The Seven Sins of PowerPoint

Love it or hate it – OK, sorta like it or truly detest it – PowerPoint is essential in the modern boardroom, and the modern lecture hall, and the modern classroom, and the modern lab, and the modern wedding, and the modern funeral, and, for all we know, probably some modern bedrooms. You are almost certainly going to have to make a PowerPoint presentation from time to time. So here, as our gift to you – and, more importantly, our gift to your audiences – are seven mistakes many people make when creating and delivering PowerPoint presentations. You should strive to avoid them.

1. Reading the slides

Everybody hates this, and everyone who saw the title of this article probably thought of this first, so obviously we have to put it first or you’re going to be distracted wondering when we’re going to say it. Your slides are there to illustrate, augment, and summarize your presentation. They are not there to be cue cards that you simply read aloud. If the presentation can be understood simply by reading the slides, then there’s no point in listening to you.

This is not to say that you can’t say anything that’s on the slides – if they’re key points, you’re sure to make them, and if your audience is busy reading your slides, they may not be listening to what you’re saying (we’ll get back to this below) – but if your physical presence and voice don’t add value, well, why are you there?

2. Rambling

On the other hand, while you want to have that fresh, live feeling, you still need to be prepared and on point. Some people say it’s bad to use prepared notes, but truly there is not one person in the world who would rather sit through half an hour or more of “um, uh, OK, I’m just going to go ahead and, ah, so here, as you can see, we did a thing that we had decided was a thing we should do, which, you know, and so I – did I mention this already? – the sample size was, let me check, OK, you can see it there…”

It’s best if you have the time to rehearse well so you can deliver it from memory with good structure and minimal hesitation or digression, but we live in the real world where most people don’t get 20 or more hours to rehearse a presentation. Your quarterly report is not a TED Talk. Make the notes you need, do what you can to speak directly to the audience as much as possible, and, for heaven’s sake, do rehearse it at least once or twice – and time yourself. It’s OK to finish a few minutes early (sometimes quite a few minutes, depending on the occasion), but it is the gravest sin to go over time by even one minute. And it’s the second gravest sin to blast through the last 15 slides of your presentation in three minutes because you rambled too much at the beginning.

3. Information overload

Sometimes presentations go on too long because the presenter is trying to cover too darn much stuff. And if they don’t go on too long, they go too fast. For a 20-minute presentation, you should aim to have about 10 slides (and certainly no more than 20), and you shouldn’t cover more than you would in a 2000-word article. In fact, record yourself and count how many words you say per minute: if it’s over 100, you’re going too fast.

And don’t overstuff your slides. For each slide, time how long it takes you to sit and read through it silently – or, if it’s a chart, how long it takes to make sense of all the relevant information in it. Consider that your audience won’t be able to listen to you and read your slide at the same time (unless you’re reading the slide aloud, which we’ve already agreed you’re not going to do). So, since you’re going to be standing there talking rather than just being quiet while they read your slides, don’t give them more than about 10 seconds’ worth of reading to do per slide.

4. Excursions

Don’t leave PowerPoint. Just don’t do it. Don’t click on a link and go to a website or YouTube video or PDF or whatever. As soon as you leave PowerPoint, you’re inviting a world of technical difficulties – you will discover the limitations of your internet connection, and the time it takes for Acrobat to start up, among other things – but also a world of distractions. Your audience will be looking at what other tabs you have open in your browser, what files and applications are visible on your computer, perhaps even what emails you have coming in. Stay in PowerPoint. Take screenshots of the websites you want to talk about. Embed the videos you want to show.

Some people will even advise you against showing embedded videos. You don’t have to go that far, but if you do have embedded videos, for heaven’s sake, test the sound setup and connection in the room in advance. You don’t want to have your audience trying to hear the sound squeaking out of your laptop’s speakers. And you really don’t want to have to pause your presentation for several minutes to try to sort out technical difficulties. That’s as bad as leaving PowerPoint!

5. Eye torture

Do not make the experience of looking at your slides like walking through a carnival funhouse or a casino slot-machine hall. Don’t use a million animations, don’t use wacky transition effects, don’t make the text dance. Just don’t. That kind of thing screams that you’re trying to distract them so they don’t notice the lack of real value in your content.

Also watch your fonts – you may worry that the standard fonts are boring, but the secret is that they should be. You want your audience to be focusing on the information you’re giving them, not on the funkiness, weirdness, or ostentatiousness of the letters that are attempting to convey it. They should be like a clean window, easy to see through.

And be careful with your colors. Your templates and color schemes don’t have to be boring, but they should be reasonably calm. They need to have enough contrast to be readable (not yellow on white!), but your audience will be less receptive to your information if you’re making their eyes bleed – or if they can’t even read it because it’s at a 45-degree angle in a spidery script font in red on black.

Wild and crazy designs are like wearing a clown suit with a flashing bowtie to give the presentation – and making the audience hate you for your design choices is a very questionable career move. If you want the presentation to feel fresh and lively, that’s your job as the moving and speaking body that is presenting it.

6. Sloppiness

People will notice if you make spelling or punctuation errors on your slides. People will even notice if you hyphenate the same thing differently in different places. And at least some of them will certainly notice if you use biased language. You may think that it doesn’t matter that much as long as they get the information, but – lest the point hasn’t been made clearly enough yet – any distraction from the information you’re conveying reduces its effectiveness, reduces the audience’s uptake of it, and reduces their faith in you and the value of what you’re presenting.

The really good news here is that there is a tool to help prevent this kind of problem: PerfectIt is available for PowerPoint. You can run a PerfectIt check on your slides to catch all those problems that PerfectIt is so good at flagging, including:

·       consistent and correct spelling

·       consistent and correct punctuation, including hyphenation

·       consistent use of accents and special characters

·       common typos (including the famous mysterious disappearing l in public)

·       phrases to consider or avoid

·       contractions

As always, it’s up to your own judgment what to do with what PerfectIt finds – it’s a trusted checker and adviser, not something that will change your text without being asked. And it doesn’t have checks for eye-straining color combinations or regrettable font choices. But at least your text will be clean and consistent.

7. Flagrant errors

Last but not least, don’t say things that are obviously wrong. Well, you shouldn’t say things that are wrong whether or not it’s obvious – check your facts, for heaven’s sake – but if you get one thing flagrantly wrong, such as putting something in the wrong location on a map, or showing a photo that’s not of the person it’s supposed to be about, or messing up well-known or easily checked facts (“pi = 3.4,” “the Niagara River flows southward,” “the Bears are a hockey team from Minneapolis”), you would have been better not presenting at all.

This especially includes handling of branding, product names, and the names and titles of people. If you think people have feelings about the Chicago Bears or the value of pi, wait until you misspell their name or the name of their product, or seem to give an executive an on-the-spot demotion. Check them all and check them carefully.

In fact, put all your company’s products and personnel in your PerfectIt style sheet, and put their titles with their names in the “Phrases to Consider” check so you can make sure that you’re getting it all right … and update your style sheet every time there’s any personnel- or branding-related change. That way, when you run PerfectIt on your PowerPoint, you’ll be sure to catch anything that might be career-limiting. (For people in academic contexts, this also works for all the key terms of your particular discipline, including the names of key opinion leaders.)

If you don’t have PerfectIt loaded into PowerPoint yet, try it now. There’s a free trial, or, if you already have PerfectIt for Word, here’s how you can get started using it in PowerPoint.