PowerPoint Tip: Don’t start your presentation with credits

Last week in a coaching session a client asked, “What is the best way to start my presentation?” She said that she had tried different methods and didn’t feel that they were working as well as she wanted. This question reminded me of what Nick Morgan said in his keynote presentation at the Presentation Summit last fall. In this article I want to talk about how to start your presentation, building off of what Nick suggested in his talk.

How do most movies and TV shows start today? As Nick pointed out, it is much different than 15 years ago. In the past, a movie started out with the credits. It listed all the actors, the key production personnel, and other important people before you saw the first scene. Not today. In the first moments of any show, they have an exciting scene that immediately gets you involved in the story. After they have you hooked, they show a few credits.

I agree with Nick that our presentations should be similar. If we don’t hook the audience in the first sixty seconds, they start to lose interest. But, you may say, I don’t give credits at the start of my presentation like a movie does. Too many of the presentations I review actually do start with the equivalent of credits in the business world: the introduction of the team, many facts about the company or department, and the agenda of the presentation. The audience has lost interest by the time you actually get to any real content.

So how do you grab their attention at the start of your presentation, and what do you do with the “credits” information? As I suggested to my coaching client last week, you should start by making it clear to the audience why they should spend time listening to you. What key analysis, important decision, or future direction are you going to discuss that will directly impact this audience? Unless they see the connection to their own lives, they won’t see a reason to stay tuned to the rest of the presentation.

Once you have started with the reason they should pay attention, you can then outline the key points in your presentation, in the form of an agenda if you prefer. This gives the audience a roadmap to follow as you explain the details behind your opening statement.

Consider whether you really need to include information about the team or company. Many times that information is self-serving and does not really help the audience understand your message. If you do include this type of information, it must be presented in a way so that your audience understands why it matters to them, not just because you are trying to boast. (I did a slide makeover on this topic that you can view on YouTube here)

Just like movie and television producers have changed how they start a show, as presenters we have to change how we start our presentations. The old methods of telling a joke, commenting on the news, or reciting how great we are do not work. Our audience expects to be engaged from the start. If we don’t engage them, they will turn to their laptop, smartphone, or even get up and leave. Start your presentation with why your topic is important to this audience and you will have a more successful presentation.

PowerPoint Tip: Boring presentations are not the problem

How many times have you heard that the problem with many PowerPoint presentations is that they are boring? This is a common refrain from the media and it used to justify why presentations should not use PowerPoint, or use some other hot presentation tool instead of PowerPoint. I heartily disagree that most business presentations are boring. The problem with most presentations is not that they are boring, it is that they are confusing. In today’s article I want to explain the difference and what we can do about the problem.

A boring presentation is one that has no useful information for the audience and is a complete waste of their time. Does this type of presentation happen? Absolutely. But not very often. My experience is that the presenter does have something valuable to say to this audience. The audience has agreed to hear the presenter because they believe that there will be value in hearing what the presenter has to say. So what goes wrong?

The big problem with too many business presentations is that they are confusing, not boring. The audience doesn’t leave bored, they leave confused. Their time was wasted not by useless information, but by useful information that was presented so poorly that the time spent gave them no value. When executives call me to help their team improve their presentations, it is never because the presentations are boring. It is because the presentations are confusing and not getting the important message across.

Why are so many presentations confusing? I think there are two key reasons. First, the presenter has not thought enough about how to structure their message for this audience. I see presentations that seem to be a random brain dump on the topic. The presenter just dumps everything they know on to the slides in whatever order it tumbles out of their brain. No wonder it seems confusing to the audience. There is no flow or structure to the message and the audience can’t figure it out.

The second key reason so many presentations are confusing is that the presenter feels compelled to include everything they know about the topic. Every background piece of information, every data chart, graph or diagram ever created on the topic, and every bullet list they could think of goes on to slides. This overwhelms the audience and they don’t know what to make of all this information. No wonder they leave confused.

What can presenters do to reduce the chance that they will leave their audience confused? First, spend more time structuring your message. You need to sit down and actually plan what this audience needs to hear. It starts with deciding on the goal, continues with analyzing the audience and finally determining what points need to be included in the presentation. This is such an important topic that I did a one-hour webinar last year on Planning a Successful Presentation.

Second, be brutally honest about what really needs to go in to your presentation and what should be left out. This is a very difficult task because you are dealing with your emotions. You are emotionally invested in all the analysis and work you have done, and to leave it out can hurt. But you must be ruthless in evaluating what information should be included or excluded. For more tips, refer to this newsletter article on what data to include in a presentation.

Confusing presentations are a much bigger issue in business today than boring presentations. You can make your presentations more effective by structuring your message and including only the information the audience really needs to hear. By taking these actions, your audience will leave the presentation informed, not confused.

