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Are you too reliant on PowerPoint?
Sliding into trouble
You can use slides to make a pitch or presentation more engaging, but there is a tipping point. A point where you become too reliant on the slides, and they become your crutch. Delivering without them would derail the whole thing.
When you have a presentation coming up the first thing you might do is open PowerPoint, quickly followed by creating an ‘agenda’ slide. Then comes adding bullet points to your main slide. Maybe you add images and possibly some slide animation. You may even consider this your presentation preparation done, but you haven’t once thought about what was engaging, or what your audience needed.
This is ‘death by PowerPoint’ in waiting.
Slides are not your prompt
The trouble with most presenters is they use PowerPoint as their prompt. They make the slides for them to remember what to say. And in the worst case, they just read bullet points off a slide. But this is not how slides were supposed to be.
Make your slide for the audience, not for you.
If it doesn’t help your audience, don’t include it in your presentation. This means before you start designing your slides, you should think about:
- What the audience actually wants from you
