Last updated : Thursday, July 14, 2011

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5 Essentials for an Effective PowerPoint

What’s worse, having to sit through a boring PowerPoint presentation, or being bored by your own? Both can be excruciating, occurring all-too-frequently in offices around the world … but it doesn’t have to be that way.

“PowerPoint is supposed to be a tool to help us with presentations,” says Cliff Atkinson, a PowerPoint expert. “Instead, it ends up hurting us.”

Atkinson says relying too much on technology can quickly put an audience to sleep, and therefore PowerPoint should be used to support a presentation, not enhance it. He then went on to give us his five essentials for an effective PowerPoint.

1. Know your goal. What is the story you want to tell? What are the three most important things you want the audience to remember? Use one slide per point and make sure you’re clear, using media that supports the message.

Are you there to persuade, educate or entertain? If you’re there to persuade, you’ll want a combination of emotional and quantitative data. Get to the market research, but frame it in a certain way. People won’t be persuaded by data alone.

And educational presentation should be full of “how-to’s” and step-by-step slides. It’s best to distill down your information to a few key points, which you can use as anchors for your presentation.

If your purpose is to entertain, keep it lighter, vibrant and more anecdotal.

2. Use pictures. Put up a picture of the customer you’d like to reach instead of bullet points describing that customer. A picture helps to lock the imagination of your viewers and opens your ability to communicate with them verbally. Personal photos are ALWAYS better than stock photos. They work to accelerate understanding. Too much text overloads our capacity; you’re essentially inviting people to shut down instead of listen to your ideas.

3. Less is more. Write out the most important point and use it as the headline for that slide. And stay away from meaningless words like “vision,” “strategy” and “assessment.” Make your headline clear and to the point. “THIRD QUARTER LOWER THAN SECOND QUARTER.” Then use the rest of the slide to support that point.

4. Make it all about them, instead of all about you. “Our company” and “our mission” is not about the audience. Shift your thinking: How will your audience benefit from this?

5. Use the right colors. Red is typically energetic and it can be used to attract attention. Use it judiciously, though; everything can’t be red. I always default to the simplest color combinations: a white background with maybe a dark blue headline. This will give you flexibility for your presentation.

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Cliff Atkinson is the author of Beyond Bullet Points (Microsoft Press) which has sold more than 100,000 copies and was named a Best Book of 2007 by the editors of Amazon.com. The book expands on a communications approach he has taught internationally at top law firms, government agencies, business schools and corporations, including Sony, Toyota, Del Monte, Nestlé, Nokia, Deloitte, BBDO, The NPD Group, Ipsos, Facebook, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Intel, GE, the American Bar Association and the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal.

 

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