PowerPoint Mistakes to Avoid

PowerPoint presentations are the vacation slide shows of the business world: we’ve all sat through mundane ones that seemed to last forever. But there are a few tips that you can follow to avoid preparing a PowerPoint presentation that bores your co-workers. This is important: You create PowerPoint presentations to spread your message, promote products and achieve results. You can’t make this happen if no one’s listening to them.

Don’t Forget Creativity

As the writers at Microsoft’s Business Hub say, PowerPoint doesn’t give you authorization to get lazy. You still have to be innovative if you want to develop a winning presentation that grabs the attention of your audience. This means that you can’t let PowerPoint’s ease of use trick you into thinking that you don’t have to come up with compelling content. Simply because you can create an endless series of text-filled slides doesn’t mean that you should.

Rather, use the opportunity of having a visual aid to improve your presentation. That is the benefit of using PowerPoint; to help memory retention through visual stimulation.

Come with Solutions

You’ll also want to come equipped with ways that your company’s employees can increase these sales numbers. Another mistake of many PowerPoint presentations: they offer information. However they don’t provide useful strategies for how employees can use that information to improve the company’s performance.

If your PowerPoint presentation reveals that sales are down, be sure you follow up with your own belief on why sales have decreased and what the company can do to improve them. If sales are up? Provide information on how your company can preserve its momentum.

Don’t Get Too Fancy

We said to get creative but that doesn’t mean you need to use all the gimmicks that PowerPoint offers. Many managers toss in needless or annoying images in an effort to grab attention. Any unimportant images will only serve as a disruption. Then they will only remember the cute jumping dog in the corner of the slide rather than the information you were providing. A frequent mistake you will want to avoid as well, is reading the slides word for word. Your audience does not want to read along with you. Instead, leave the slide up for enough time for them to read the three bullets while verbally expanding on the single most important one. This way you can save your breath and avoid exhausting your audience’s attention span with redundancy.

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