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Death by PowerPoint

Are you scared of doing presentations? Especially in front of a bigger audience? You don’t have to! Just don’t do these mistakes …

  1. Using corporate templates
  2. Having content packed slides
  3. Writing full sentences
  4. Focusing on the slides during presentation

If you do the opposite I promise your audience will love you ;-)

I will have a presentation in the next days and I will need to prepare some slides for it. In order to get my mind set up accordingly I watched again a video I have seen already more than a year ago:

Instantly Better Presentations

Damian is really good in doing presentations. He gives you all the tools you need to build great slides and to hold great presentations. Since I have watched him, my presentations became much better …

Recently a colleague of mine pointed me to the videos from David JP Phillips. He is really a great speaker and presenter. If you just have 20 minutes to invest watch his talk about

How to avoid death By PowerPoint

If you only have 20 seconds to invest (which is really sad) here are his key messages:

  • ONE message per slide
  • Your audience reads OR listens
  • Most IMPORTANT part of a slide should be the BIGGEST
  • Contrast controls focus
  • SPEAKER is most important, slides are just supporting
  • maximum SIX objects on a slide

Once you managed the guidelines above there is one last step to master:

Ensure that your audience will have an “angels cocktail” during your presentation … and never a “devils cocktail”. You don’t get what I am talking about? Watch this:

The magical science of storytelling

Surely I am not on that level yet … but I keep on trying ;-)

How will your next PowerPoint look like?

Tags: skills