Giving PowerPoint Presentations


Giving presentations appears to be as much an art as a skill. Some are very enjoyable, attention-getting speakers use absolutely no presentation handouts, notes, or overhead materials like those PowerPoint can produce. On the other hand, many professional speakers wouldn’t enter a room without PowerPoint.

You should decide what is best for you, given your comfort level, your capacity to capture an audience, your material, and the environment in which you plan to present your material. One thing is for sure: Tools such as PowerPoint are so powerful that it’s easy to get catch up in special effects, color, and sound so much that your presentation’s details take away from your message. You must keep in the forefront that your message should take priority over the presentation in every way.

Don’t add a special effect unless that effect accents the message you’re trying to convey on that slide. Don’t add sound or video to the beginning of your presentation if you want to speak at the beginning. In other words, don’t compete with your presentation’s effects. When you create automatic presentations, you probably should rely more on sound and special effects to keep the audience’s attention because you won’t be there to direct things, but the message you want to convey is still paramount to the technical aspects of your presentation.

Although this may go against tradition, seriously consider not passing out handouts of your presentation, or even letting your audience know that you have them, until after your presentation ends. If you do provide handouts earlier, you may lose the interest of some audience members because they will assume that all the information is in the handouts. Or they may think they can study the handouts later, and in doing so, they may miss connecting important points that you make in your speech but that may not be explicit in the handouts. Do what you can to keep your audience attentive to your message—this may mean that you buck the trend and not pass out handouts before you speak.

Don’t print, word for word, your speaker notes, either on slides or on a printed piece of paper you keep with you at the podium. You need to know your presentation well enough to give it cold, without any notes other than (perhaps) a card with key words that remind you of your presentation’s order.

Unless you’re teaching technical material, I’d suggest that you save questions for the end of your presentation. If you do not, you may be sidetracked from your presentation, you may go over time (upsetting both your audience and, possibly, the host conference personnel if you’re speaking at a conference), and your entire presentation runs the risk of being derailed.

Finally, even though it should go without saying, how many times have you seen a speaker get up before the audience and not know how to work the equipment? You need to arrive before your audience and prepare your hardware, get your handouts ready to pass out after the talk, and test your entire presentation and hardware. When problems occur at the start of a presentation, you lose control of the situation in your audience’s eyes, and you must fight to regain your audience.