The Wikipedia told me about the “Chinese water torture”. This was a torture that was supposed to drive its victim insane with the stress of water dripping on a part of the forehead for a very long time. It was characterized by the inconsistent pattern of water drips. Supposedly, the desire for the human brain to make a pattern of the timing between the drops will also eventually cause insanity to set in. That was then. Today that method is replaced by subjecting unsuspecting colleagues to horrible presentations that makes the water torture look almost benign. There are many reasons why presentations go haywire. You have probably suffered through many sessions where the speaker reads through what really looks like the pages of a book – except that all 5000 pages including the graphs and tables of research data – all put into one slide. The font is small enough to inspire people not delay any more the decision whether to wear specs or not. Worse still many presenters feel that the slide is like a teleprompter. They read it out line by line and imagine that the audience is either illiterate or so lazy that they will not read stuff even if it is in front of them.Here is the big secret –
- If you have sentences to share with your audience, use a Word document
- If you have data and graphs to show – use Excel. Give them a printout that they can either read ahead of the meeting or can deliberate upon out after you have gone home
- If have a conclusion to share or an idea you want them to remember use PowerPoint
The Slide Rule (pun intended): Have a single point on a slide – preferably with a visual. The visual should be about the story that goes with the slide. The slides are for the audience to remember as key take aways. Slides are not speaker notes. It is not about the slides anyway. (more…)