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Sometimes using PowerPoint is the wrong decision to make…

When somebody asks you to give a speech do you start thinking about the PowerPoint (or Keynote for you Mac users) slides that you’ll have to create? Do you ask the person how long the speech needs to be just in order to determine how many slides that you’ll need to make? Stop! Maybe it’s time that we all take a step back from the keyboard and those books about PowerPoint presentation tips and instead spend a moment thinking about when it’s appropriate to use PowerPoint – and when it’s not!

When Should You Use PowerPoint?

We all like to make fun of PowerPoint – have you heard the phrase “death by PowerPoint”? Even though we dread going to presentations that other people are going to be showing us their PowerPoint slides, we have no problem creating volumes of slides to use at our presentation.

This all leads to the interesting question: maybe we should all stop using PowerPoint all together? Well, maybe — but probably not. PowerPoint was created and has caught on for a reason – it’s very good at doing what it was intended to do.

What PowerPoint does well is to help a speaker to boost the importance of their public speaking by helping them to visually display information. Things that could require a long explanation in order to make our audience understand what we are talking about can be quickly communicated using PowerPoint. It gives us the ability to share graphs, charts, photos, and even videos as a part of a speech. This is powerful stuff.

When Should You Not Use PowerPoint?

With all that being said, you might be lead to believe that every speech needs to have a bit of PowerPoint added to it. Now there you’d be wrong. Many of the speeches that we give, such as motivational speeches, are really all about the speaker – you. These kinds of speeches call for your audience to use their listening skills, not their eyes in order to learn. Adding PowerPoint, or even worse the wrong kind of PowerPoint, to this type of speech can take away from your main message.

What’s going on here is that we all need to learn how to take a step back and make a decision about using PowerPoint with a speech long before we sit down at a keyboard and start to pull our next slide deck together.

The first thing that should come into your mind is the simple fact that you need to decide on what the purpose of your next speech is. What is the strategy that you’re going to use to get your message across to your audience? Once you know this, then you can consider if PowerPoint will help or hinder your ability to accomplish it.

If you do choose to use PowerPoint then you’ve got another decision to make. You’ve got to determine how many slides you want to use. You may be surprised to learn that the correct answer is “as few as possible”. You want to use just enough slides to help you get your point across and not one more. Create a slide deck and then go through it cutting out as many slides as you possibly can. When you can cut no more, then you’ve got the right number of slides.

What All Of This Means For You

PowerPoint is a powerful tool that public speakers can use to communicate information visually – after all, isn’t this one of the benefits of public speaking? However, if we’re not careful we’ll end up using it when we really shouldn’t.

If you are going to be giving a speech in which your goal is to communicate information, then using PowerPoint may be a good idea. As always, you need to take steps to make sure that your slides don’t overwhelm the message that you are trying to convey.

If instead of communicating information, you are trying to inspire or motivate an audience, then think twice about using PowerPoint. Create the strategy that you want to use with your speech and identify the message that you want to get across. Then determine how many, if any, slides you’ll need in order to accomplish this task.

As with all powerful tools, PowerPoint can either help or hinder your next speech. When asked to speak, spend your time thinking about what you want to accomplish and then determine if PowerPoint can help you do this. Not the other way around!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Public Speaking Skills™

Question For You: Do you think your speech could be more powerful if your audience is expecting you to use PowerPoint slides and you don’t?

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Note: What we talked about are advanced speaking skills. If you are just starting out I highly recommend joining Toastmasters in order to get the benefits of public speaking. Look for a Toastmasters club to join in your home town by visiting the web site www.Toastmasters.org. Toastmasters is dedicated to helping their members to understand the importance of public speaking by developing listening skills and getting presentation tips. Toastmasters is how I got started speaking and it can help you also!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Hey speaker, how good of a speaker are you when you don’t get a chance to show up? I’m not talking about blowing off a speaking gig, rather I’m talking about that virtual stage that all of us find ourselves occupying all too often: the teleconference. You might not view this as an opportunity to give a speech, but it is!

