Video Transcript: Death By PowerPoint (Andrew Bryant)

Video Transcript:  Death By PowerPoint - Presentation Skills - Public Speaking (Andrew Bryant)

A powerful tool that is often misused in presentations is PowerPoint, or Keynote for those Macintosh watches. PowerPoint allows us to get our points across very powerfully, or to send our audience into a deep, deep trance. Now we've all experienced death by PowerPoint, the room slightly dimmed. And then somebody turns their head to a presentation screen. And reads dot point, after dot point after dot point, it's sometimes really, really, really small font. All they show us a spreadsheet that is huge, where we can't really understand anything. Please, please don't do that to your audience. If I have a mission today, it is to say to you stop committing death by PowerPoint. 

So how do you do that? See PowerPoint, as an adjunct to your presentation, people have come to listen to you, if you don't add any value, don't turn up, just send them the notes, all right. But if you add value to the to the presentation, then that's what you should do. And then the PowerPoint, or the keynote adds value to you. So how do you create this, use pictures, a picture says 1000 words. So now use dot points, pick a picture or an image that gets your point across, then you only need one title, or maybe one point or quote, which backs up your presentation unless you know where you are in the flow. And it adds otherwise your audience are not listening to you. They're reading the screen. If you do have a spreadsheet, or you do have some information that they need to read, then print that out as a handout and pass it out to them either at the beginning or the end of your presentation to let them know what's available. So if you do write on PowerPoint, here's a couple of just technical things to do for the header. Try and not go smaller than 40 points. 

For the for the dot points, please no more than five on a slide. And don't drop the size down below 28 points which is pretty big, which is going to limit how many to split the points between two presentations. Don't overdo the animations just because the animations are there doesn't mean you have to use them. Remember, just a soft transition from one presentation slide to the next. And if you want to add something with a custom animation, just one soft appear or white will do the job. Minimize the text. Don't kill people, inspire people.