Spice up your presentations
Okay, so we have all been there, that office meeting where a member of the management reads off a long list of bullet points on each slide of their PowerPoint presentation and you struggle to pay attention. And even if you are paying attention, you probably have all the bullet points read before the presenter does! This can make presentations tedious and boring and you will lose your audience.
Okay so what do you do to avoid this? Well in this blog post we have some invaluable tips to avoid the dreaded 'death by PowerPoint' and give you some tips on how keep your presentation engaging while avoiding those bad habits that so many fall victim to.
Those bad habits might include stuffing slides with too much content, going overboard with animations, distracting from slides with animated transitions or just overcomplicating your presentation. There are also other bad habits such as having long lists of bullet points on each slide, making your presentation very tedious. This is one guaranteed way to bore your audience, lose their attention and kill your presentation.
Recent studies have shown that most people can retain a maximum of 4 chunks of information at a time, so having more than 4 bullet points is not a good idea, limit those bullet points! Better still, why not avoid bullet points all together! Other studies suggest that people retain information far better when it's presented graphically rather than with text! So why not use a simple image or photo to illustrate your point and make your points based on the image on screen. This method has to be better than simply reading bullet points off the slide.
The below video from Microsoft Office Blog elaborates on these points very well and gives some great tips on how to win over your audience with your PowerPoint presentation and avoid all those bad habits that lead to 'death by PowerPoint'. Simply put, it will help you make better PowerPoint presentations.
Training
But of course the best way to avoid the dreaded 'death by PowerPoint' is to take one of our up to date PowerPoint courses with our certified, and very knowledgeable, instructors.
And don't forget the fast growing alternative the PowerPoint, Prezi! Check out our blog post about Prezi, the cloud-based presentation software tool that is great for presenting ideas on a virtual canvas. It employs a zooming user interface, which allows users to zoom in and out of their presentation media, and allows users to display and navigate through information.
You may also be interested in our Microsoft Office PowerPoint cheat sheet.