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A Speaker's Power Comes From Within

If you really want to connect with your audience and make an impact in their lives, then you’re going to have to discover out how to speak with power. The trick is that power is a tricky thing – you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it, you’ve got to find it and hold on to it. The good news is that I know how you can do this…

It Isn’t All About The Slides

In the quest for speaking power, all too often speakers attempt to create the very best PowerPoint slides in the vain hope that if they have powerful slides, then their speech will also have power. Sorry, it doesn’t work this way.

George Torok is a professional speaker who has spent time studying how speakers use PowerPoint slides. He’s come up with the three following observations:

1. Everybody Uses PowerPoint: one of the big problems with PowerPoint is that everyone uses it – it’s not special. No matter how good your slides are, your audience has seen similar slides like that before.
2. PowerPoint Is Easy To Use: because it’s easy to use, it’s all too easy to start to believe that your slides are the centerpiece of your presentation. This is not the case and many presenters have been fooled.
3. Good Slides Can Cover A Bad Presenter: the belief that fantastic slides can smooth over flaws in a presentation has lead too many speakers to fall flat during their presentations.

Where Does Power Really Come From?

It turns out that the power that you need in order to deliver an effective presentation comes from within you. If you believe in yourself and the message that you are delivering, then you’ll have the power that you need to give an effective presentation. Once you believe in yourself, your next job is to convey power to your audience.

Projecting Power

In order to communicate your power to your audience, you’ll need to do the following four  things:

1. Look Powerful: How you physically look to your audience is the first step in communicating your power to your audience. The simplest way to do this is to smile at your audience. This helps you to convey both trust and confidence.
2. Posture Counts: Taking the time to stand up straight. All too often we stoop over and hunch our shoulders as we focus on what we are saying. If we stand up straight we’ll be projecting power to our audience.
3. Use Your Voice: One of a speaker’s most powerful tools is your voice. In order to communicate power to your audience, you need to speak slowly and deepen your voice. Additionally, using pauses and actually saying less will allow more time for your words to sink in with your audience.
4. Your Words Count: keeping your words short and simple will allow your speech to have more power than using longer more complicated words. The harder it is for your audience to understand and comprehend your message, the more diluted your power will be.

Final Thoughts

Audiences want to be told what to do or what to believe. However, in order for a speaker to be able to accomplish this you need to be able find and use your power.  Realizing that this power does not come from PowerPoint slides is the first step.

In order to release the power that you have within yourself you need to use your appearance, your voice, and your words to convey power to your audience.  Learn to do this well and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you think of the perfect speech in your mind, what do you see? Do you see yourself up on a stage giving a speech, reaching the end, and then having everyone stand up and applaud until their hands grow tired? Nice picture. However, all too often that doesn’t happen…

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PowerPoint Can Help You Be Funny

I would like to be allowed to see more PowerPoint slides. Ok, not really. In fact I could probably live the rest of my life without seeing another PowerPoint slide – I think that I’ve seen my limit! Since I probably can’t avoid seeing more slides, then perhaps at least we can talk about what we can do to make them more fun…

It’s All About Fun

The purpose of a PowerPoint slide is to enhance your speech. Malcolm Kushner is a speaker who has spent some time looking for ways to make this happen. His thought is that we can all learn to get along with PowerPoint better if we can find ways to make our audience laugh. Malcolm has done the heavy lifting for us by searching the web for different sites that we can use to create images that will cause our audience to chuckle and warm to your main message.

A Little Help From Albert Einstein

The nice thing about Albert Einstein is that everyone knows who he was. If only there was some way we could get him to help us out with our next presentation. Well good news, we can. Take a look at this image:

Albert Knows What He's Talking About...

The web site http://hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php allows you to add any text that you want to to the chalkboard that Albert is writing on. I’ve given you an example, I think that you can take it from here…!

Try A Bumper Sticker

Or a movie marquee, or a bar of soap. Taking a phrase that your audience will recognize and putting it in an image that they aren’t expecting is what will capture their imagination and help you to recapture their attention. Here’s an example:

Guess How Much This Promotion Cost?

Over at http://www.redkid.net/generator/sign.php they have 50 different images that you can overlay your company name / product name / main message. Check it out!

A Wanted Poster Always Works

Malcolm has one final suggestion for us. Once again everyone in your audience knows what an old-style wanted poster looks like. Here’s an example of what you can include in your presentation:

Look Who's Wanted!

