Are you making any of these errors when creating your presentations?
Visualizations
Do you use overly complicated visuals? Are you guilty of adding complicated charts or graphics with small fonts? Stop now! Complicated charts might show how smart you are but if your audience has to spend time trying to make sense of it whilst you are presenting that will work against you.
Solution – use the glance test – Make sure your audience can make basic sense of your slide within 5 seconds of seeing it.
Wordy or Vague Titles
Another mistake is using vague or long titles for your slides. Your audience should understand the purpose of each slide just by reading the title. Your titles must provide a concise overview of the primary idea of your slide so that the audience can read and comprehend the details easily.
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The audience will find it lot simpler to understand what you’re attempting to convey if you use a whole sentence as your title, ideally one that encapsulates the major point of the slide.
Standard PowerPoint Layouts
The third error we see more frequently than we’d like is using PowerPoint’s stock standard design templates and themes. They’re boring, outdated, and just plain blegh.
These designs are recognizable to everyone who has used PowerPoint and send a subliminal message that your audience wasn’t important enough to invest the time to design a presentation that would wow them and rather that your slides were slapped together at the last minute.
Solution: Invest the time to develop your PowerPoint skills or consider appointing someone with the right skills to help you out!
Unrelated Information
How often have you added a photo, image, or graph to your slide deck just because you really liked it but it wasn’t specifically relevant to your presentation?
Far to often we see items that are only decorative and have no real function.
Remember as our MD says, everything you add to your slide is either adds value and helps you get your message across, or it takes away and distracts your audience.
Too Much Information
Time is limited and you have a lot to say. So you add multiple key facts to each slide.
This leaves your audience in an attention battle, they have to listen to what you are saying whilst reading the slide and simultaneously try to identify the key points.
Solution: You may have a lot to say but remember to only say what you must say to support your key message. Try to only have one key point per slide and using visual clues to lead the audience through your slide so that your point is obvious.
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