Death by PowerPoint
Posted By Rob Millard - 0 Comments -
Communicating data effectively is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL to successful strategy crafting. PowerPoint is a frequent but often abused tool for this. Jesper Johannsen, a senior strategist at Microsoft, blogged about the 10 most deadly sins PowerPointers commit. They are summarized as follows....
1. Powerpoint is NOT a word processor. Don't cram slides with data.
2. Most of your audience knows how to read. Don't read the slides to them.
3. A picture is worth a thousand words, possibly more. Use them.
4. Know your presentation. Otherwise you look stupid.
5. Bullets are bad, stories are good. Stories are always good.
6. The actual content of your presentation is much more important than the slide template that you use. Time spent changing templates is a waste and may be considerable.
7. The purpose of the three-pane view is not so you can see the next slide. There is nothing to beat rehearsal.
8. Make sure your design is reader friendly. Black font on a white background in a dark room will make people look anywhere but at the screen. (It hurts!)
9. Be concious of people with disabilities. Especially colourblindness. Red text on a blue background is particularly difficult for people with some colourblind people to read, and red on a similar shade of green (or vice versa) can be completely impossible.
10. 12 point type is not appropriate. Don't go below 18. 24 is a better minimum size.
I'd add an eleventh which is be extremely careful with animation (except appropriate page transitions.) Its distracting to have something some cartwheeling in from the left and slotting into place with a loud "ping" unless there is a specific point to it. The point is to communicate information, not to demonstrate that you know how to use all of the program's gizmos.
10/20/30
Another great point about PowerPoint is made by venture capitalist Gary Kawasaki in his blog "Let the Good Times Roll." He says presentations should conform to the 10/20/30 rule, which is a maximum of 10 slides; 20 points; 30 minutes.
