Saturday 15 November 2014

Presentation Skills & Being A Slave To Your Slides

Some speakers or presenters can just be plain lazy. Their idea of giving a presentation is to simply ‘throw up’ the jumbled mess of ideas in their head onto a bunch of slides and expect the listening audience to decipher it at their own trauma. It completely negates the point of giving a presentation – efficiently communicating one’s thoughts and agenda in an easy to understand manner. In this article we will look at some simple tips on how NOT to make your slides gives your presentation instead of you

·      If you’re going to use slides at all, at least make them easy to look at. Some slides can be so crammed with information that it gives the viewer a headache just looking at it and trying to make head or tail of the content. Cleaning up the home page is what made Google so popular in the early days of their entry into the Internet business. Hint: There is a lesson there!


·      The trick to a good presentation is leaving the audience with something that they can take home with them and ponder over. Long complicated sentences with technical jargon can be hard to remember. Focus on keywords or short concise statements that epitomize the concept or agenda of the presentation. At the iPhone launch, Steve Jobs’ slide simply said, “Today Apple Reinvents The Phone”. The short phrase stuck in everybody’s heads and the media droned out the same tagline over the next many weeks.

·      Sometimes illustrations or graphics can communicate a lot better than words or text. This zeroes on the notion that humans are visual beings and we respond more intuitively to what we can simply see and not what we have to see and compute in our head. So instead of stating this year’s output was 52,300 units compared to last year’s 49,800 units, a simple coloured graph chart showing the incredible hike in production instantly communicates the progress without having to mention the actual numbers.

Presentation Skills Training is an important aspect of giving employees the rudimentary skills necessary to communicate effectively with their audience in an efficient and persuasive manner. 


MMM Training Solutions conducts soft skills trainingexecutive coaching and leadership training programs for corporates in India and abroad. Please visit our website http://www.mmmts.com to know more about our programs and our trainers.

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