(Updated) Nobody enjoys “Death by Powerpoint”
Today I provided some advice to a colleague due to present in Parliament soon. I decided to share this advice and use slides from one of my own presentations to demonstrate the good vs the bad in my suggested approach.
Note, the suggestions below assume you’ve either printed out notes or cue sheets to speak from or are using Presenter View to view your notes per slide on your screen while the slides themselves are displayed on the projector screen. Also, these recommendations do not make for good re-distributable presentations; they are made purely for the live presentation.
“Powerpoint allows you to append notes to each slide viewable by the presenter. For the most part, the content of your current slides should become the notes and your slides should be limited to images, phrases, single words, graphs and other easy to digest details.
Too much detail per slide is what is referred to as “Death by Powerpoint” and people participating are either distracted by reading and not listening, or they give up as a result of the information overload.
Below are two images showing Powerpoint slides from a presentation I put together in 2008 during an exercise on using Powerpoint to enhance message delivery. I got slated afterward for having too much information, but at least I got the first slides right!
The people you are presenting to are there to *listen* to what you have to say. Tell them what they need to know and let Powerpoint illustrate, reinforce and prompt.”
I'd suggest this is too much text for any normal person to comfortably process per slide.
This graphic shows post-colonial leaders in Africa, and can be spoken to effectively.
I applied the above theory to the presentation I used to accompany my speech at INDIASOFT 2009 in Kolkata, India.