You have to agree, in most corporate jobs we spend more time with PowerPoint Presentations and Excel Spreadsheet than we do with our friends and girlfriends! Well, by choice or by force if we are spending that much time, we might as well try to deliver some awesome presentations each time. Here are a series of 6 tips that worked very well for me!
3 Things do before you make a Presentation!
Nothing you do on PowerPoint makes a catchy slide, it is actually what you do before making a slide !
1. Define an Objective
This is pretty standard no-brainer stuff that applies to most things in life. It most adequately applies to presentations as well. Just to give your presentation objective a bit more direction, I’ll help you with some pointers. Ask (and get an answers to) questions like
- So who is the presentation going to ?
- What is does she want to see in the presentation ?
- Most importantly, can I add value to what she is looking for ?
2. Gather and become friends with Data and Information
Value addition starts parallelly with collecting data and understanding it thoroughly. Ok, so lets define some points here..
- Collect all your data at once, you don’t want to go back and forth between collecting data and making a presentation
- Wear your thinking hat and perform meaningful analysis. You can use excel to draw charts and relationships [read about Charts Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]
- Now create a story around your data. Most often I have seen people being interested in stories not just raw numbers
3. Drawing Mock Slides
Well the objective building and collecting data isn’t enough, drawing mock slides on paper almost always helps you structure the information in a slide format. Mocking involves scribbling/drawing a rough layout of how would you like to place the data on the slide. I really stress on doing a mock slide for 2 key reasons
- Most people have some idea (in mind) about how their slide would look like, putting it down on paper crystallizes your idea
- Having your idea in front of you would reveal how much effort you need to put in while making it on PowerPoint
- A bonus reason would be that you can redo the mock with almost very little effort which becomes challenging when you start placing things on PowerPoint
Making a classic presentation needs as much analytical mind as it needs a design oriented one.
Remember!
The presentation design follows the logic/objective not vice versa!
3 Things to do while making Presentations
4. Make neat and clean slides
Recall what your mother told you about your handwriting when you were in school. The neater you write the more marks are you likely to get!! That is so true no matter how much ever digital have we gone. The information which is neat, clear easy to read and understand and looks pleasing to the eye stands out [related: learn to use slide master to make neat and clean template]
5. Use Visualizations over Text
- Offices in Northern India – Delhi Jalandar, Jaipur, Lucknow and Ghaziabad
- Offices in Western India – Mumbai, Indore, Ahmedabad
- Offices in Eastern India – Kolkata, Guwahati, Patna , Cuttack
- Offices in Southern India – Hyderabad and Bangalore
V/S
A map (visual) showing the above information
Which one would you choose to put in your presentation. I think I have made my point here 😎
Additional Tips
- Learn how to make Interactive Slides
- Integrating Excel Charts with Slides
- Tips and downloads from a Consulting Project
- Adding action buttons to the slide
- How I converted raw data into a visualization
6. Paying attention to Details
Pay close attention to things like accurate formatting, spelling mistakes, currency labels, adequate labels on the charts. Sometimes making a presentation can be extremely dragging in that case we tend to overlook the details, here are a few quick steps to fix the problem
- Get a Foreign Eye – Show your presentation to a friend, ask him if he can find any mistakes
- Spell Check – Incredibly helpful feature irons out the small glitches like none other, by the way F7 is the shortcut key for spell check
- Give your presentation that last look before you send that out to the client
Watch a short video on 10 Rookie Mistakes to avoid while making presentations
What problems do you face while making presentations?
Share with me and I will try to give you a solution. That’s it for now, I’ll see you in the next one 
