What are your feelings when you are about to sit through another PowerPoint presentation? Let me throw some stats at you - did you know a staggering 30 million PowerPoint presentations are made every day. A study calculates the cost of meaningless PowerPoint presentations at about $252 million each day. Max Atkinson a UK based communications consultant in an attempt to work out how much boring presentations were costing the UK economy alone, came up with the figure of £7.8 billion a year. According to Atkinson, "The modern business presentation has lost its way. Every day, thousands of people are attending presentations, from which they are getting little or no benefit. Companies seem agreed that the customer is always right, but when it comes to presentations they don't seem to realise that the audience is the only customer that matters.
With public speaking skills increasingly diminishing, PowerPoint has become the default way of communicating to a large audience where it is easy to do a data dump and throw everything into a pre-designed slide template and then read it back verbatim at a sales meeting. And we the people are conditioned to sit in the dark and watch dense slide after dense slide.
Last week, I worked with an organization training them on their PowerPoint presentations for a big conference that their top guns are going to present at. My five big points were EYE CONTACT with the audience, REDUCE or eliminate bullets, MORE pictures and LESS text, ENTHUSIASM when presenting and PRACTICE!
Watch this pretty funny take on bad PowerPoint
Yep! I think so
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