Presentation Basics

DON MCMILLAN: There are some things I hate about PowerPoint, and I figure it's kind of my duty to point them out. So, here we go. Here's common PowerPoint mistakes. Number one, people tend to put every word they are going to say on their PowerPoint slides.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERING]

Although this eliminates the need to memorize your talk, ultimately this makes your slides crowded, wordy, and boring. You will lose your audience's attention before you even reach the bottom of your-- uh-- first slide.

[LAUGHTER]

Please don't do that anymore, please. Number two, most common. Many people do not run spel cheek--

[LAUGHTER]

Big mistak!!! Nothing makes you lok stupder then speling erors.

[LAUGHTER]

If it's got a red line under it, recheck the spelling. And then finally, I hate this—avoid excessive bullet-pointing, only bullet key points. Too many bullet points, and your key messages will not stand out. In fact, the term bullet point comes from people firing guns at annoying presenters.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERING]

Hence, the bullet point. Bad color schemes, not good.

[LAUGHTER]

Clashing background and font colors can lead to distraction, confusion, headache, nausea, vomiting, and loss of bladder control.

[LAUGHTER]

I can't stay on that one too long.

[LAUGHTER]

Here's something I've noticed. The higher number of PowerPoint slides you have in your talk, the less useful your talk actually is. Unfortunately, my presentation is right there.

[LAUGHTER]

I've also noticed this--people love to pack data into their presentation. They just shove more and more data, thinking it's better, but it's not. The more data you have, the harder it is to read your slide, and the effectiveness plummets. Now, you can improve the effectiveness by adding some shading and some 3D effects, and--

[LAUGHTER]

--then some second order and third order effects. And then, I know, let's add some labels. That will help a lot.

[LAUGHTER]

And that's pretty much every marketing slide I've ever seen, right there.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERING]

Yeah. Then something like VP of Marketing standing there and going, it's real clear in Q4. What the hell are you talking about?

[LAUGHTER]

Now, I'm into animation. People become animators in PowerPoint. You can have things flying all over the place, and that can be good. If you're a visual learner, that will improve the effectiveness of your performance. But if you're easily distracted, more animations and people have no idea what you're talking about. There just-- wow, that is cool, wow. And there's regions here, by the way.

There's the simple, but effective, region. There's the active, but confusing, the effective, but boring, the active, but ineffective, the dull, but static region, the busy, but useless, the ADD only region, the useful, but amusing, and the stupid, but confusing, the dull triangle, the hyper triangle, the sleepy square, the dizzying pentagon, and everything else I just call pointless motion.

[LAUGHTER]

That slide right there took me an hour and a half to make, right there.

[LAUGHTER]

PowerPoint can just suck the life out of you.

It's amazing.

[LAUGHTER]

I've also come up with this. It's a kind of a little science I've invented called font analysis. Basically, the font you choose says something about who you are as a person. There's a huge list of fonts, and you choose one. And that says something about you, so, be careful the font you choose.

For example, if you choose Courier New, which happens to be my favorite, you're probably organized and structured. If you choose Matisse, it means you're artistic. And if you choose Times New Roman, it means you're lazy, apathetic, and unimaginative, and you always use the default.

[LAUGHTER AND CHEERING]