Coaching

You might call PowerPoint slides the Cinderellas of communication. Most of the time they hardly get noticed, but how they could shine if given a chance! It’s a pity we won’t let them. Instead, we overload them with text, squeezing in a pixelated graph and then never give the audience enough time for the content to sink in. Is there another way? Well, definitely. For a good start to a presentation, start early. When do you usually get your slides done? Honestly? Two days before the event, like most of us? Well, that’s way too late to achieve anything meaningful.

And of course, you’ll be including the entire text of your speech on your slides, won’t you? Ever stopped to wonder why? Well, usually, it’s because people will want you to send them the slides after your presentation so they can read them. But if all you have to say is on the slides, why bother speaking at all? E-mail the whole lot to your audience and let them read it at their leisure, instead of spending hours and dollars to go someplace to have them read by someone else. If you are going to speak to people, make it worth everyone’s while. Make your speech a call to action, and make sure people notice and understand. For that to happen, they need to be able to read whatever text is on your slides, so don’t make it too small. One rule is to take the age of the oldest participant and divide it by two. That gives you your minimum font. So if you have sixty-year-olds in your audience, a 30-point font is as low as you can go. Of course, that means you won’t be able to fit a whole lot of text on your slides. But that’s good. It means people will actually be listening to you instead of reading text. If you’re still in doubt, take a look at the late Steve Jobs’ presentations. His slides often contained only one word, but did that ever enter everyone’s mind? Slides are wallpaper, not a newspaper. Use them as a background, and keep yourself and your passion in the foreground.