Another Quick list of 10 dumb powerpoint mistakes
1. Font Size “I-Cant-See-Jack”. Major Issues with a number of presentations. Your audience isn’t there to read a paper on a big screen. You font needs to be nice and clear. So do me, yourself and your poor audience a favor. Make the font size for text a minimum of 26. Make it 34 for Headlines and 40+ for Slide Titles.
2. Opps I forgetting to chek Splelings and grammer. Major Killer of any presentation. The intelligent ones in the audience or your bosses will never feel the impact of the point you are trying to make, if you cant get the spellings and grammar right. Personally, it pisses me off and tells me that you don’t respect me or the audience enough to get this simple basic thing right.
3. Action film on the Slide. Dear newbie powerpoint empowered person. Please note that the point of making a presentation is not to depict the Star Wars trilogy using animated arrows. Every animation that you put in must serve a purpose and should be subordinated to the real point you are trying to make in a slide. Any animation done just because it looks ‘snazzy’ or ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’ is worth Kingfisher Airlines right now.
4. My Grandma Cant understand. “You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother” – Albert Einstein. And if you cant explain your point or the concept to the audience then most wither feel dumb, switch off or worse, think you don’t know what you are talking about. Most presenter who give bad presentations, usually don’t know what they are talking about.
5. Rainbow Overload. Yes, we know there are lots of colors in the world. No, we don’t want them all to be on the same slide or presentations. Classic disasters of using blood red or light yellow fonts on white background, Multi-color pointers just because they are different points and using splashes of color because it looks pretty. Aww. So cute. But its wrong! Create a color template based on what you want to present and stick to those 2-4 colors throughout.
6. Disco Dancing Slides. When you don’t use master slides, you slides, logos, animations do the disco once slides change. Very very unprofessional.
7. Hindi Movies of the 90s. No story. Every good presentation needs to have a story. Or they will bomb just like the hindi movies of the 90s. To capture the attention of your audience please just create a storyline. And stick to it.
8. The rendition of War and Peace on powerpoint. Lots of words. Loads of them. Just because you are scared you might miss something. The audience is not there to read your presentation. They want to hear you out. Please impress them with what you have to say and how you say it, rather than just offering them a wall full of text.
9. First-pic-from-google-syndrome. You want to make a point. You want to be classy. Good enough. So you do a google search and put in the first picture that comes your way. Fail! Major Fail!. Why? 1. Because tons of other people would have put the same picture somewhere. Believe it or not, other people know how to use google too. 2. Most people just put in low resolution pics that look like grainy mug-shots when projected. 3. Most pictures are not relevant to the topic. Unfortunate.
10. You. You don’t know your topic, your script, your material, your audience, your slides. Your tone makes people go to sleep and your jokes makes them want to wriggle with pain. You have little empathy for the audience. You are usually the problem, not the slides.
Startup Yapper 