A speaker came to my service club this week with a PowerPoint presentation that showed she really hadn't grasped the "power" part of the software's name. She used it so ineffectively that it actually detracted from her presentation, rather than improving it. 

Specifically, she loaded each slide with multiple photographs. They varied in size and shape, and weren't all necessarily on the same topic. As she went through her speech, she would say things like "The three photos on the left show..." [blah, blah, blah]. Then she'd describe the remaining photos. 

I was sitting near the back of the room, and found the photos too small and chaotically arranged to have much impact on me. I couldn't understand why she didn't use more slides to segregate her photos by subject. She could have then made each photo larger and more intelligible. There's no cost to adding more slides, or enlarging your pictures—except your time in making the presentation look good. 

Neither was there much explanatory text on the slides. Large captions would have helped her direct our attention to what she wanted to convey. 

When she did change slides, she did not use any of the interesting transitions that PowerPoint offers. In fact, she used only a tiny, tiny part of the many features that presenters can find in PowerPoint. 

Finally, she remained seated during her presentation, which meant that she was hidden from view for a couple of audience members by a huge podium. 

The speaker was an educator with many years of experience. It surprised me to see that over all that time, she had not mastered PowerPoint to any significant degree. 

We at Keen Eyes love to use PowerPoint and its Mac equivalent, Keynote, to make gorgeous slide presentations that make speeches more memorable. We can help you avoid the kind of errors mentioned in this article. Call us to get a quote on this service.