This is a great way to include an image of the person who arranged your speech or the CEO. Once the audience recognizes them and sees the context, they’ll either laugh or at least have a good chuckle.

Final Thoughts

One of the fundamental rules of life is that we all like people who are like us. As a speaker we all have the challenge of finding ways to get our audience to warm up to us within the space of our speech. Getting our audience to laugh is a great way to make this happen.

Since we all use PowerPoint slides, finding a way to use our PowerPoint slides to make our audience laugh is a great way to connect with our audience. Customizing images with a dash of either our information or some part of our audience is a great (and easy) way to do this. Spend a little time with the sites that we’ve talked about, and you’ll be able to intimately connect with your audience and make an lasting impact in their lives.

Click here to get automatic updates when The Accidental Communicator Blog is updated.

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If you really want to connect with your audience and make an impact in their lives, then you’re going to have to discover out how to speak with power. The trick is that power is a tricky thing – you can’t touch it, you can’t buy it, you’ve got to find it and hold on to it. The good news is that I know how you can do this…

No related posts.

Speakers Often Find That They Are Trying To Sabotage Their Own Speeches!

A few years back I found myself in a situation where I had allowed myself to get roped into delivering a presentation to a university class. I was going to be talking about what I had learned during my IT career – a somewhat painful and introspective topic. My excitement level was at zero.

I put off creating the speech until the last minute. I threw together some slides the morning of the speech. I ended up showing up just a few minutes before the class started. All three of these actions are not how I do things – what was going on here?

The presentation ended up going ok (everyone clapped at the end). However, I was seriously troubled – why had such a simple speech come so close to being a disaster so many times? After running things through my mind a few times I came to realize that I had been a victim of self-sabotage!

I really, really didn’t want to do this speech. It turns out that because of this mind-set, I was working actively to make sure that the speech would never happen (don’t write the speech, don’t prepare the slides, don’t show up). Dang – what was going on here?

Kevin Hogan is both a psychologist and a speaker. His take on all of this is “Essentially, self-sabotage is consciously or unconsciously blocking yourself from succeeding or accomplishing some task or project.” Well there you go. It turns out that we all have some of this going on, but sometimes it can get out of hand.

What’s a presenter to do? First, you need to be aware that you are engaging in self-sabotage. Once you realize that it’s happening, you’ll be better able to deal with it. Next, use affirmations – tell yourself that you are good at what you are going to be doing. The simple act of saying this to yourself can go a long way. Finally, dig in – focus on what you want to get accomplished and shut out any negative noises that are coming from inside.

It turns out that I must have done better than ok on my presentation to that class because they’ve asked me back twice a year since then. I now look forward to this presentation because it the audience is always appreciative and it give me a chance to try out new material and techniques. I’m glad that I didn’t let self-sabotage do me in!

Have you ever found yourself trying to sabotage one of your presentations? What were you trying to do? How did you fight back? Who won in the end? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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Presenters Who Can Visualize Lots Of Data Are Better Communicators

We would all like our next presentation to be our best. However, when we’ve got lots and lots of data to present, we can all too easily overwhelm our audience. What’s a presenter to do? It turns out that the good folks over at IBM have come up with a way to help us out of this mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into…

Not having enough data to support our position is rarely the issue. Rather, having too much data and not enough knowledge that has been created by processing that data IS the issue. Researchers at IBM have set up an experimental web site at www.many-eyes.com where you can upload data and then play around with it in order to visualize it.

Now I’m sure that everyone is well aware of the graphing capabilities of both PowerPoint and Excel. The problem is that EVERYONE is aware of these and so all too often, every presentation starts to look the same.

The scientists at IBM’s Watson Research Center (located up in Cambridge, Mass.) have created this site not so much to help presenters, but rather to help people publish and discuss graphics in a group. However, there is no reason that we can’t make use of the tools that they are providing us with and if we can get some social networking suggestions along the way, all the better.

The web site is the creation of two IBM researchers, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viegas. What they wanted to do was to take the sophisticated data visualization tools that have been available to researchers and make them available to the masses.

Currently, the Many Eyes site provides 16 different ways to present your data. Yes, your old friends the stack graphs and bar charts are there. However there are also more interesting presentations such as diagrams that let people map relationships and TreeMaps which show information in colored rectangles.

