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Change your PowerPoint Habits

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: Refresh your thinking about using PowerPoint to present material. This article gives some great tips to be more contemporary with your presentations.

Change your PowerPoint Habits

I attended a breakout session by Jeffery Gitomer at the National Speakers Association Convention in Orlando this Summer. His topic was "Why your PowerPoint presentations suck and mine do not." I thought that was a rather catchy title and decided to attend. His presentation was totally different from any I had seen before. Parts of it I found annoying or confrontational, but on balance he made me think about my presentations and I ended up making some changes that have paid off.

Jeffrey turned conventional wisdom on its head in every possible way he could. For example, when we entered the room there was a big notice on the screen saying, "Please tour your cell phone ON." That was an unusual opening! His idea was to have the session content go viral during the presentation. He had set a goal to get 100,000 tweets in an hour. I have no idea if he was successful, but you have to admit it was an unusual start to a breakout session.

I learned that having fancy graphics in the background of a slide is simply distracting. The new look is a perfectly white background. I had been using this technique all along, so that was not much of a change. He also advocated severely limiting the number of words on a slide. In the past I was guilty of putting too many words in each bullet. Jeffery advocated only one bullet per page with all lettering in large black letters with one or two words in bright red to emphasize the key point. This meant that his hour long presentation was over 300 slides, but he went so fast, we did not notice the volume.

One trick he advocated that helped me was to eliminate all use of clip art. Typically I would use a clip art cartoon to emphasize my point on each slide. His contention is that clip art is old and tired. It has little impact these days. Jeffrey advocated the use of photographic images to highlight any particular point. I took that advice.

I got a subscription to istockphoto, which allows the presenter to download photos from a searchable catalog of millions of images. You purchase a license to show the photo up to 500,000 times for a very low fee. Now my PowerPoint presentations have a lot more character and interest to audiences. The flexibility of using real people rather than clip art makes my presentations alive with action, and I have received several compliments on the quality of my work since making the change.

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Article Tags: Images, no clip art, PowerPoint, tips



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Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - Glad you liked it David! I only managed to get partway through the list today because my one year old was looking for some playtime but I did read the Zen Habits one - I love reading Zen Habits while relaxing at a coffee shop!
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - I was also interested in the Zen Habits affiliate programme as it might mix well with my business/japan blog...
Re: Spellcheck? - [quote="TheAnonymousMan":2f894q6j]When discussing the majority of people I would definitely say that most people hit the "Change" or "Ignore" button without thinking too much about the correct spelling of a word. All bosses are concerned about is getting the report to the Directors meeting on time.[/quote:2f894q6j] That probably depends on what the "majority" are trying to accomplish. I have word set to alert me about misspellings and grammatical problems, so I fix most as I go. But I also add names etc to the dictionary because I get tired of seeing the red and green squiggles when I know the info is right. If you're only going to click "Change" or "Ignore" then why bother to take the time to use spell check????? Business people that I work for want the info compiled in a timely manner and they want it right - which is fine because that's the way I strive to do any project. Sending out a memo, letter, report etc with obvious spelling and grammatical mistakes makes the person and the company look bad as far as I'm concerned. Shri
Re: Money Does Not Guarantee Happiness - Thanks for singling this point out, Chris. One book that comes to mind that covers it in an overall approach is "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" by Stephen Covey. He addresses our inner life and the way it can change our effectiveness home and at work. There are corporations who have taken this model and effectively molded their business around it.


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