I’m sure you’ve had to sit through bland PowerPoint presentations before. It seems like they go on forever and you hardly retain any of the information. What a total waste of time right? If you agree, make your next presentation more unique with some of the ideas below.
Don’t Forget Creativity
As the writers at Microsoft’s Business Hub say, PowerPoint doesn’t give you authorization to get lazy. You still have to be innovative if you want to develop a winning presentation that grabs the attention of your audience. Which means that you can’t let PowerPoint’s usability trick you into thinking that you don’t have to produce engaging content. Just because you can create an endless series of text-filled slides doesn’t imply that you should.
Instead, use the slides to emphasize 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
Giving solutions or insights into the information you present is another way to help make your PowerPoint memorable. If your meeting is not simply to inform your audience but get them to consider the data and perhaps come up with ideas for improvement or change, get them thinking along the same lines as you by giving them some creative ideas to ponder.
If your PowerPoint presentation reveals that sales are down, make sure you follow up with your own belief on why sales have decreased and what the company can do to boost them. If sales are up? Provide information on how your company can maintain its momentum.
Don’t Get Too Fancy
We said to get creative but that doesn’t mean you should utilize all the gimmicks that PowerPoint offers. Many managers throw in needless or annoying images in an attempt to grab attention. Any irrelevant images will only serve as a disruption. Then they will only recall the cute jumping dog in the corner of the slide instead of the information you were providing. A common mistake you will want to avoid as well, is reading the slides verbatim. Your audience does not want to read along with you. Instead, leave the slide up long enough for them to read the three bullets while verbally expanding on the single most important one. This way you can save your breath and avoid exhausting your audience’s attention span with redundancy.
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