PowerPoint


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Suggestions on Getting Ready for the Presentation

In the past I’ve been afforded several opportunities to provide individual feedback to folks who’ve asked me to review their PowerPoint presentations intended for this activity. This has given me a chance to see some themes emerging. In this brief note I’ll explain a few pointers; you can use them, or not, as you wish.

It's crucially important that you NOT 'read the screen.’ To that end the information on your slides is likely to be too much for a 50 minute presentation if you’ve more than 12 slides with more than 6 lines on each. To allow for a 5-minute self introduction and a closing 5-minutes for questions this means that each slide would get exactly 3-minutes. With such a short time to explain each slide (Notice: explain, NOT read) then you can see how you must not use more than 12 slides for the content. If you try to get more than this number of points across it could take several hours to do it all. And, if a person asks you to explain even a single point as you go through your presentation you'll automatically be 'out-of-time' from that instant on ....

Several individual slides within entire PowerPoint presentations that I’ve reviewed in the past could take 20-minutes <each> to explain. Generally, I’ve found myself exhort the presenters to limit each slide to four-to-five maximum bulleted points. I have always asked for a briefer outline, generally more to the point.

I’ve also suggested that if there are data you want to share, but not show on the screen or actually explain then they could be provided as a handout. Basically, the screen should only show the 'Talking Points' for the presentation and NOT the entire presentation. It should NOT be possible to understand your whole thesis just by reviewing the slides. If this is the case then what you’ve got is a digest of the handout and not the pointers that sequentially lead the listener/watcher from one point to another point in your logic. Consequently, if you have more than 15 screens in total (including the opening and closing credits) then you're probably overdoing the screen-support. Again, remember, you should be able to do this presentation without reading the text off the screen to the audience.

Make sure that you limit the use of multiple fonts. Keep to one basic font for all the text, but have others for the headings, etc. No more than one graphic per slide.

If you’re showing this presentation with color overhead transparencies that you’re printing from the computer file then TRY THEM OUT FIRST ON AN ACTUAL OVERHEAD AND SCREEN. I’ve seen several presentations that, once printed, will not be able to print to fit on an actual overhead projector platen and therefore the screen. Unless you try out your slides with the actual equipment you plan to use then you’re inviting problems.

At NASP it's simply not feasible to use your own computer/projector to present your PowerPoint. Whatever you use you'll need to handle entirely yourself. The complete setup and takedown will need to be done by you. So, if this is the case then plan to set it up before the presentation starts since you’ll not have time for technical trouble-shooting at NASP or at the on-campus presentation where you'll have the rehearsal run-through.

HERE’S THE MOST IMPORTANT INFORMATION IN THIS ENTIRE MESSAGE: Before you prepare even a single slide you should:

Re-conceptualize your entire presentation in terms of the MAIN POINTS you want to share, and then organize it with this framework in mind. Here's how you do it:

Think out the 5 to 8 main points of the presentation.
Then create an initial content slide that explains what it is that you're going to cover with these 5 to 8 points.
Show all 5 to 8 points as bulleted items on slide 2 and three (where ^#1 slide is the title slide with your name/affiliation and the presentation title). This becomes your Advance Organizer.
Then, each of the points gets a single slide to itself ― a slide that comprehensively covers JUST THAT ONE POINT. You can also have a second slide for each point BUT ONLY IF ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL (e.g., illustrate with a case study, provide a pertinent image or capsulate it with a brief single sentence or a quotation).
The presentation will close with a single slide that provides a restatement of the 5 to 8 main points and a drawing together of them all into a single overarching statement ― which is where you end the presentation. This is realistic for 50 minutes. To try to do more is to overreach.
Also, every pointer should have immediate, obvious relevance to SCHOOL PSYCHOLOGISTS (your audience's primary interest). The listeners should be able to see the primacy of the 5 to 8 points to their roles without having to make any grand leaps of faith.

SIMPLE RULES TO POWERPOINT PERFECTION

Recently, I attended a trade seminar. While I was trying to digest the information in the various talks, I made some observations, which I thought would be of interest to you.

