From business pitches to board meetings, there are many reasons to put together a PowerPoint presentation. Regardless of the purpose of the PowerPoint presentation, there are some basics guidelines you should follow to make sure you get your point across correctly, clearly and professionally.
Analyze your Audience
First, much like any other public presentation, you need to consider your audience. Why are they here? What do they want to hear? What are they interested in? What do you hope they get from this presentation? What are your immediate short-term goals that you hope this presentation will accomplish? What are your long-term goals that you hope this presentation will accomplish? You need to figure out the answers to these questions, because if you don't know the answers you cannot properly guide the audience towards your goals.
Write an outline of your presentation
Next you need to write an outline of your presentation and what your talking points will be. At this point, forget about the actual PowerPoint and just focus on what information you want to convey to the audience. Pretend that you will not even have a PowerPoint. What will you say? Break it down to an introduction, body and conclusion. Make sure this outline hits every question and goal stated above when you analyzed your audience.
Use your outline to give your speech
Now that you have an outlined version of your presentation, start practicing your presentation. There is still no PowerPoint involved. Just focus on what you will be saying, what the audience will be hearing, and the key points you need to get across. Take this time to go back and edit the structure, flow and order of your presentation until you are comfortable with it, it meets your time requirements and it moves the audience on a logical flow towards your goals for the presentation. Note: It's always better to present the facts and assumptions and allow the audience to make the connection in their head, as opposed to you directly telling them what they should get from this presentation. Also take this time to remove any "clutter" that does not directly or indirectly lead to your goals.
Put together a PowerPoint to supplement your talking points
Now that you have outlined what you will be saying in your presentation, you can put together a concise, professional PowerPoint the way they were meant to be used-- to supplement the verbal portion of your presentation, not as a standalone presentation. While putting together your PowerPoint, here are some tips to remember:
Don't cram too much information into one slide. The audience should be listening to you, not reading.
If your presentation is constructed properly, you should be spending 2-3 minutes on slides with text. For slides with pictures, you can spend as little as 15 seconds on them, or you can use them as a placeholder or reminder-- but don't stay on any for longer then 3 minutes in order to keep the audience engaged.
Always use PowerPoint to display any compelling graphs, projections or numbers that cannot be emphasized enough verbally.
Simple is better.
The main thing to remember is that the PowerPoint is not giving the presentation-- you are! Put together your speech first, then put together the PowerPoint to help drive your arguments home.
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