A poor PowerPoint steals the spotlight and prevents your audience from remembering what you say. Here are three pieces of advice to help you make better PowerPoints.
You sit in a dimly lit room in front of a screen filled with a white background, a huge pile of black letters and a whole lot of graphs and complicated diagrams. You try to focus, but slowly you feel your colleague’s voice drifting further and further into the background. You try to make sense of the slides shining into your eyes, but there is too much, it is too complex, it is too messy. Slowly but surely. Enters. Death. By. PowerPoint.
Power on/off
When we provide advice on presentation technique, frustrations about PowerPoint always appear as one of the first topics. There are many different opinions about it, but one thing is always shared: far too many experience that their audience suffers under PowerPoint. Therefore, here are three pieces of advice to help you improve your presentations – whether you are speaking to colleagues, customers or partners. Your PowerPoint should assist you, not steal the leading role. You can best ensure this by following these three recommendations:
Your presentation is not a PowerPoint
“How many slides?” “How much weight do you put on slides?” “Can we get the slides afterwards?” These are the questions we hear from many participants getting ready to speak at our courses. They are perfectly reasonable questions, but they also reflect a widespread misunderstanding: that a presentation or a talk is the same as a PowerPoint presentation.
The interesting part of any presentation is not your slides but what you want to tell. Therefore, you should put the thought of slides aside for as long as possible.
Prepare what you want to say before you even open PowerPoint. Sketch your slides instead of creating them directly in the software. In this way, the core becomes your thoughts, not your PowerPoint.
We present and speak to make use of the effect of the spoken space. To look people in the eyes, influence them, persuade them with arguments, good examples, body language, presence, enthusiasm, vocal variation and much more. Here, the amount of data is less important than ensuring that the data sticks with the receiver. That they feel your point.
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Firstly, humans cannot multitask. The more we study the brain, the clearer it becomes that we cannot do two things at once. And this is crucial for PowerPoint: text and spoken words are processed in almost the same way in the brain. We cannot read and listen simultaneously. We can switch rapidly between the two, but in that split second of switching, we understand neither. This means that large amounts of text on a slide are deeply confusing if the speaker reads too quickly, or the audience is not given time to read in silence.
Secondly, any receiver will struggle to stay focused for more than about 20 minutes without variation. The brain battles to digest new information while sorting through the other impulses racing around – urgent tasks on today’s to‑do list, dinner plans, the weekend and so on. Sitting still through a 45‑minute talk in semi‑darkness with a glowing screen in front of us simply puts us to sleep. We look for variation in the speaker and their tools. That is why many of us breathe a sigh of relief when something changes – writing on a whiteboard, a video clip illustrating a point, a question that forces us to relate the talk to our own tasks.
Your PowerPoint should support your presentation
If your slides do not help the receiver understand your point, they must go! If your slides make sense on their own, there is no reason for you to say anything. Just send them to your audience instead and save everyone time. We use PowerPoint to clarify what we say. Therefore, you should not worry about whether people understand your slides, only about whether you can explain them.
“What should I do when my colleagues expect to receive my slides before the meeting?” you might ask. In reality, they are not asking for the slides you plan to use but something entirely different – slides with much more text, because without that, the slides alone make no sense. You might consider sending them a proper briefing note with the background information they need. You could also add text in the notes field of your PowerPoint slides and emphasise that the presentation must be seen as part of the talk you look forward to delivering.
Drop the perfect, polished slides
Slides must be pretty, or they have no effect. The boss rejects them if they are not stylish enough, and employees spend hours tweaking details to meet an unspoken aesthetic standard, often based on templates chosen by leadership or a consultancy.
We have nothing against good‑looking slides, but the downside is often that the message gets lost because we focus on form and forget content. The two things must work together – ideally with emphasis on a clear, receiver‑oriented message that supports the spoken word. Time spent perfecting slides can be directly counterproductive. It is the icing on the cake, not the foundation, that makes your audience find your talk interesting. If you focus on your audience, have a clear message, strong arguments, a well‑thought‑out structure and show enthusiasm, you can succeed in most situations – even without PowerPoint.
Impact
When the power goes out, your presentation should still be strong enough to reach your goal and persuade your audience – even without PowerPoint as a crutch. Avoid letting your message drown in your slides. Step forward and look your audience in the eyes. Right there – where the speaker belongs. It gives you greater impact and helps your audience remember and act on your message.
In the end, that is what it is all about.