Without exception, all speakers used PowerPoint slides in their presentations. This observation is not necessarily a bad thing, in fact, I think that for what it is, Microsoft PowerPoint is a great product when it is used properly.

These observations and the frustrations I have felt when attending seminars and presentations prompted me to share some experience with you.

To start with, let's consider what PowerPoint is. You'll remember the ubiquitous overhead projector. You will remember sitting in a lecture, bored out of your brain, watching while the lecturer places one transparency after another on a source of bright light while reading the transparency's contents at you while you read exactly the same thing on the transparency. Perhaps the more interesting parts of that lecture were when a transparency was placed on the projector, upside-down or back-to-front. Maybe it was so crooked that you can imagine everyone in the lecture hall (or at least the ones not already asleep) with their heads cocked to one side in an attempt to read the presentation.

To many people, PowerPoint has replaced the overhead projector, but it is much more than that. A computer-hosted slide presentation, using tools like PowerPoint certainly fixes some of the problems presented by overhead projectors. For instance, the slides should always be in order, they should have a consistent look about them and they will never be upside-down, crooked or back-to-front.

You know, when you look at it that way, computer-hosted presentation packages such as PowerPoint have removed the interesting parts from presentations!

That's a sad state of affairs isn't it? Most of today's PowerPoint presentations contain the script of the presentation, and each slide is read at the attendees. If you are lucky enough to get a printout of the slides in a handout, you might as well collect the handouts and skip the presentation. I know that I have done that several times (other times, I wished I had).

Now is the time to seriously think about how you can use PowerPoint to really assist you in giving dynamite presentations. In the remainder of this diatribe, I will give you some suggestions on how you can improve your presentations using PowerPoint.

Rule 1: Don't host the entire script of your presentation in your PowerPoint slides. Use your slides to highlight the essence of your presentation. Whiteboards and flip-charts can be equally useful as presentation tools. After you've presented some of the material, use some PowerPoint slides to review the lesson.

Rule 2: Don't use the default screen background in your PowerPoint slides. You have no idea how many presentations I have seen that all look the same. Try to show your audience that you have some imagination when building a set of PowerPoint slides.

Rule 3: Watch the colors you use. Have you ever noticed that some color combinations are hard to read? This is not your imagination. Colors have different wavelengths and your eyes must adjust. If you mix long and short wavelength colors on the same slide, at best your slide will be unreadable; at worst you will give your audience a terrific headache! If you don't believe me, try using a dark blue background with red writing - if you look at this for any more than a few minutes, you will see what I mean. I like light yellows and greens. They are easy on the eye.

Rule 4: Use fonts that are large enough to see from the back of the room. The major reason for using small fonts in presentations is to fit a great deal of information onto the one slide. Rather than making the font smaller, look at putting less information onto each slide. Then if you end up with too any slides, you are probably trying to put the script of your presentation in your slides! (See Rule 1, above)

Rule 5: Allow plenty of "white space" (or whatever color you are using as a background). This should happen automatically if you follow all of the rules above.

Rule 6: Give all of your slides a consistent look throughout the presentation. Under no circumstances should you change the color scheme within a presentation, it will really annoy your audience. This means that if you're importing slides from another presentation, you will have to change the imported slide's color scheme to match that of the new presentation.

Rule 7: Don't use too many gadgets to cover up lack of content in a presentation. PowerPoint has a huge toolbox of gizmos to brighten up your presentation and they are great as long as you don't use all of them at once. If you have attended presentations where lots of gadgets have been used, can you remember how tedious they became?

Rule 8: If you really need to make an impact with your presentation but feel that you don't have the expertise to do it justice, seriously consider taking your outline and text to a graphic artist friend and have them build the presentation for you.

Rule 9: Don't use PowerPoint as your word processor. Sure, PowerPoint has some word processing capabilities, but that is not its main function. If you are processing words, then use a good word processor like Microsoft Word. You will notice as you discover all of the applications within the Microsoft Office suite that some functionality is repeated (to a greater or lesser extent) in the other applications.

Rule 10: Remember, you should always choose the right tool for the job, that's what they are for.

	Caven S. Mcloughlin, Ph.D.		Last Modified : October 20, 2009
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