Posts Tagged ‘slides’

Don’t look back

When you’re giving a presentation, many times you have to go back to a point you raised earlier; many speakers go 3 or 4 slides back to refresh the audience’s memory or just to remind them of the big picture. I find that going back and then having to skip those 3 or 4 slides again gives a sloppy image to the audience, like you forgot to say something and quickly skipped back to make your point only to rush back over slides they’ve already seen.

If you know it will be good for your audience to see a slide again just duplicate it (right click, or command click on a mac, in the slide panel and hit duplicate) and include it again in your slideshow. This will avoid you having to skip back and forth through your deck and it will seem much more professional and smooth.

I usually use a slide like this to mark the 3 areas of presentations I’m going to reference.

When I’m done with the first part I show the slide again, just to remind people where we’re going. Notice that in this slide the word preparation is clear, whereas design and delivery are faded out. When I begin the next section the word design will stand out and the other two will be faded out. This gives an idea of movement and transitioning through the talk although it is the same slide.

Give this a try in your next presentation and let me know how it goes.

Until next time.

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Friday, 04 June 2010 13:37 Written by Byron Stanford 0 Comments

How many slides should I use?

A common question people often ask me is how many slides should I use? There is no real answer to this, obviously. How many pages make for a good book? How much sugar should you put in coffee? It always depends on what your story is or who is having it. Your slideshow is quite the same.

There is no magic number which will ensure a good slideshow. Think of who will view your presentation. Each occasion will call for more or less slides. A great option that you will find in Power Point and Keynote is hide slide. This allows you to make a slideshow and decide before giving the presentation which slides you will show. This way you won’t have to design several slideshows for the same topic, instead you decide which slides you will use for each occasion.

Think of your audience, if you have too many slides they might be overwhelmed, if you have to few they might be bored. This is not the same as to say shoot for the middle. There is no middle here. Just try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think which pace would make them feel most comfortable.

I’ve seen many good presentations (and many bad ones, unfortunately) some with fast pace speakers which switch slides every minute and others that went on for 20 minutes with just 3 slides (or no slides at all). Each speaker is different and you have to find the style that you, as a speaker and with your audience in mind, are more comfortable with.

Check out different styles from speakers, you can go from Sir Ken Robinson’s no slide talks, to a Pecha Kucha style presentation, where they use exactly 20 slides, showing each one for 20 seconds.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.