PowerPoint

PowerPoint slides.

Now you may think I’m reflexively anti PowerPoint.

I’m not.

But when you are speaking in front of a really large audience you have to you absolutely have to follow some very specific rules when it comes to PowerPoint.

For starters text bullet points.

Complete waste of time.

If you’re in a room with hundreds even thousands ten thousand people watching you.

They do not want to have to stare five hundred feet away to read text that is simply not how human beings like to read.

Chances are slim that it’s really going to be that visible and easy for people to read.

So my recommendation is if you’re going to use PowerPoint and it’s fine to do so use exclusively images pictures to dramatize your key point.

If you’ve got a whole lot of text data points complicated financial charts email it to people in advance giving the Web site at the end where they can download a PDA for a white page do not when you’re in front of a large crowd.

Put up complex graphs that have you know 8 9 different colors of color coded charts and lines people can’t differentiate that from a distance.

So don’t even try.

And people certainly don’t want to read a bunch of bullet points from one hundred two hundred three hundred feet away use images in your PowerPoint slides that you project you want to give people the traditional PowerPoint as an email handout later fine.

Be my guest but don’t project it it’s only going to make you look weak and ineffective.