How Not To Use A Powerpoint

Life after death by PowerPoint with Don McMillan. There is some things I hate about PowerPoint and I figure it is kind of my duty to point them out. So here we go. Here is common PowerPoint mistakes. Number 1. People tend to put every word they are going to say on their PowerPoint slides. Although this eliminates the need to memorize your talk, ultimately this makes your slides crowded, wordy, and boring. You will lose your audience’s attention before you even reach the bottom of your first slide. Please, please don’t do that anymore, please. Number 2, most common. Many people do not run spell check before their presentation. Big mistake! Nothing makes you look stupider than spelling errors. If you have got a red line under it, recheck the spelling. And finally, I hate this. Avoid excessive bullet pointing, only bullet key points. Too many bullet points and your key messages will not stand out. In fact, the term bullet point comes from people firing guns at annoying presenters. Hence the bullet point. Bad color schemes. Not good. Clashing background and font colors can lead to distraction, confusion, headache, nausea, vomiting, and loss of bladder control. I cannot stay on that one too long. Here is something I have noticed. The number of PowerPoint slides you have in your talk, the less useful your talk actually is. Unfortunately, my presentation is right there. Also, I noticed this, people love to pack data in their presentations, they just shove more and more data thinking it is better, but it is not. The more data you have, the harder it is to read your slide, and the effectiveness plummets. Now you can, you can improve the effectiveness by adding some shading and some 3D effects and then some second order and third order effects and then I know, let us add some labels, that will help a lot. And that, that is pretty much every marketing slide I have ever seen right there. Then some like VP of marketing standing there going it is real clear in Q4, what the hell are you talking about? Now I am, I am into in animation. People become animators in PowerPoint. You can have things flying all over the place, and that can be good. If you are a visual learner, that will improve the effectiveness of your performance. But if you are easily distracted, more animations and people have no idea what you are talking about. They are just, wow that is cool, wow. And there is regions here by the way. There is the simple but effective region, there is the active but confusing, the effective but boring, the active but ineffective, the dull but static region, the busy but useless, the ADD only region, the useful but amusing, the stupid but confusing, the dull triangle, the hyper triangle, the sleepy square, the dizzying pentagon, and everything else I just call pointless motion. That slide right there took me an hour and a half to make right there. PowerPoint can just suck the life out of you, it is amazing. I have also come up with this, it is kind of a little science I have invented called FONT analysis. Basically the font you choose says something about who you are as a person. There is a huge list of fonts and you choose one and that says something about you. So be careful the font you choose. For example, if you choose Courier New, it happens to be my favorite, you are probably organized and structured. If you choose Matisse, it means you are artistic. And if you choose Times New Roman, it means you are lazy, apathetic, and unimaginative, and you always use the default.