PowerPoint Mistakes to Avoid
I’m sure you’ve had to sit through dull PowerPoint presentations before. It seems like they go on forever and you seldom retain any of the information. What a total waste of time right? If you concur, make your next presentation more exciting with some of the ideas below.
Don’t Forget Creativity
As the writers at Microsoft’s Business Hub say, PowerPoint doesn’t give you authorization to get lazy. You still have to be creative if you want to produce a winning presentation that grabs the interest of your audience. Which means that you can’t let PowerPoint’s usability trick you into thinking that you don’t have to come up with engaging content. Simply because you can create an endless series of text-filled slides doesn’t mean that you should.
Come to your sales pitch or company meeting furnished with interesting and useful information. Don’t just slap some sales numbers on a series of slides. Rather, describe what these numbers mean.
Come with Solutions
You’ll also want to come equipped with ways in which your company’s employees can boost these sales numbers. Another fault of many PowerPoint presentations: they offer information. However they don’t provide useful methods for how employees can use that information to improve the company’s performance.
If your PowerPoint presentation reveals that sales are down, make sure you follow up with your own belief on why sales have dropped and what the company can do to boost them. If sales are up? Provide information on how your company can preserve its momentum.
Don’t Get Too Fancy
We said to get creative but that doesn’t mean you should utilize all the gimmicks that PowerPoint offers. Many managers throw in needless or annoying images in an attempt to grab attention. Any unimportant images will only serve as a disruption. Then they will only recall the cute jumping dog in the corner of the slide rather than the information you were providing. A frequent mistake you will want to avoid as well, is reading the slides word for word. Your audience does not want to read along with you. Instead, leave the slide up for enough time for them to read the three bullets while verbally expanding on the single most important one. This way you can save your breath and avoid exhausting your audience’s attention span with redundancy.
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