Do your presentations suck?

PowerPoint. The very word can strike fear into the hearts and minds of audiences and presenters alike. Below are five presenters who made very typical mistakes when presenting.

Sometimes asking an audience questions can seem like a mistake. We often feel the need to monologue to audiences, but the fact is that interaction is the difference between a monologue and a dialogue. The 'sage-on-the-stage' is a dying trend. No-one cares if you've climbed Everest (we've seen the pics of the queue at the top!) Audiences want you to engage them and ask them questions which will challenge them and force their mental interaction. Read more here.

HDMI, VGA, DISPLAY PORT, USBC, AUDIO DRIVERS, CODECS, 16:9, 4:3: Technology can get in the way of successful presentations. Some presenters are technophobes who will start by saying things like: "it doesn't work for me" or "can you see this chart at the back" - Fact is that it's your job as the presenter to ensure that your presentation works and is easy to view and understand. If you have technical fear then keep things simple and use simple slides without media embedded and one clear message on each slide. If you need help here are 100 Presentation Tips.

Wilbur is pretty typical. He got fed-up with PowerPoint (although he'd never really learned how to use it) and tried Prezi instead to try to make his slides less boring. Fact is that he should have stayed in PowerPoint and worked on his content and storytelling. Meanwhile most of the features of Prezi are now in the latest version of PowerPoint and poor old Wilbur is disillusioned and stuck at the flip-chart! Here's a playlist of the newer features of PowerPoint.

Did you know that PowerPoint has a built-in teleprompter? It's called Presenter-view and when activated you can have your script on your laptop screen whilst presenting your slides. This removes the fear of forgetting your script and allows you as the presenter to have more impact. Watch this video and give it a try!

Sure we all love cool visuals in a presentation but they need to be contextual and add to your messaging. We see way too many slides with ineffective backgrounds so much so that sometimes the text or graph on top cannot even be read! The solution to laying slides out correctly is visual hierarchy and here are 15 tips for effective slide layout.

We hope you enjoyed this article on presenting mistakes and learned something new. Presenting with impact is a skill everyone can learn !