PowerPoint Tip: Effective dashboard slides

At the start of the year many organizations are looking back to see how they did last year. They will use many different measures, and they may decide that they want to start tracking certain statistics that will make a difference in improving performance going forward. A common approach is to create one or more dashboard slides that give executives a quick snapshot of how the organization is performing. In this article I want to share some tips on creating effective dashboard slides.

The term dashboard comes from vehicle dashboards that use indicators to show the status of such metrics as amount of fuel remaining, oil temperature, and battery power. An effective dashboard slide gives the viewer a single quick view of the performance of key areas in the organization. By glancing at the slide, the executive can quickly determine what areas need attention. Many dashboard slides contain stoplight indicators, with red indicating an area that needs immediate attention, yellow an area of concern, and green indicating acceptable performance.

The first step in creating an effective dashboard slide is to decide on the correct metrics to use. This is done in conjunction with the executives responsible for that area of operations. When selecting the metrics, make sure that you will be reporting numbers that have context. A single number on its own does not have context since you can’t tell if that number is acceptable or not. By comparing the current value to one in the past or a standard, the viewer will have context. Since many dashboards use the stoplight indicators, get agreement on what constitutes a red, yellow, or green indicator for each metric. If the executives will be making decisions based primarily on these colors, it is critical to get the definitions of each color correct up front.

Once the metrics are well defined, the next step is to decide how to show the metrics. If you decide to use the stoplight indicators, remember that some people may not be able to interpret the colors green or red due to red-green color blindness. Medical research suggests that this condition affects approximately one in ten Caucasian males. If you use the stoplight approach, include the first letter of the color (R, Y, or G) in a contrasting text color so everyone is clear on what the indicator means. Don’t restrict your indicators to just the stoplight colors. Use indicator arrows (up or down) to indicate trends. Use a checkmark or ‘X’ to indicate acceptable or unacceptable situations. A thumbs up or thumbs down symbol can also work. By using a variety of indicators, it makes it more visually interesting for the viewer.

Next, don’t get trapped into thinking that every metric must be reduced to a single indicator. Some metrics are more complex and may need more information to allow an executive to properly interpret the results. You may need to show a simple trend graph along with the goal that is trying to be achieved. In this way, the executive can see that performance is better than last year, is improving each month, but that the goal has not yet been achieved. This is a better interpretation than a simple red circle showing that the goal has not been achieved this year.

Also, work with the executives to determine the order of information that will help them make quick and effective decisions. Usually you will start with a broad overview, and then go deeper into each area so they can interpret the broad indicators properly. There are many ways to break down the overall results. You could dive deep by geographic area if that makes sense, or by product or service grouping if that will be more helpful. Some executives will want to break down the information by first looking at what metrics need attention, regardless of what area they come from. Ask the executives how they want to see it broken down and perhaps give some options with a non-linear approach to building and delivering the presentation.

Dashboard slides can be a valuable part of a regular presentation if you take the time to design them to be an effective visual that gives executives the information they need to make decisions. If you are creating new dashboard slides or reviewing the ones you currently use, keep the above tips in mind.

Apply John Bohannon’s proposal to your organization

Recently, John Bohannon presented a TED talk in Brussels that proposed replacing PowerPoint with dancers. The video has had over 330,000 views in less than two months and the idea has once again started people talking about how to improve presentations. In his presentation, John quotes a calculation from an article I published a few years ago to illustrate how much poor PowerPoint presentations are costing organizations. He compares the enormous amount wasted by poor presentations with the cost of funding arts programs in the US, and suggests that cutting arts programs would not help the national economy nearly as much as capturing the productivity that is wasted creating and sitting through poor presentations. I suggest you consider applying his thought to your own organization, no matter how small or large it is. If you could plan and create presentations more efficiently, and the presentations were so good that they allowed quick decisions and increased profits, your organization would reap clear benefits. If your organization took some of those gains and used them to support local causes in the arts or other areas, our overall economy would benefit. Where do you start improving your presentations? I suggest you start with better planning of what you want to communicate in the presentation. Most poor presentations fail to communicate the important message because the presentation has no clear purpose or structure. Recently I delivered a one hour webinar on how to plan a successful presentation. You can order the webinar recording here and get started this week. If you are skeptical that your organization could really be wasting that much due to poor presentations, you may want to use the formula in this article and be prepared to be surprised at the number you end up with. There is a lot of discussion going on about how to improve the global economy. All of us can do our own part by improving the presentations we create, which will increase productivity and improve results.

PowerPoint Tip: Spreadsheets don't belong on slides

Frequently people tell me that financial presentations include a huge spreadsheet that has been copied on to a slide. The text and numbers are way too small and inevitably the presenter says, “I know you can’t read this, so I’ll read it to you.” Spreadsheets don’t belong on slides. Today I want to talk about why not and what you can do instead.

