Getting Your Point Across
When you have to explain something to people, you may automatically whip out PowerPoint. And you may load it with bullet points, ready to shoot the audience into submission with facts.
If only effective presentations were so easy...
We've all seen too many awful presentations. Boring all-text presentations. Clipart-infested shows that had no real purpose. These things happen often because PowerPoint makes it so easy to create really bad presentations. You have to work hard to avoid this trap.
Gauging the Situation
While there are several wrong ways to present, there's no one right way, because different situations call for different types of presentations. Your presentation style needs to adapt to:
- The audience (i.e. colleagues vs. industry analysts),
- The venue (conference room vs. auditorium)
- The time available ( a few-minute report vs. multi-hour seminar)
- The content and media (no visual content vs. photos, charts, animations or movies).
Each combination requires a different presentation style, and one of your most important tasks as a presenter is to evaluate these factors and make the right choices.
For example, small groups usually expect less formality and more personal interaction; in big rooms this is much harder, so a more formal style, sometimes with more visuals, is appropriate. If a user group expects to see a highly visual, detailed preview of your next product, you had better have something very visual to show - and a lot to say. But if you force a busy executive to sit through a 60 minute slideshow with pages of text explaining every detail of your operation, you may not make it to the end (and you may not have a job the next day).
(I've found that in a corporate environment, executive presentations are often seriously overdesigned. There's a natural desire to impress senior management, and sometimes different groups compete to see who can develop the fanciest slides. Days or weeks may go into preparing visuals for an executive presentation, sometimes to the point that the executives would object if they were aware of the resource expenditure. With most executives, a convincing and confident explanation is appreciated more than pretty pictures and endless bullet points.)
Connecting with the Audience
Once you've gauged your audience and situation properly, here are a few guidelines that can help establish and maintain a connection to your audience:
First, be a storyteller. Whether you're delivering a three-minute report or a two hour class, stories engage the audience and provide a way to explain things in real-world terms. Stories have characters; they have a plot; they have conflicts and resolutions; they have a beginning, middle and end, and they have a moral or point.
If you're talking about your market, tell stories about real customers you've talked to. If you're explaining your product to someone, lead them through the experience the customer will have as they use it, story-style. If you're delivering something as mundane as a status report, think of it as a story, with a starting point and a goal (the plot), problems (the conflicts), characters (the team), and a resolution (the current or desired outcome).
Telling a story based on your personal experience or knowledge is also a lot easier to tell effectively than reciting facts. It's simply easier to engage emotionally when telling a story, and your audience will engage along with you.
Second, use PowerPoint when you need it, and don't use it when you don't need it.
If you're explaining something that has lots of numbers, lists of things, relationships, or important images, then put them on the screen so that people can see them. It's hard for an audience to remember lists of things while you're talking, so displaying the list can enable them to focus on what you're saying while referring to the list as they need to. Graphics, charts, images and photos are all ways of communicating at a glance what it might take you a thousand words to explain, and visual images are more memorable than words. Show them. Memorable images, closely connected to your point, can help people remember the point. But don't fill the screen with "eyewash" - meaningless or feel-good images. These will distract the audience.
Bullet points are the single most egregious presentation crime. The audience should never be reading a set of bullet point sentences as you say them: this distracts them from listening to you. The only time to use bullet points is to help underline your point with just a few summary words, such as "Don't use bullets", and then it's usually best to show only one bullet point at a time.
If you want the audience to focus on you and what you're saying, then they should be watching you, not a slide. It's almost always a mistake to read text from a slide. (The exception is when you present a quote or passage that you want the audience to see, as you read it, word for word.) In using PowerPoint, your best friend is the "B" key. This causes the screen to go dark and the audience will focus on you. In general, that's what you want, right? Then, when you have another visual point to make, press the B key again to bring the slideshow back up.
If you need notes for your presentation, put them on paper or read them from PowerPoint's Presenter's View display. Never use your presentation as your teleprompter.
Third, use animation when it communicates something extra, and only then. You can use PowerPoint animation to attract attention to something, to show how things work, or to show steps in a sequence. But as soon as the audience sees text flying onto the screen, it becomes a distraction. Don’t try to use animation to keep people awake - your story has to do that.
Every time you step in front of an audience, you are the show. Don't try to pretend that the show is on the screen - it's not. So plan for your audience, have a good story, practice what you're going to say, and say it like both your project and your reputation depend on it.
