Been asked to give a PowerPoint presentation? Not sure where to begin? These handy hints will help you make your talk a success.
Check your equipment
It sounds basic, but it's amazing how much time is wasted at conferences and meetings by people scrabbling around searching for that missing lead or disc, or trying to get a computer to play a presentation that for some reason won't load. Of course, even the best-laid plans go wrong sometimes, but it's important to do everything you can to minimize the chances that you'll be frantically searching through your luggage or crawling around trying to hook up the relevant wires while the audience sits awkwardly by, tapping its feet.
Check out your venue
This can be difficult, particularly if you have been invited to speak somewhere new; however, it should be possible to spend a moment or two familiarising yourself with the stage and the lectern and the microphone if one is available (NB microphones are nearly always a good idea. You may think your voice is loud, but even people trained in voice projection can struggle to reach the back of a large hall. It's also very tiring to have to speak with a raised voice and exhausting for an audience to have to strain to hear a speaker whose words aren't carrying.) Don't be embarrassed to arrive a little early and ask the organisers if you can have a moment or two to try out the stage during the coffee or lunch break. You are the speaker and it is to everyone's advantage that you deliver your presentation as well as possible.
Plan your movements
One of the advantages of visual presentation tools such as PowerPoint is that you don't have to be tied to a lectern and your notes (although you may still choose to speak from notes - more of this later). This means that you can move around as you speak. Some speakers relish the freedom this gives them and are very relaxed about moving around, sometimes coming up to the screen to point out a detail on a picture or diagram, at other times strolling up and down the presentation space. Done well, this makes for a fluid and informal presentation and can be a good way of making sure all parts of the audience are engaged. However, awkward movements or strange physical tics can be distracting and it's important to be aware of how you move and to feel comfortable with it. Aimless wandering, swaying from side to side or visible embarrassment will detract from what you are saying. It's perfectly acceptable to decide to stay in one spot, either at a lectern or beside the screen and deliver your talk from there. The main thing is to find the method that you feel most confident with and know what you are going to do in advance.
Don't try to show too much
When preparing a presentation, it's tempting to cram in every last picture and diagram that has any relevance to your topic. But you need to be selective. There's nothing worse than sitting through a presentation that is overrunning because the speaker got carried away with the content or watching a speaker flick hurriedly through slides with no chance to explain them properly. As a general rule, one slide per minute is about right. Any more than that and your audience won't have time to take the images in.
Get the size of your images right
Lifting huge picture files into your presentation will take up space on your computer and could lengthen the time it takes to flick from one slide to the next or even crash the programme. You can resize photos in Photoshop and should aim for a file size of no more than 100KB per photo.
Don't include your notes in PowerPoint
The number of speakers who seem to think PowerPoint is simply a tool to prompt them as they talk is incredible. Endless slides of bullet-point notes are boring, repetitive, and, in the worst cases, can stop the audience listening to what the speaker is saying as they might as well just read it on the screen. The point of slides in presentations should be to illustrate and illuminate the talk, not simply to regurgitate the same material. Of course, if you are talking about a topic you know well, you might find that the pictures and diagrams in your PowerPoint presentation are enough of a prompt for you to talk from and you don't need notes as well, which is great. But if there are points or statistics that you want to make sure you remember, it's better to have them on prompt cards than to force the audience to read through them as well.
Put yourself in the audience's shoes
It can be very difficult, when speaking on a topic you know well, to gage exactly the level of information that people listening to you will need to follow your argument. Try to have a sense of who you're speaking to and gather as much information as you can from the organisers about the level of expertise and areas they expect you to cover in advance of the event. Think back to presentations you have seen yourself. What do you look for from a speaker? What has been good and bad about talks you have heard in the past? Try to prepare a presentation that you would be interested to listen to yourself.
Wear a watch
There's nothing worse than an audience that's impatient to get away for lunch and, as a speaker, it's horrible to be told to wrap up mid-flow. Avoid this by keeping an eye on the time for yourself. Don't count on being able to see a clock in the venue and don't rely on your computer to keep time - computer clocks are notoriously unreliable. If you like, you could synchronise watches with the chairman before he conference or meeting starts.
Do a trial-run
Silly though you may feel, it pays dividends to have a run-through a day or so before, particularly if you are talking purely from the images on the screen. This will also help you check the length of the presentation. Even experienced speakers spend time flicking through their images and lecturing themselves in the bathroom mirror, so you'll be in good company.
Make sure you can do without
If, despite all your preparations and careful checks, you find that the presentation won't run when you need it (and let's face it, even computers have their off days), it pays to have a plan B. This means being prepared to deliver your talk without the help of the images on the screen. If your illustrations are vital to the audience's understanding of what you are saying, it might make sense to prepare a hand-out showing the key slides, which could be passed round if for any reason the technology goes on the blink. Of course, that would be annoying, but it's not the end of the world. The chances are that as long as you don't mind too much the audience won't either; after all, it's you they've come to see, not a series of brightly coloured images on a screen.
This is a very useful article, and it includes many of the best practice effective meeting management techniques which are the subject of training and development in the consultancy sector... Thank you for such a user friendly and readable distillation!
#2 by Steve Lennon, Sep 19, 2007
That's what I've been doing wrong! The last time I had to do a presentation the projector bulb blew and I had to do the whole presentation unaided. It was a nightmare!! I'll definitely be taking a note of number 10. Top tips, thank you Ann!
