This episode contains abbreviated
language with dubious meaning. It's for instructional purposes
only. Don't repeat at work. Today, I want to share with you three tips that helped me make more effective PowerPoint slides and
deliver better presentations. So if you go to a lot of internal company
meetings and you need to present at some of them, so either to your team or your management
or you're a consultant that needs to pitch a product or service to another
company, these tips can help you. They actually stem from my own mistakes
and these are the tips that I personally use to improve my presentations. Number one, simplicity is not the enemy of detail. In fact, as stated by Davinci, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Slides are there to help
deliver your message. They aren't there for you to remember
your text. They're for your audience, not for you. This was a big problem area
for me when I created slides. When I went to a meeting I took
with me one thing, my slides, they were my cue points.
They were also my handouts. It was like a three in one deal except
that it was only a good deal for me, but not for my audience. I used to add one bullet point after
another because I didn't want to forget something.
What happened was I ended up with crowded, intimidating slides, slides that
no one could or wanted to read, not only where they're distracting cause
who can read and listen at the same time,
but I started to lose people's attention. They started to think about
their dinner and fitness plans. Something you probably don't want to
encourage while you're presenting. One complicated slide takes the same
amount of time to present as three simple slides. It's a question of
pacing your communication. It's about giving them the right amount
of information in the order they need to understand it. The difference is the complicated
slide confuses and distracts the viewers. Whereas with the simple ones, they're likely to stay on
and get your message. Now when I attend an important meeting, I take with me three things. I have my cue cards which
help me remember my points. I have my slides which help my audience. Remember the most important points and
I have the detailed handouts that help them get more detail if they want. If you're not sure whether your
slides are simple enough or not, here's the test you can do.
If you gave your PowerPoint, to your neighbor and you ask them, go to the meeting and press next, next, next, on the slides. Will it make
sense to your audience? If yes, that's not a PowerPoint presentation. Those are your handouts. Your slides shouldn't make
sense without you. Number two, the use of acronyms.
Do they help or hurt? If you're in a finance
meeting and you say, let's take a look at the
BS you've been working on, probably people will understand you mean
balance sheet and you're not trying to be offensive, but it's not always
clear. When I working in a team, on an Oracle project setting up a
group finance consolidation system, we had to create the backbone structure, which is called the Metadata of the system. One task was to set up different hierarchies for
our company structure and all of them had code names like no spaces,
short words, sometimes numbers. One request we got was to set up separate
structures for our European and American companies. The code to
use was A. N. A. L Europe, A. N. A. L America. A.N. A.L
standing for analysis. Some words just shouldn't be shorted. You can either entirely replace
them or use the full word. So going back to your use
of acronyms in a meeting, you want to make sure that you don't
unintentionally offend someone. And you don't exclude anyone because
they don't understand what it means. So make sure you emphasize what these
are in the handouts and also on the slide if you're using them in there. Number three branding. Are you getting excessive
with your branding? The companies I worked for always
had their logo on every single slide. When I started to work on my own,
that's what I did. I put my logo on every single
slide prominently featured on top. I believed that was the
professional thing to do, but when I started to make simpler
slides, that logo was so distracting. It looked bigger than ever. Before I didn't even notice it so much
because the slide was so full, but when it started to get empty, I started to question the placement
of any image or object on that slide, and I asked, does it bring
any added value? Well, it didn't. It was distracting. I don't need my logo on every single page. It's enough to put it on the
first and the last pages. And if you're concerned about piracy, you can use a light watermark
in the footer and make it
small. That's what I do. Think about this slides you
use for your internal meetings. Do you have the logo on every single
slide? Does it bring any added value? So these were my three tips that help me
make better PowerPoint slides and more effective presentations. I hope you found them helpful. I'm curious to hear what you think.
Also, what do you most struggle with when
you make PowerPoint presentations? Let me know in the comments below.
Thank you for watching. See you in the next video. Yeah.
