Avoid the Most Common PowerPoint Mistakes
PowerPoint presentations are the vacation slide shows of the business world: we’ve all sat through uninteresting ones that seemed to last forever. But there are several tips that you can follow to avoid creating a PowerPoint presentation that bores your co-workers. This is important: You create PowerPoint presentations to spread your message, promote products and achieve results. You can’t do this if no one’s listening to them.
Don’t Forget Creativity
PowerPoint is very easy to use, but this doesn’t mean you ought to be lazy where creativity is concerned. Try to come up with innovative ways to make your slides more interesting. Maybe use a memorable quote that pertains to your subject, or use a mnemonic device to help retention. Don’t just put a bunch of slides up that have bullet points on them.
Instead, use the slides to display the most crucial and useful data. Don’t just use them as a way to show all the graphs you made, while detailing what they mean.
Come with Solutions
You’ll also want to come armed with ways that your company’s employees can improve these sales numbers. Another mistake of many PowerPoint presentations: they provide information. But they don’t provide useful methods for how employees can use that information to better the company’s performance.
If your PowerPoint presentation shows that sales are down, be sure you follow up with your own belief on why sales have fallen and what the company can do to increase them. If sales are up? Provide information on how your company can maintain its momentum.
Don’t Get Too Fancy
While you should be creative when you make your slides, don’t opt for all the bells and whistles. A common mistake managers make is using excessive graphics and pictures, thinking this pop of color will draw the attention of the audience. What it generally does is distract. Additionally, many people simply read their slides to the audience, this is unnecessary and can bore, if not irritate, the audience. They will just read your points. Instead, focus on the most significant item and go in depth. Otherwise you could have just emailed the presentation to them and saved your breath.
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