Stepcase Lifehack: One of the editors here at Lifehack, Chris Smith, frequently writes about technology. As I was reading some of his recent articles, I was influenced to write a tech article of my own, so here it is.So, you are sitting in a company meeting and the presenter puts up the first slide. You are probably thinking to yourself,“Oh no, not another Powerpoint presentation – BORING!”
Monday, October 10, 2011
Six Major Mistakes When Doing Powerpoint Presentations
Stepcase Lifehack: One of the editors here at Lifehack, Chris Smith, frequently writes about technology. As I was reading some of his recent articles, I was influenced to write a tech article of my own, so here it is.So, you are sitting in a company meeting and the presenter puts up the first slide. You are probably thinking to yourself,“Oh no, not another Powerpoint presentation – BORING!”
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All of the mistakes pointed out in this article seem obvious and are mentioned frequently when discussing powerpoint presentations, yet we all see the same mistakes repeated over and over again. Some people see using a powerpoint as an easy way to give a presentation, but doing it right can take just as much planning and preparation as any other presentation would. I wonder what this author feels about having printed copies of the powerpoint to pass out to listeners. This is done in the 30 Hr OSHA course, and I think it eliminates the stress of trying to cut back the amount of words on a slide, because people will no longer be scrambling to remember or write down everything the slide says, and will have time to take decent notes.
Brooke brings up good points, we all know the downfalls of power points yet we ignore them. There is also a gap between how much text we should have to reinforce what we are saying, or if we should discuss what we are talking about and not show it. There are some easy fixes to power points, such as text size, not abusing the bells and whistles, and reading each word. Deciding the amount of text present should be one that is based off the depth of the topic. An entire definition may be necessary instead of a paraphrase, but the speaker should fill in the gaps. Powerpoint's should be brief to aid in the presentation by reinforcing ideas, but we run into the block of not remembering the presentation and falling back on the powerpoint. If your text is too small to read, then there is probably too much information.
Power point is used as a crutch by many people when giving presentations. It is an incredibly strong tool, and when used appropriately can strengthen a presentation. What this article discusses is the common downfalls seen regularly by presenters. I took a class last year in which we learned that your font size should be twice the size of the age of the oldest person in the room. Granted, this doesn't always directly apply but it is a memorable way to remember that rule.
Something that does bug me about presentations is too much text on a slide or reading word for word off the slide. The powerpoint should ASSIST your presentation, not BE your presentation.
Liz brings up a great point in the fact that power point should aid your presentation,not be it. I love really simple powerpoint that gets to the point and have minimal text, few pictures, and a simple layout. One of the things i hate is a powerpoint that has the text blend into the background and the colors are off. there is nothing worse.
There are times when articles like this seem to contain tips and tricks that I am pretty sure I had hammered into me while in middle school. I get that Powerpoint is in the grand scheme of business tools still new enough that lots of people who did not have training in it make lots of mistakes, but I would like to think that given the number of presentations a person who uses it a lot has to do that mistakes like this would have been weeded out by now.
I also agree with the statements that this author makes. Often the problem is that people do not actually spend much time putting powerpoint presentations together which is what leads to problems. In order to be effective one needs to make an outline ahead of time of what they want to present and then fill in the blanks during the presentation. I think often people just copy and paste information from their papers or other sources. It takes a little time but ultimately I think powerpoint can be a good tool if you take the time to use it.
The many student comments here about the PowerPoint being a crutch directly reflects the need for backups mentioned in the article. An effective speaker should be able to deliver their presentation without using PowerPoint. If they can clearly articulate their ideas and conclusions in a way that is captivating for the audience, their words alone will paint the imagery needed. We certainly all aren't motivational speakers, so having visual aids to support our claims and to help break up long presentations is an added bonus. I agree with Devorah that outlining your presentation ahead of time, which is effectively what a PowerPoint is, will allow to you coherently arrange your talking points. You should bring this outline with you to the presentation, just in case somebody forgot to bring the projector.
This is a good article to read for us students who have to create Powerpoint presentations. I always feel bad when giving powerpoint presentations because I am so sure that I am boring everyone in the class. I will apply these tasks to my future presentations, but I think it is more important that the speaker is engaged in the topic he/she is lecturing on, hopefully that helps the audience with also staying engaged. Brooke makes a good point, though, that when people are attempting to write down everything relevant in a lecture, there are other factors to keep in mind when putting the presentation together.
It's disappointing that this article was even necessary, seeing as these types of mistakes are addressed often and usually while students are still young and inexperienced enough with the program to be able to fix them without a problem. However, I do agree that they are still seen all of the time. I don't know whether people ignore the tips, don't believe them, or have never witnessed a bad powerpoint presentation that wasn't their own, but the fact that the slides are a guideline for talking points is still brushed over. A respectable powerpoint should serve as an aid for speaking and having an audience understand effectively, not as a crutch.
I feel that, and this is true with most of the "Mistakes People Make When _____" articles, these tips are strikingly obvious. Really now? Do people need the text to be larger to see it from a notable distance? Revolutionary! Seriously though, as obvious as these tips are, it is nice to have them as a casual reminder. Even though anyone could look at a powerpoint and figure out what mistakes were made in its creation, people tend to skip over the obvious and make the same screwups over and over again. Obvious; but necessary I suppose.
Fantastic notes here for some of our classmates to read. I've seen some of the recent Powerpoint presentations and as a group we've hit every mark. For me, the most frustrating thing is people who read off their slide. The slides should be for the audience, you should have your own notes. It seems that people (and I myself) most often fall into this trap when I start a presentation by making the Powerpoint first, not my presentation notes. When I do the notes before the slides, I often find myself better help to support what I'm saying.
