PowerPoint skills: presentations with pizzazz

PowerPoint skills: presentations with pizzazz
January 2011

Duncan Peberdy, author of ‘How to make Microsoft PowerPoint work for you’, kicks off a new series by looking at ways of improving your presentations.

Over the coming months, I am going to provide tips, tricks and advice to enhance the presentations that you make using Microsoft PowerPoint. While the focus will be firmly on using PowerPoint with financial data, I will also be covering more general aspects of using PowerPoint to help ensure success for your presentations.

Who doesn’t use PowerPoint?
Some organisations have banned it. And for some types of information, especially where large amounts of evidential data need to be carefully considered, PowerPoint is not the best tool. In most of these instances, what has wrongly been identified as dissatisfaction with PowerPoint, is in fact frustration with the way PowerPoint is misused.

This happens because PowerPoint has evolved from software that produced slides to accompany presentations, into becoming the presentation itself. And by being available on almost every Windows PC, we’ve been lulled into a false sense of reality about the design ability and presentation skills of PC users. A poor calibre of people think that they can hide behind PowerPoint simply by using it as an autocue. Complacent managers continue to let them get away with it. This results in the lacklustre reading out of slides verbatim, which are then distributed at the end as handouts. Such practice is not worthy of being called a presentation, and only results in a well documented syndrome known as 'death by PowerPoint’.

The great news is that, when used correctly, PowerPoint is an incredibly persuasive tool that adds weight to our words, and increases the engagement presenters have with their audiences. These things help the objective of the presentation to be fully achieved.

So before we start to look at using PowerPoint with financial data, this month we will concentrate on some usage aspects that will enhances all presentations.

Preventing ‘death by PowerPoint’
Effective communication is a crucial skill that clearly distinguishes people from each other. What better way is there to communicate your message than by delivering a compelling and informative presentation? But right across the business spectrum – training, sales, HR, marketing, and finance – there are so many would-be presenters who get everything wrong and end up ‘killing’ their audiences. The audience might not physically die, but they certainly start questioning their will to live much longer!

Microsoft’s PowerPoint has now become completely synonymous with the production and delivery of presentations. Apple’s Keynote might be trying to muscle in on PowerPoint, but complete compatibility with PowerPoint is high on Keynote’s feature list. That’s not surprising given that a bewildering 30 million PowerPoint presentations are launched daily around the globe. PowerPoint is used by companies to pitch to clients, internally for training and in meetings, and at universities and colleges for student learning.

Presenting material with an audience in front of you is so much more compelling than just producing reports or forwarding documents. To start with you can never be sure if your reports have even been opened, let alone read properly. But as with anything that you want to be successful with, it’s about far more than just the words on the paper. It’s about the value and emotion that your passion and expertise can add to those words, and a presentation is the best vehicle for success.

'Death by PowerPoint’ occurs when the value and passion that a presenter must add to the material displayed on the slides is absent. Academic research has shown that when the words on the slides are read out verbatim, the effect of hearing and seeing them is actually less than just reading them for yourself. Why? Because instead of being engaged by the presentation, you will have read the words before they’ve finished being read aloud, at which point you switch off and think about other important issues, check your phone, etc.

Your presentation should be aimed at interchanging information in one of three ways – to learn, share, or create information. Whether you simply need to convey information without any feedback or you are encouraging everyone to be involved, combining powerful visuals with your spoken words improves the likelihood of achieving your objective.

That’s because combining images with words requires the audience to subconsciously use both sides of their brain to process the information. Now they are more engaged with the process, and you as a presenter are giving them a better than average experience. Without all the words on the slides, the presenter cannot now hide behind PowerPoint as an autocue, which means that the presenter has to understand their subject and convey their expertise and passion for it to the audience.

Setting expectations
As part of the introduction to your presentation, clearly state your objective/s. If the audience is relatively small, then engage them immediately by asking if anyone has any other expectations not covered by your objectives. Asking this at the start ensures that all relevant content is covered, and means that when you conclude, all the objectives can be ‘ticked off’ as achieved.

Tell your audience exactly how you want to deal with any questions that arise. Do you want questions saved until the end, or to be interrupted and ensure that the question is considered in the right context?

Tell your audience about making or providing notes. How frustrating is it to take lots of notes diligently, only for them to be given out at the end? On the other hand, if you give out notes at the beginning, doubtless there will be some people jumping ahead. We will cover this again in more detail in a future article, but just providing copies of the PowerPoint slides as notes is not good enough.

Returning to why PowerPoint is so often misused, a big part of the problem is that lazy and unqualified presenters use the slide content as the spoken narrative, as their visual, and as their handout. As well as being downright lazy, it’s also highly ineffective and wastes the opportunity to maximise the presence of an audience with your communication.

Tips and tricks
When presenting with PowerPoint there are a number of keyboard short cuts that can heighten your professional presence, as well as making life easier for you. Try these when you are next preparing to present using PowerPoint.

In PowerPoint, before you start the slide show:
Key Action
F5 Starts the slide show from slide 1
Shift + F5 Starts the slide show from the current slide. This is useful if you’ve had to break the slide show. Now you don’t have to start at slide one and laboriously advance through each slide to the required slide.

Once you have started the slide show:
Key Action
‘W’ or ‘B’ key If you have got your first slide ready on the screen but you don’t want the audience to see it yet, just press either the ‘W’ or ‘B’ key to make the whole screen white or black. Pressing the same key again will reveal the slide, as will pressing the ‘next slide’ button on a wireless presenter remote control. In fact, you can press ‘W’ or ‘B’ at any stage during a presentation to remove the slide from view without ending the slide show.
Slide number followed by Enter key If you need to jump to a particular slide, you can type the number and press enter to navigate directly to it.
Control + ‘S’ key If you need to move to a particular slide but can’t remember its number, press ‘control + S’ to bring up on screen a list of all the slides in your presentation. Double click the slide you want to navigate to. Or press the number and enter.

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