They do.
If only effective presentations were so easy...
We've all seen too many awful presentations. Boring all-text presentations. Clipart-infested shows that had no real purpose. These things happen often because PowerPoint makes it so easy to create really bad presentations. You have to work hard to avoid this trap.
Gauging the Situation
While there are several wrong ways to present, there's no one right way, because different situations call for different types of presentations. Your presentation style needs to adapt to:
- The audience (i.e. colleagues vs. industry analysts),
- The venue (conference room vs. auditorium)
- The time available ( a few-minute report vs. multi-hour seminar)
- The content and media (no visual content vs. photos, charts, animations or movies).
Each combination requires a different presentation style, and one of your most important tasks as a presenter is to evaluate these factors and make the right choices.
For example, small groups usually expect less formality and more personal interaction; in big rooms this is much harder, so a more formal style, sometimes with more visuals, is appropriate. If a user group expects to see a highly visual, detailed preview of your next product, you had better have something very visual to show - and a lot to say. But if you force a busy executive to sit through a 60 minute slideshow with pages of text explaining every detail of your operation, you may not make it to the end (and you may not have a job the next day).
(I've found that in a corporate environment, executive presentations are often seriously overdesigned. There's a natural desire to impress senior management, and sometimes different groups compete to see who can develop the fanciest slides. Days or weeks may go into preparing visuals for an executive presentation, sometimes to the point that the executives would object if they were aware of the resource expenditure. With most executives, a convincing and confident explanation is appreciated more than pretty pictures and endless bullet points.)
Connecting with the Audience
Once you've gauged your audience and situation properly, here are a few guidelines that can help establish and maintain a connection to your audience:
First, be a storyteller. Whether you're delivering a three-minute report or a two hour class, stories engage the audience and provide a way to explain things in real-world terms. Stories have characters; they have a plot; they have conflicts and resolutions; they have a beginning, middle and end, and they have a moral or point.
If you're talking about your market, tell stories about real customers you've talked to. If you're explaining your product to someone, lead them through the experience the customer will have as they use it, story-style. If you're delivering something as mundane as a status report, think of it as a story, with a starting point and a goal (the plot), problems (the conflicts), characters (the team), and a resolution (the current or desired outcome).
Telling a story based on your personal experience or knowledge is also a lot easier to tell effectively than reciting facts. It's simply easier to engage emotionally when telling a story, and your audience will engage along with you.
Second, use PowerPoint when you need it, and don't use it when you don't need it.
If you're explaining something that has lots of numbers, lists of things, relationships, or important images, then put them on the screen so that people can see them. It's hard for an audience to remember lists of things while you're talking, so displaying the list can enable them to focus on what you're saying while referring to the list as they need to. Graphics, charts, images and photos are all ways of communicating at a glance what it might take you a thousand words to explain, and visual images are more memorable than words. Show them. Memorable images, closely connected to your point, can help people remember the point. But don't fill the screen with "eyewash" - meaningless or feel-good images. These will distract the audience.
Bullet points are the single most egregious presentation crime. The audience should never be reading a set of bullet point sentences as you say them: this distracts them from listening to you. The only time to use bullet points is to help underline your point with just a few summary words, such as "Don't use bullets", and then it's usually best to show only one bullet point at a time.
If you want the audience to focus on you and what you're saying, then they should be watching you, not a slide. It's almost always a mistake to read text from a slide. (The exception is when you present a quote or passage that you want the audience to see, as you read it, word for word.) In using PowerPoint, your best friend is the "B" key. This causes the screen to go dark and the audience will focus on you. In general, that's what you want, right? Then, when you have another visual point to make, press the B key again to bring the slideshow back up.
If you need notes for your presentation, put them on paper or read them from PowerPoint's Presenter's View display. Never use your presentation as your teleprompter.
Third, use animation when it communicates something extra, and only then. You can use PowerPoint animation to attract attention to something, to show how things work, or to show steps in a sequence. But as soon as the audience sees text flying onto the screen, it becomes a distraction. Don’t try to use animation to keep people awake - your story has to do that.
Every time you step in front of an audience, you are the show. Don't try to pretend that the show is on the screen - it's not. So plan for your audience, have a good story, practice what you're going to say, and say it like both your project and your reputation depend on it.
They do.