2 Powerpoint Tips: Make your point, point by point
So, you have put together your presentation and are happy with the content, but how do you get your audience to listen to you presenting?
Here are 2 PowerPoint tips to help you.
#1 Use short points to make your point
There are a few advantages to using short points to get your message across when presenting.
These include, but are not limited to
- short points allow you to talk more freely about a point – you can gauge your audience, if they understand the point then it might need less explanation than if they did not understand what you were talking about
- depending on your own preference, you might feel more comfortable talking freely and using short points as a guide for what point to make or explain in more detail. In some cases I use images as well as text to help me present
- If you have a paragraph on screen there is a good chance that your audience may tune you out and start reading the paragraph while you are still talking about the first line
- If you were going to write paragraphs of text and then just talk about them, you could have just e-mailed the presentation to everybody and let them read it.
#2 Present point by point
As with the third point above, if you have a paragraph of text on screen there is a good chance that your audience may tune you out while they read ahead of you, the same can be said if you have multiple bullet points.
If you have, for example, 5 bullet points and show them all at the same time, your audience may end up reading all 5 while you are talking about point number 1.
Look at the image below……
You read all 5 points straight away didn’t you?
If I was presenting this to you, you would probably have done the same thing, so while I’m talking about point 1 you have read through all 5 and when you do start listening to me again you have to figure out what point I’m talking about.
Now look at this image…
Now if you do read ahead of me, at least it takes less time and we are both on the same point.
When finished, I will then display point two and we go from there.
Use Multiple Text Boxes
I have often been asked to help people display one bullet point at a time.
They understand animation and know how to make images, shapes, text boxes, etc appear on screen, but they put all their bullet points inside one text box and now want to animate the slide point by point.
When creating presentations I advise people to create a text box for each bullet point. That way you can animate each bullet point individually.
Even though in a previous post (read it here) I advised you to leave animation to the end, here I am advising you when creating your presentation to keep animation in mind, make it easier for yourself when it does come time to animate.
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