Next month, I will be presenting at Enterprise University “DIY Marketing – How to Promote Your Business Through Social Media”. This class will be 3 hours long and the audience will not have access to the internet, making it difficult for them to follow along with my presentation, so it will be a challenge to keep them engaged.
The last thing that anyone wants to do is to watch another long, boring PowerPoint for any time, and I want to encourage open discussion. How does one create an easy-to-follow presentation on such a broad topic? By outlining the information in a clear, systematic way.
When you are faced with creating a broad, information intensive presentation, the most important thing you can do is to start early. These type of presentations cannot be created at the last minute and if you wait, you will not be presenting your best product and that could ultimately stress you out and affect your reputation.
Here are some other tactics that may help you the next time you are creating a PowerPoint presentation:
- Outline your presentation – I learned how to create an outline in grade school and still find it very useful today in organizing my thoughts. I’ve tried to “wing it” in the past without an outline, and found that creating a presentation takes much longer. It is easy to tweak the sequence of slides when you follow an outline.
- Try a collaboration utility like Google Wave – Ann Marie and I signed up for the beta test of this collaboration tool and have found it works well for us to share ideas about our presentations. Since December, when I found out I would be giving this presentation, I have been clipping web sites and adding them to Google Wave; I especially like the ability to look at the time sequence and back links to the original articles.
- Photos and files – Microsoft Office has a wonderful online resource where you can download royalty-free clip art to spice up a presentation. There are also other sites like iStockPhoto where you can download photos for a nominal fee. I created individual folders in My Documents to house the PDF articles, photos, the Word documents of my outline, and the shell of my PowerPoint presentation. I have found that by placing shortcuts to these folders on my Desktop, it makes it easy for me to navigate to those folders once I have a sudden flash of inspiration.
If you are planning to have a long presentation such as mine, doing a little organization in the beginning of your project and starting early, will save you a great deal of time and frustration in the end!
Wow, that’s a challenge to create an interesting enough Powerpoint slide presentation to hold over a classroom full of people for 15 minutes. Let alone an hour!
But the great thing is that even a bad slide presentation doesn’t mean the overall presentation goes bad. With a speaker who knows how to use his skills to keep an audience engaged with him, everything is okay.
Even a speaker who isn’t the best speaker can have a great presentation as long as she gets the audience to like her. That’s the importance of infusing your own personality into my presentation.
There will always be sites to help with the design. But only you can change how you present in front of others.
Thanks for sharing your experience and insight!
Best,
Nikki
“Keeping the audience attentive from start till end is a tough task. All you can do is prepare yourself good for the presentation, both visually and verbally. And a good visual impact certainly comes from the Presentation that you prepare.
Starting early and keeping the subject in points have always helped me produce a good output. Thanks for sharing your experience!
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http://www.slideworld.com/ppt_templates/powerpoint-template.aspx/Animations