Background: Making Effective PowerPoint Presentations
The art of presentation is the art of storytelling and keeping your art to yourself. When was the last time you sat through an hour-long PowerPoint presentation without falling asleep? During our careers, most of us will be asked to make a presentation to management, to clients or at a conference. How well it goes may well define one's career path - for better or worse. PowerPoint can be an effective tool to communicate ideas to an audience without boring them to death with those dreadful bullet points. A presentation is more about inspiration than information. For technical proposals, the details are already in that half-inch thick, three-ring binder on the desk in front of the client. PowerPoint is a visual communication tool. If the topic being presenting is highly technical in nature and cannot be described easily in spoken words, the details of the content should be in the handouts. Much of the presentation should be done through your narration. Each slide should include a visual (a photo - not some cheesy clip art) and a single, short-sentence headline. The headline should be written in conversational tone. Multimedia presentation research has shown that given this format, an audience will quickly take in the headline and pay attention to what is said. Richard Mayer, Ph.D., a well-known authority on multimedia research and Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Santa Barbara, has done extensive research in the field of multi-media presentations. Some of his key findings can be summed up as follows: * It is better to have both words and graphics on the presentation than to have just words alone. * People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously and near each other on the screen. * The presentation is more effective when there are no extraneous words, pictures and sounds. Audiences presented with a collage of bullet points and clip art on a single slide will experience sensory overload and tune out the presentation altogether. Telling the story The most effective presentation is to tell a story by describing the setting, identifying the people involved, the starting point (problem) and the end point (solution), and the proposed path to get there. Present it in the following sequence: 1. Define the setting 2. Identify the protagonist (the people involved) 3. Describe the imbalance (the place where the protagonist finds himself) 4. Describe the balance (the place where he wants to be) 5. Offer a solution (how he can get there) As a consultant, the imbalance is the problem that the clients are facing. The balance is what they wish to see happen. The consultant's job is to show future clients how to bridge that gap. Sidebar "It is just like showing a movie, with a setting, the hero, the conflict and the resolution. Author Affiliation Norman Wei is the principal instructor and founder of Environmental Management and Training LLC, a consulting firm based in Union Washington. He conducts environmental seminars throughout the country. He also teaches consultants on how to make effective presentation. He recently authored the book "Connecting with Your Future Clients" - available at www.yourfutureclients.com.
Question:
What would be the summary of the entire article list above in one's own words?