Why don’t spreadsheets belong on slides? Because a spreadsheet is an analytical tool, not a communication tool. We use spreadsheets because they are the best tool for analyzing numbers, doing calculations and comparing numerical information. A spreadsheet does those jobs well. It quickly allows us to do hundreds of calculations that would take hours if done by hand. It is so easy to do calculations that we may end up doing more analysis that gives additional insight into the numbers. So for this purpose, a spreadsheet is a great tool.

But when it comes to communicating the results of that analysis to others, the spreadsheet is a terrible tool. It contains far too much detail that confuses instead of informs. The audience only wants the results or conclusions of the analysis, not every step you took. The spreadsheet you used to do the calculations contains both the detailed work and the results, usually with the vast majority of the cells taken up by the details of the analysis, not the resulting conclusions.

So what should you do instead of copying the entire spreadsheet on to a slide? You should create a summary table of results. You can create a new worksheet in Excel or put the summary table below the existing worksheet, whichever you prefer. This summary table only contains the numbers that the audience needs to see in order to understand the conclusions of your analysis. The final numbers, the bottom line, is all they need to see.

When you are deciding on those final numbers, make sure that you aren’t forcing the audience to do math with the numbers. If you are presenting a comparison, don’t put both numbers in the table and expect the audience to figure out the difference. Show a percentage difference in the table if that is the important message you are trying to communicate.

Once you have the table down to the bare minimum of numbers, you can copy the table on to a slide or create a table on a slide and enter the numbers by hand. Add a graphic indicator, like an up or down arrow to indicate the direction of the change or difference. Make the table as easy to understand as possible. Now you have a table that truly gives insights and doesn’t confuse the audience.

Next month I’ll be doing a webinar that is a little different from the ones I’ve done this year. I will be sharing the best techniques for using financial data in PowerPoint. There will be more of a focus on the “how-to” in this webinar and I expect I’ll be dropping out of slide show mode to show how things are done in editing mode. You can see all the details and register at http://www.ThinkOutsideTheSlide.com/effectivepresentationwebinars.htm#financial.

The best tool for presenting PowerPoint on the iPad

In the next few months I’ll be doing a webinar on using the iPad to develop and deliver presentations, but I want you to know about one of the tools that I’ll be discussing. It is SlideShark and it is the best tool I have seen for presenting PowerPoint slides on the iPad. I was one of the testers of the app, but I’ve held off sharing it with you until now because I wanted to make sure it was going to stand up in the real world - and it does. It is a free app, and here’s how it works. You upload you PowerPoint file to a free SlideShark account on the web (you can do this from the iPad if you want to), they convert the file into a format that works on the iPad, then you download it to the iPad ready to present from the SlideShark iPad app. It works well and supports more fonts, animations and features than any other solution I’ve seen. Right now you can get extra storage space on your account if you use this link that SlideShark gave me: http://www.slideshark.com/r?r=14787B. Sign up today and discover the best solution for presenting PowerPoint on the iPad.

PowerPoint Tip: The audience wants the conclusion

In my survey this fall of what annoys audiences about bad PowerPoint presentations, the clear message you sent was that too many presentations suffer from information overload. Whether it is text, numbers, or a combination of both, the excessive information causes confusion and lack of action by the audience. Today I want to address the issue of whether to present a little or a lot of your work in a presentation.

It is likely that you have done a lot of analysis and many calculations in order to come up with the conclusions that you want to present. The common view is that it is important for the audience to hear about all the assumptions, steps in the process, formulas, and calculations. You may also be tempted to include who did each step, how long it took, when it was done and even what office location helped out. While all of this information may be important to you, the truth is that the audience doesn’t need to hear it all.

What your audience needs to hear is the conclusion you reached. What does your work mean to them. How will your work help them make an important decision they are facing. They want to know the bottom line, not all the lines in between. The focus of your presentation should be on the conclusion of your work, not the details of your work. They trust that you did the work properly, that’s why they asked you to do this analysis.

But what about all the details? Shouldn’t we include some details? Only include those few details that, if changed, would significantly impact the conclusion. Talk about a key assumption you used that, if not correct, would change the whole outcome. Review the source of an input that some may want to question. When you review these areas of possible contention, also discuss how you verified the decisions you made so that further questions don’t need to arise. Other than those key details that impact the conclusion, leave out the rest of the details.

But what if someone asks about one of the steps or a formula we used, shouldn’t I include everything just in case? No. You should anticipate possible questions and prepare answers for them. If you want to include a slide that will help answer the question, create a hidden slide that you can jump to if the question gets asked. You can include a hyperlink on the slide that will likely trigger that question, or use the ability of PowerPoint to jump to any slide to access the hidden slide from any point in the presentation.

In your next presentation, step back and focus on the conclusions that will impact the audience instead of listing every detail of your work. Your presentation will be more effective, your discussion with the audience will be more insightful, and decisions will get made faster.