This Is An Example Of A TreeMap Visualization

When the site first became available, they only offered visualisation tools that would work with numbers. Quickly the site owners discovered that their users were attempting to upload books and blog posts. Based on this discovery, they went ahead and added visualization techniques that would work with unstructured text.

One of my favorite unstructured tools is the Tag cloud that you’ve probably been seeing show up on blogs (like mine). The more a word is used, the larger it appears in a tag cloud. Here’s an example:

Example of a Tag Cloud Visualization

If you want to learn how to use this tool to process your data, Rich Hoeg has created the Northstar Nerd Tutorial: Data Visualization via IBM’s Many Eyes.

One important point to realize, the tool was really designed to allow people to share data and visualizations. Don’t upload confidential info! You can delete your information after you are done processing it; however, if it has been commented on by others this won’t make the site’s owners very happy.

Have fun coming up with different ways to look at your data and present it to your audience. However, keep in mind that once you start to look at the data in a different way, it may end up giving you answers to questions that you didn’t even know that you had.

When you have to present data as part of a presentation, what format do you normally use? What tools do you use to create your visualizations? Do you think that your audience can understand what your visualizations are saying? Do you feel that all graphs are starting to look the same? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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When Is Too Little Information On A PowerPoint Slide A Problem?

Hopefully by now everyone at least knows that you can seriously damage your audience if you create and use poorly designed PowerPoint slides. The number one offence that everyone seems to be able to agree on is that a slide that has been overloaded with text and numbers (a) doesn’t work, and (b) puts your audience to sleep. Good news – this problem has been solved!

Olivia Mitchell who is a speaking coach out of New Zealand (was there ever a “Zealand”?) discovered a blog posting by Laura Bergells in which she laments the current state of PowerPoint presentations as we move into 2009.

Laura’s main point is that most people have gotten the message that too much information is a bad thing. However, she objects to the way that we are currently solving it – by removing basically all of the information from our PowerPoint slides and replacing it with pretty pictures.

She’s got a good point – I’ve started doing this over the past year or so. However, in my own defense, I only started doing it because I saw that Steve Jobs was doing it and everyone was just raving about his presentations.

I sorta don’t have the heart to tell Laura that it’s probably going to get worse (in her opinion) before it gets better. A new presentation format in which you only get twenty slides and can show each one for “only” twenty seconds (for a total of 6 minutes 40 seconds) is catching on. This presentation style is called Pecha Kucha, and was started by two architects in Tokyo as part of a designers’ show and tell.

So what’s a presenter to do? First off, I think that we all need to sit down and have a quick reality check. Why do we give presentations? These are actually pretty poor ways of teaching new material. Adults learn in all sorts of different ways and listening to spoken words (and looking at PowerPoint slides) doesn’t do it for most of your audience (especially the younger ones raised on multimedia).

What this means is that you’ve got to decide why you are REALLY there. The list is pretty short – convince the audience that your view is correct, get them to agree to take some action, educate them on some new piece of information, or simply to amuse them.

Keeping the “back to basics” concept in mind, we should remember that PowerPoint slides don’t deliver the presentation by themselves. Instead, their whole reason for being is to help the presenter. It’s when we rely on our slides too much that we start to lose our audience.

So can you use a slide that has a lot (but not too much) information on it? The answer is YES. However, you can’t spend too much time on it and your certainly can’t read the contents of the slide off to your audience. Remember, the slide is a tool, not the presentation itself.

As we enter 2009, what should the ideal PowerPoint presentation look like? In a nutshell, it should look like it was designed to support the words that are being spoken. This will involve a lot of visual imagery (“pretty pictures”) and SOME detailed slides if they are needed.

It’s how the detailed slides are used that will differ from presentations of old. Show the detailed slide, make your point in an unhurried manner, and then move on. Additional information can be provided on your web site, in handouts, or in pod-casts that your audience can use to learn more AFTER your presentation. Welcome to 2009!

Have you gone to the minimalist approach in your presentations or are you still using a lot of words and bullets? What do you think of presentations that you sit through that only use pretty pictures and few words? Do you remember more or less from these presentations? Leave me a comment and let me know what you are thinking.

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