CAB 10. Don't depend too much on your Powerpoint

Hello friends.

In the last edition, I wrote about how to write your presentation.

Focussing on having only one key message and using the ‘mind grenade’ to open your presentation to capture the audience’s attention right away.

I will only start making my slides once I have finished writing my whole script for the presentation. I will read again my presentation and choose at which part of my presentation do I want to have a slide.

A slide is there only to support your presentation. It is NOT your presentation. So if let’s say your laptop stops working or the projector in the meeting room is kaput, you should still be able to do your presentation because it is all in your head and you are not dependent on your slides.

Something like this happened to me before. I was doing a training about presentation (I know, very ironic) when I realised that the slides didn’t save properly on my laptop. So there I was with no slides at all. I told myself that I can still do the training because everything is in my head. I was clear about the structure of my training so I was still able to conduct a full hour of training even though I had zero slides!

When you start preparing your slides, keep this in mind. Is the slide for you or for the audience? It should be for the audience, and not for you. But what normally happens is people use slides as their presentation notes, so they put a lot of words in the slides.

When you put a lot of words in the slides, it becomes very distracting. The audience will automatically try to read what they can see. It is just human nature, they cannot help it. So instead of listening to you to what you are presenting, they will instead be focussing on what is behind you, what is on the slides.

What I find works best is to have only 2-3 points per slide to support your presentation. I myself prefer to have only 1 point per slide and 1 photo. I truly believe in the phrase ‘A picture paints a thousand words’. A carefully chosen photo can convey so much more meaning, more better than having a slide full of words.

For example, when you see the photo below of me reaching the summit of Mount Kinabalu, you immediately can understand the joy and exhilaration of the moment. Something that even till today I find hard to explain in words.

The other point to remember is to be consistent in your overall look. If you decide to go for a sharp business look, then make sure all your slides have that same feel. If suddenly there is one slide that is more cartoon based then it will make your presentation look less polished. Like you haven’t really put much thought into your slides.

There are so much help out there that you can use to make good slides. Powerpoint itself have a ‘design’ feature that can make some great suggestions for appropriate photos. The ‘morph’ transition is so cool that you should learn how to use it if you haven’t discovered it yet.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/use-the-morph-transition-in-powerpoint-8dd1c7b2-b935-44f5-a74c-741d8d9244ea

I use ‘Canva’ for my presentations and they have many templates that you can choose for. I heard that there are some AI-powered websites that can turn text into full presentations already. I haven’t tried any of them so if you have some experience with them, do email me to let me know if they are any good.

So we have already talked about how to write a presentation and how to make your slides, in the next edition, I will be writing about how to deliver your presentation to get the maximum impact.

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Doktor Az

2 tips this week.

The slides are only for support. The slides are for the audience and not for you.

For your next presentation, start by preparing your script first. If you don’t want to write full script at least prepare the outline first. Once that is done, then decide on what slides do you need to support your presentation.

Do it you for your next presentation.