Charlotte shows how not to give a presentation

It started, as so many PowerPoint presentations do, with a shout from the front for IT assistance. But this time the presenter´s clumsy attempt to get a laptop talking to a projector was a ruse.

Public speaking coach Charlotte Mannion was using it to demonstrate the first pitfall of PowerPoint presentations.

“How many times has a presentation you´ve watched started like that?” she asked members of Swindon Chamber of Commerce at last Friday´s business breakfast. “If that happens to you, you´ll spend the first ten minutes of your presentation trying to win the audience back.”

During her presentation, entitled Life After Death by PowerPoint, Charlotte did use PowerPoint slides – but only to demonstrate how they could distract the audience from the speaker´s key messages:

• Bullet
• Points...
• Are
• They
• Information
• For
• The
• Audience
• Or
• A
• Reminder
• For
• The
• Speaker?

And the really long piece of text that the speaker would read word for word, but because the audience can read faster than the speaker can talk they would reach the end before the speaker did and be twiddling their thumbs waiting for the person giving the presentation to finish.

Other pitfalls included spellcheck failures, pieces of clipart that add nothing to the presentation, and slides with complicated graphs or charts, which serve only to baffle the audience.

The key to a successful presentation using PowerPoint, said Charlotte, is to stick to one or two slides.

“It´s very tempting to plan your whole presentation using PowerPoint, and then just show your audience your work,” she said.

“Plan your presentation on paper first, ask yourself who it is aimed at and what the aim of the presentation is – to inform, educate, sell or entertain.

“Think about the result you want and plan your presentation from this point. Decide three key points because people remember things in threes. Use two or three slides to illustrate your key topics. And remember a call to action at the the end.

“And remember too the words of Mark Twain: ´It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.´”