Presentation Sins - Top 10

Over the last three weeks, I have had the misfortune to sit through a lot of PowerPoint. The best presentations were interesting, just the right length, taught me something I did not know before and kept my attention throughout.

The worst - well they included one or more of the following sins (in no particular order):

1. "Sorry, this is not my presentation" - no excuse for this one - just too hurried or too lazy to learn the material behind the slides. You are in front of an audience because you are expected to know more about the subject than the audience. If you abuse that trust by not knowing your material, everybody gets to waste their time.
2. "These figures are taken from the annual report which is out of date" - or some other excuse for not updating the data you are using. Your audience will expect you to have the best available information - or to extrapolate to today depending on the circumstances. Lazy presenters are guilty of this error - frequently.
3. "Here are a couple of case studies. I am not familiar with them so I will read the script." - another way of telling your audience that you could not give them the courtesy of preparing properly.
4. "These slides are from a colleague, so please do not ask me any questions." - so why did you include the slides that you could not be bothered to research?
5. Blue fonts on a blue background - It may look OK on your whizz-bang laptop, but projection systems are often lower in contrast. Help your audience by making things legible.
6. 4 point font - You just had to include all the text. Then you read it to the audience who cannot read it for themselves. In a short presentation, there is a limit to the amount of information that an audience can absorb. Unless you have a great reason, try the rule of 6. Maximum 6 bullets per slide. Maximum 6 words per bullet.
7. Not rehearsed - often made obvious by a failure to stick to time, repetition of similar points, lack of flow or a hesitant delivery. Your audience trusted you to be the authority. You could give up an hour of your time to rehearse.
8. Technology fumbles - pressing the wrong button or that clever video fails to run. In all presentations, arrive early, check the technology - especially if you are using somebody else's systems. And keep the embedded techie features to a minimum. If it does not add value to the audience, leave it out. You are there to engage the audience with your content, not with your grasp of weird PowerPoint features.
9. Ignoring the audience - or failing to do your homework before the event. Try asking the organiser about the audience if you do not know them. When you get in the room, you could try asking questions of the audience to see what they already know of your subject, then you get the chance to vary the level at which you deliver the content - assuming that you spent enough time preparing properly.
10. Over-running - your host invited you to speak for a specific amount of time. And you agreed to speak for 20, 30, 50, 70 minutes. That means planning the content properly to cover the material in the planned amount of time. If you are the only thing between the audience and the loos, coffee or 'phone messages, how much of your content do you think they will remember?

So, how many of the sad 10 are you guilty of? There is a huge amount of content on the web about preparing for presentations. If you struggle to get the basics right, then it will pay you to spend a day of your life getting some training. One day, you might win some business from an audience that you pleased rather than boring senseless!