What makes a powerpoint presentation bad

Use only the text and images that are needed to support your points. Remember that one powerful image will do more to move your audience than ten average images grouped together on one slide. When you read a book, magazine or newspaper, you almost always see black text on a white background.

This formula is pleasing to the eye and increases readability. Poor contrast destroys readability and makes your presentations look amateur. As a rule, avoid dark text on dark backgrounds as well as light text on light backgrounds. Stick with dark text on a light background or vice versa to ensure readability and attract audience attention.

One of the biggest PowerPoint mistakes you can make is to simply read slides out as they appear on the screen. Simply repeating this information makes it a boring presentation. The audience will quickly tune you out and miss any important points you might make later in the presentation. That means that you must direct your attention to the audience, not to the screen. Too many presenters stare at the screen while speaking instead of looking out at the audience.

Actually, it was Monday and I know that because I had just come back from the gym. By now your audience is ready to pull their hair out. To make your stories more interesting, keep them succinct and only include relevant information. Obviously, you want to be sensitive to different cultures, but In North America, lack of eye-contact can make people distrust you. If making eye contact adds to your nerves, pick three main focal points around the room one on the left, one in the centre, and one on the right.

Move from one focal point to the other as you speak, making eye contact with a few people from each area. A pause is like the mount on a diamond ring. The diamond is the message, but the mount is what presents it to the world and helps it shine! Help your message shine with a well-placed pause. Self-deprecating humour is almost always safe. Poking fun at yourself also helps put people at ease, and when you hear laughter, it can help you relax.

This is a mistake that almost everyone makes. Emphasize only the main ideas very briefly. What was the purpose of your presentation?

Were you trying to teach something? Did you wan to persuade the audience to take an action? Whatever the goal, make sure to tell people what you want them to do next. Unfortunately, PowerPoint does provide an analytics dashboard, leaving the presenter with no information that they can work off of, unless they follow up with the audience directly.

This makes improving the presentation, let along gauging its effectiveness, extremely difficult. Even something as simple as a ratings and comments system can provide presenters with invaluable information that can end up transforming presentations for the better.

Imagine being able to get immediate responses from your audience, rating how informative or fun your presentation was. You could even take a quick poll to see if your audience felt that the presentation itself was even necessary, which could be useful for cutting out inefficiencies in things such as corporate training programs.

However, you should know that PowerPoint is not your only choice for presentations, as there are solutions available that are better for both you and your audience that you should be aware of.

There are methods for creating more engaging presentations that are easier than putting together a deck of slides and come fully equipped with tools that will set you up for success, from security and analytics to collaboration and content management.

SpeachMe allows you to quickly create brief interactive presentations optimized for maximum impact that feature video captured on a smartphone, tablet or webcam combined with existing media and documents. Hyperlinks, screen captures, and images can also be included. Questions like these keep popping up to your head. Do not worry.

This article will show you the way to create powerful and engaging PowerPoint presentations by pointing out the most common mistakes you must avoid during the design process. The number one mistake found in PowerPoint presentations is usually the amount of text used in a slide.

Because they want to deliver more information about a subject, educators fill the slides with text, even with irrelevant information, leaving no space for images or other visual media. However, according to surveys, when there is a significant amount of text in a presentation, the audience prefers to read it, paying more attention to it rather than to the educator talking. For example, see the following slides. Which one is more frustrating to you? We can agree that the first slide is the most frustrating.

It is full of text, with no space for other media, and although the text is divided with bullets, even these contain many sentences. On the contrary, the second slide, contains less information in bullets, making it easier to read. The third slide, however, is the most clear.

There is only a sentence, that summarizes the topic of the Subject Matter. This, makes it easier for the audience to concetrate less on the presentation and focus on the educator talking and explaining the topic. The text on your slide should reinforce the points you are trying to make. As we are talking about text, fonts, also, play an important role in your presentation. A font with narrow letters, or another with big bold ones, or with letters in italic , usually makes it difficult for the audience to actually read what is written on the slide.

However, when creating a presentation, you must always take into consideration the message you want to deliver and the needs and personality of your audience. For example, Comic Sans is inappropriate for a business presentation, but it is quite playful when used in a presentation created for primary school students.

It is up to you what kind of font you will choose, but be careful and choose fonts that are simple, clean, sharp and easy to read.