All six of these problems are ones that we have seen before and I freely admit that I probably have done at least a couple of them before. And even thought we have seen how bad they can be and we have been told how bad they are why do people keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again. It’s like we think oh this time will be different. This time everything will be fine. NO it won’t; these six things are still mistakes
I agree with the author--oftentimes Powerpoint presentations come across as boring. We've seen all of the styles, layouts, and bells and whistles of Powerpoint before. Everyone is using it now. Not that it's not effective, but it's become pretty boring to look at.
I don't usually create Powerpoints for presentations because I'd rather find another way to get across information. However, when I do use Powerpoints I am guilty of just reading off whatever is written on the screen. I need to work on that.
All of these tips are things that have crossed my mind whenever watching a powerpoint created by someone who hasn't had the experience having to watch them. I think the older generations who are trying to keep a presentation interesting would come to these same tips if they had been watching powerpoints their whole lives like we have. I hate when you're trying to take notes and the teacher skips to the next slide right away. Why bother putting so much information on a slide if you don't leave enough time to read it. This goes along with don't read the text word for word; don't put text in a slide that if you are only going to cover a fraction of it and then skip around.
We have seen each of the six of these mistake made repeatedly over the past few weeks in Foundation II. The most effective people had bullet points that were perhaps just a name, and then they would talk about that person. Using the notes feature in presenter mode helps with not needing to read off each word. We also saw an barely coherent powerpoint the other week that had not been rehearsed but DID have animations - something that really makes me questions the author's priorities.
In general, I'm a bit a tired of powerpoint presentations and would really like to see people with poster boards, objects, white boards, and paper handouts for a change.
When I was first introduced to Powerpoint in middle school I thought it was the coolest program ever. I remember making some sort of presentation for science and using literally every transition possible - each new slide had a clapping sound effect.
However, once that new shock wore off, I though Powerpoint was relatively useless. I think thats because people mistake its purpose. Teachers in middle and high school often assign Powerpoint presentations. Rather than explain how visual aids and bullet points can help stress the most important information in your presentation or help your audience understand the material, teachers just let students write entire paragraphs on each slide. I also once had a teacher that tried to combat this by having the completely ridiculous constraint of only 10 words per slide. That also wasn't useful. I needed a nice balance somewhere in the middle to simultaneously remind myself of the material and help clarify things to the other students I was presenting to.
I think Powerpoint presentations can be very helpful, but most people that try to use them are just like I was in middle school - throwing on 3D text and spinning transitions for no reason. This article gives some good basic advice, but I think a more inclusive article addressing all means of visual/textual presentation aids, coupled with some tips on structuring speeches would be something worth e-mailing to everyone.
These are really good tips. Not reading off the slide is SUCH a basic thing; I'm always surprised when I see someone who is supposed to be really professional or whose job is actually presentations doing it. They're just standing up there, reading their presentation to the audience. Which is insulting, as well as boring and predictable. And it makes them look like they don't actually care. What I love to see is someone getting excited about giving a presentation. Someone who knows the material well and is interested in it is infinitely more enjoyable to listen than someone who merely reads off the slides. People will be more likely to remember that presentation, too.
I agree with all of the points in this article. I agree with Brooke that all the "mistakes" seem obvious, but we have all made these mistakes before. One of my biggest pet peeves is when someone is giving a power point presentation, and they read every word verbatim. Not only is it bothersome that the presenter doesn't make eye contact when they do this, but it makes the listeners feel like they are wasting their time by being there because they could have just printed out the power point and read it whenever convenient. It is also really distracting when people use "word animations" in a power point presentation, because then all the listeners are thinking about is that, not the actual content. I think it is also important to remember your audience when making a powerpoint presentation, since that will help guage what is appropriate and what is not. I wish that more people would step back and look at their presentation on a big screen before actually using it all the time so that you can see any issues before the actual presentation. Whenever a problem comes up with a powerpoint during someone's presentation, it makes them more nervous, which in turn makes their presentation even weaker.
There are so many rules to powerpoint, yet no one ever follows them. These are all the classics, wrong text, reading off the slides, and bad graphics. No matter how many times people are warned, these are the problems. The text being too small or too big or too much on a slide are inherent problems of the information needing presented and a switch from your computer to a projector. Reading off the slides is my biggest pet peeve and it just seems that people feel more comfortable doing this or don't expect their audience to actually take the time to read. Regardless, these are both easy fixes with practicing your presentation with the projector or other media layout.
I had to give a powerpoint presentation in class the other day and I am sick of shitty powerpoint presentations. i set out to avoid the common errors most people make in these presentations. I ended up following 5 or the 6 (I didn't have a backup) points mentioned in this article. The class didn't need to take notes so i didn't have to worry about having a lot of information on slides and plenty of slides has as few as one word where most of my content was in my presenter notes allowing me to speak more naturally about the subject and not read directly from the slides. I think it was a moderate success and definitely better than some of the power point presentations we have seen recently.
I agree with what most of the previous commenters have said. The people who make these mistakes are people who don't have enough experience with the program, people who were never made to sit through a boring powerpoint presentation that falls into these traps, and they all seem fairly obvious. Personally, I have found that powerpoint presentations that are most useful in a class situation are ones which are mostly made of pictures and diagrams that portray what the lecturer or presenter are talking about. A few definitions, spelling of difficult words, and major points or background information is extremely helpful. I would rather listen to a teacher lecture about something than have to read a powerpoint and take notes on it. If that's all I'm doing, why should I bother to show up to class?
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