Part I – From PoorPoint to PowerPoint Presentations
Have you attended any boring, too long to stay focused (even awake) presentation and at the end walked out dissatisfied without gaining something or giving out any useful input? Have you ever delivered any lengthy, fact loaded presentations with tons of tables, bullet points, graphs and even slide animation?
PowerPoint is an essential business tool and is used to inform/convince the audience and deliver the key message. It’s to be used as visual aid to help presenter and not to present complete white papers in PowerPoint format.
From sales people to students and from technical gurus to creative mavericks, everyone is using PowerPoint to share concepts, offer solutions, sell products/services and deliver messages. Leveraging the power of PowerPoint is helping people to deliver speeches effectively and easily. By following few steps, you can improve the outcome, make interesting presentations and engage the audience.
As we all know that most precious commodity after the time is the attention of the audience so that real message can be delivered, and desired results can be obtained. Our goal should be to keep audience attentive and receptive of our message by making presentation concise, engaging, on-topic and result focused. Also, preparation around the delivery of PowerPoint is the key success factor; actual problem is with the amount and type of content, style of delivery and type of preparation that goes in – and not with the PowerPoint itself.
Self-Evaluation
First Step is to answer following as first step, use the answers to plan your PowerPoint –
WHY do you need to give PowerPoint presentation?
WHAT do you plan to accomplish from this presentation?
HOW would you make your idea get across and accepted?
WHEN do you think will you be ready for presentation?
Now we know the importance of presenting right ‘stuff’ in ‘right’ format for better results. In next posts we will review –
Part II – Cause Of Boring PowerPoint Presentations
Part III – How To Prepare? Putting Slides Together & How To Improve Your Presentation
More reading material –
http://ltlatnd.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/powerpoint-is-not-the-problem/
http://www.wordsellinc.com/blog/communication-skills/presentation-skills-public-speaking/
Categories: Performance, Productivity
Leadership and Management 
Leave a Reply