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Anna Marshall is <<... looking for (1) guidelines for developing effective
PowerPoint presentations and/or (2) examples of effective PowerPoint
presentations.>>
Can't help you with the examples, as our presentations are confidential and
not all of them are shining examples anyway <g>, but the rules for
PowerPoint are no different than the traditional rules: keep it simple, both
as a whole, and on individual slides. All that really changes is that you
have more options at your disposal for doing truly useful things (e.g.,
switching between PP and other software to demonstrate a point in that
software, using simple transitions to add bullets one at a time,
incorporating animations or videos where motion is necessary to communicate
a concept). The flip side is that you also have an opportunity to abuse this
power by making the flash more important than the content. Recommending that
presenters avoid that abuse is one good thing to include in your guidelines;
perhaps give them a list of recommended effects (e.g., slide-on bullet
points) and ones to avoid (e.g., most other animations).
<<One of the trends I've been noticing over the last year is that presenters
who use PowerPoint tend to leave out many of the usual elements of effective
presenting like forecasting and summarizing.>>
Although these are important for some kinds of presentations, "tell me three
times"* isn't always appropriate; you may not have the time, it may not suit
your speaking style, and so on. Also, for simple presentations, it may be
unnecessary. But these are exceptions; if you expect people to remember what
you've said, saying it only once is generally less effective than saying it
at least twice.
* "Here's what we're going to discuss. Now we're discussing it. Here's what
we just discussed."
<<I believe the oversights are a side effect of using PowerPoint for both
giving the presentation and creating handouts.>>
Possibly, but I suspect they're also due to ignorance of effective
presentation techniques. Not everyone is born a speaker, and most of those
who aren't born speakers have had no formal training in giving
presentations. Even those who have had some training (me, for instance), may
be no more than competent speakers because we don't do it often enough to
get really good at it.
<<presenters who also provide handouts of their presentations seem even more
driven to get ALL the information they want to communicate on their
slides.>>
That's the result of ignorance of the tools at their disposal; PP is easy
enough for a beginner to use that most people never take the tutorial or
read the manuals, and thus miss key features. For example, PP has a helpful
"speaker's notes" feature that lets you enter nearly a page of information
into the presentation in such a manner that it only appears when you print
(or display) the speaker's notes, not when you actually present the speech.
The editor is woefully primitive (no named styles or control of layout), but
it still works well enough to be usable. I like to aim for no more than 50
words on a slide, with a maximum of five bullets added one at a time, since
people are there to hear me talk, not to read the screen and wish I'd shut
up long enough for them to do so.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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