PowerPoint was the overhead projector. For the really young folks reading this, the overhead projector allowed you to write with an erasable marker on acetate pages (transparencies), and as you wrote it would project that drawing on the same screens we use today with PowerPoint slides. Overhead projectors used light bulbs and shadows, very similar to how I play finger shadow games with my kids on the wall. Back in the 70’s this “technology” was great because it would allow professors or any other professional who was presenting to large audiences to display pictorial items that were visually much larger than what that presenter could do with a chalk board. Notice: I said “pictorial items,” not words! Thus, if professionals were explaining something that could be easily drawn as a picture, it was displayed on as big a screen as you could buy. People are visual and therefore the power of “chalk and talk” is huge and it has always worked! This is why some of the best presentations you will experience will be with merely a flipchart or whiteboard. Well, things started to go sideways in the 1970s and 1980s with the proliferation of printer technology that would allow you to preprint the acetate sheets. Now you had professionals/instructors that could very easily print a million sheets for one presentation. Furthermore, many times those sheets had way too much information on them. This meant that once all of those busy preprinted sheets were thrown up during a presentation in rapid succession, audiences either experienced “death by a million transparencies” or they would read ahead to the other “preprinted content” on each respective sheet. Thus the power of the instructor’s words was greatly diminished. Does this sound familiar? Does this sound like presentations that our industry tends to conduct today? Well, it evolved from there when, on May 22, 1990, Microsoft released an easier way for presenters to put their audiences to sleep—Microsoft PowerPoint.
With that as a primer, I want to share with you five quick tips that I teach people for using PowerPoint slides so they are not falling victim to the traps I just outlined.
1. Less is better. Paradoxically you are competing for the audience’s attention when you use PowerPoint slides. Therefore, I believe if you are going to use PowerPoint slides, there should be no more than one slide for every two minutes of speaking you do. Thus, if I’m going to speak for an hour, you will rarely see me have more than 30 slides. I will actually likely have no more than 10 slides. And, those slides have very few words and are more “pictorial” to add to my presentation versus competing with my presentation. As I tell the folks I have coached over the years, if you can speak to an audience for a couple of hours and keep them engaged without one PowerPoint slide you have hit the major leagues. I’m not suggesting that you not use PowerPoint slides, I’m just suggesting that you not use them as crutches. What would happen if you were at a major conference with 1,000 people and somebody came up to you and said “Hey, one of our speakers with a two hour slot just got sick and cannot present. The presentation is in 30 minutes and we have no time to upload PowerPoint slides. Can you fill in?” What would you say? I know what I would say! “Put me in coach!”
One last word on this point: Just because you want to say it does not mean it has to be in PowerPoint. A while back I was planning a presentation with a colleague of mine and anytime we had a new item that came up to discuss, he would say “Ok, are you going to make that slide or am I?” This mentality needs to go away unless you are teaching people how to fall asleep easier.
2. Know your transitions. A few weeks ago I was thumbing through my PowerPoint deck at Mach speed before a presentation while a colleague was looking at me like I was crazy. What was I doing? Remembering the order of slides! The transitions are more important than anything else! This is the beauty of not having a ton of slides—the fact that you do not have to remember a million transitions from slide to slide. I do not “memorize” the content of the slides because the content is pictorial. But, what I do memorize is knowing which slide is next before I hit the clicker. Having smooth transitions makes the presentation one cohesive message, as opposed to starting and stopping 30 times which is equivalent to Ambien. It has always amazed me when presenters act surprised by the slide that comes up next after they hit the clicker.
But if you must, add context to the point. For example: If I were to have agenda bullet points on a PowerPoint, as I usually do, I will read each bullet point but only while adding context to each bullet as I go. If I had an agenda item that was “The Power of Seminar Selling,” I would not just read it off and move on to the next bullet. I would say something like, “Bullet point #2, ‘The Power of Seminar Selling.’ You know, I was at a seminar a while back that had top producers discussing how they prospected. Of those 10 top producers that spoke, eight of them prospected by seminars. Seminars work and that is why I want to discuss this in bullet point #2.” This is completely different than hypnotizing the audience with the rhythm of reading the bullet points verbatim. And, again, PowerPoint content should be merely bullet points or pictorials to tee up a much broader conversation. Paragraphs in PowerPoint are deadly to a presentation. PowerPoints are points—with you elaborating on them verbally.
4. Favor stage right. This is an interesting technique I learned from a nonverbal communications expert. Our brains have grown accustomed to starting to observe or starting a thought on the left side and then moving to the right. Why is this? Because we spend our whole lives reading from left to right. Of course, stage right is on the left-hand side for the audience. So as you speak on the left-hand side of the projector screen, from the observer’s standpoint it is subconsciously more natural. The audience is able to look at you on their left and then to the right to the PowerPoint. All important thoughts start with you, not the PowerPoint. Although I like to casually walk around to mix it up, if you are to favor any side make it stage right.
5. Learn and rehearse stories and jokes. If this were a column on presenting in general, storytelling would be number one on my list. The power of storytelling is paramount and will be a topic of future columns. Why do I bring storytelling and jokes up as it relates to PowerPoints? Because PowerPoints can abandon you! We have all been there. That awkward moment where your computer dies, or the projector dies, in the middle of your talk. This is awkward for the audience. Not because the audience believes you screwed up and you must be an amateur, but because the audience believes it is awkward for you and feels “embarrassed” for you. We have all had that “embarrassed” feeling even though we were merely in the audience. However if you, as the presenter, can show them that it is not big deal to you, the “embarrassment” doesn’t happen. So here is what I do when something crashes. As I am pulling everything back up I will tell a story or a joke in order to fill what otherwise would be an awkward silence. When you do this you are showing that you are in control, not panicked, and have been there and done this before. Now if the problem is going to take more than a couple minutes to remedy, take a five minute break!
“The highest-paid person in the first half of the next century will be the storyteller. The value of products will depend on the story they tell.” -Rolf Jenson, Director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies.
In closing, I am a PowerPoint fan if it is used correctly. The problem with this wonderful technology is that it has made our lives so much easier that it is easy to rely on this tool too much while cannibalizing the important stuff—delivery. And good delivery is hard because it takes a ton of elbow grease. I tell people all the time that for every new presentation I have done there was always that one person (or family) in the hotel room adjacent to mine that heard my presentation at least five or 10 times at 4:00 or 5:00 AM the morning of my talk. Yes, I have gotten that unpleasant knock on my door! There is no way around it. A good presentation takes work—not more slides!
“The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place”—George Bernard Shaw
