Standing up in front of an audience and presenting can be a difficult task. Being in the audience at a poor presentation can be frustrating, annoying and time wasting. PM coaches and guides presenters so that their audiences are engaged and entertained.

Guidelines for making speaker support slides.

The key notion here is that of speaker support

Some of the worst presentations that we have all endured are those where the slides are used as an aide memoir for the speaker and not as an asset for the audience.

The goal when planning a presentation must be to bring together what is said with what is seen into a synthesis that is greater than the sum of the parts.

To this end I offer a few simple suggestions:

Do not put on the slide the words that you are actually going to say – use different words that hint at or develop what you are saying from a slightly different angle.

Do not put a bullet point up on the screen until you are speaking about it or have just spoken about it. (Putting a list of bullet points up and then talking about them one by one encourages the audience to be distracted and to be ahead of you.

Avoid using complete sentences or indeed verbs on the screen – they make the screen too wordy and encourage you to read off the screen. (Quotations are an exception)

Maximum number of words on the screen – 20
Maximum number of bullet points - 4

Make sure graphs and charts are simple and clear with all unnecessary words and details omitted.

Use most of the available space; don’t leave oceans of space around the words. When making a balance between readability and design, err on the side of readability (size of text and type of font). All is lost if people at the back can’t read the words.

An appreciation of how the audience sees the slides is vital. What looks fine on the computer display in front of you - viewed from an arms length away -is very different from what is seen by a hundred people in a large room. Make your slides for the latter not the former.

Resist the temptation to be seduced by the wonderful array of different backgrounds available in the latest versions of powerpoint and on the web. Choose only the simplest and those that enhance what you are saying and not those that conflict with it.

Write down what you are going to say and let your slides be made out of that. Do not start with the slides and then write your talk around them – that is not speaker support that is slide support.

Rehearse, rehearse and rehearse – especially timings. Maximum impact is achieved when your slide comes up at exactly the right time. Too soon and you let the cat out of the bag – people know what is coming and switch off.  Too late is better than too early – the slide reinforces the point. Just right and you keep the audience with you and you capitalise on the synthesis mentioned above. 

Tony Othen
Presentation Matters Ltd

tony.othen@presentation–matters.co.uk