Yes it’s true PowerPoint was first released in 1987 and was originally designed for the Apple Mac. 20 years later it’s still going strong yet it still gets most of the blame for the millions of boring business presentations that occur around the world every year.

When I was a child I was taught that “a good workman never blames his tools” and I believe that old adage still holds true today when it comes to presentations. The real cause of boring presentations is laziness on the part of the presenter.

Garbage in, garbage out applies to PowerPoint presentations in the same way that it applies to other computer programmes. Isn’t it time we took responsibility, held out hands up and said, we need to design better presentations.

  1. We need to think about why we are giving the presentation in the first place. What’s our purpose and what do we want the audience to be doing as a result.
  2. We need to put ourselves firmly in our audiences shoes as we prepare our presentation and ensure that we spell out the benefits to them of applying the information in our presentation – we need to make it relevant AND we need to make that relevance clear and obvious early on.
  3. We need to craft a coherent story that takes our audience from where they are at the start to where they need to be by the end of the presentation.
  4. We need clear simple memorable messages that are not buried amongst a sea of irrelevant and incomprehensible detail.
  5. We need to design visual aids that support our story and have much fewer words and more images, diagrams and videos to support our verbal script.

It may sound like hard work but it;s not that difficult and, the results are so much better. Invest a little time in developing your presentation and it’ll pay you back many times over.

So let’s raise a glass to PowerPoint and commit to learning how to use it in better, more intelligent ways.

Posted in PowerPoint Tips

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