Slide by Slide - PowerPoint Design

PowerPoint - 'Use the experts or risk going bananas'

Bananas, oranges, apples, melons, grapes, pineapples, plums, raspberries, cherries & strawberries: now you're off on your weekly shop. No list, mind, although without that you'll struggle to remember all ten amidst the mental clutter of yoghurt, pasta and high-octane alcohol, or whatever gets you through the night to overcome a bad case of PPSD (post-presentation stress disorder). Anyway, let's say the above are your favourite fruits; that's why you're buying them, but from memory alone it's likely you'll get as far as apples with maybe a strawberry or two. So why then should you be expected to remember a PowerPoint presentation involving 60-plus bullet points backed by text about a subject that often only truly engages your interest come pay-day – aka, your work?

Of course, you owe it to yourself and your employer to grit your teeth come Monday morning whilst remembering that only last Friday night the weekend with its limitless possibilities stretched before you until in the blink of an eye you find yourself in a meeting. OK, like Monday mornings, presentations are unavoidable, but we're all in this together; the captive audience and the presenter. It's the latter's role to make Tuesday the new Monday.

Presenter: get engaged. No, not a water-cooler romance; simply remember to engage your audience, put yourself in their shoes, remember that we live in an age where there's an infinite variety of visual stimuli available to us all, and then remember that in the right hands a PowerPoint presentation can match the best. Think of what you'd want to see and try to replicate that. Start with the idea, what you need to convey, then engage a professional, low-cost designer and let them do what they do best. They probably can't do your job; don't try to do theirs.

Simple, image-based presentations have been shown to work best, so long as you avoid clichéd stock imagery like you would an angry Honey Badger. They're nasty, pound for pound making the Tasmanian Devil seem like a Gerbil. Text is fine, but keep it minimalist. Remember, what looks good on your screen may not work best across a crowded meeting-room. Use animation. Use originality. Use humour. Use music. Try as much as possible to give the bullet to bullet-points. Seemingly there to simplify, they instead encourage information-overload by making it possible to cover too many subjects in oversimplified detail.

Face your audience, not stand in front of the screen as though reading the presentation for the first time. You're the originator, so come presentation day you should have mastered your subject matter. Don't be like those TV weather forecasters who stand in front of their symbols. You know, right over the place where you're about to take your summer break. Ultimately it's about your audience. A presentation is there to back you up; you're not there to validate the presentation.

According to Microsoft, the average PowerPoint session lasts 250-minutes. The Wolf of Wall Street runs for 180-minutes, and even then people are saying – Marty, Marty, Marty, less is more, mate. Remember that people need to get back to their jobs with their memory and will-to-live intact, and with the time spent in the meeting having a positive effect in the workplace.

Can't remember that list at the top? No problem; you don't need that much fruit. They say it's a bit of a sugar rush. Stick to five a day. Far easier to remember. And do eat your greens, as I'm always telling my granny.