There are some things I hate about PowerPoint and I figured it is kind of my duty to point them out.
So, here we go. These are common PowerPoint mistakes—number one—people tend to put every word they are going to say on their PowerPoint slides. Although, these eliminates the need to memorize your talk ultimately this makes your slides crowded, wordy, and boring. You will loose your audience attention before you even reach the bottom of your first slide. Please do not do that anymore, please.
Number two—most common, many people do not run spell check, big mistake. Nothing makes you look stupid when spelling errs. If got a red line under it, recheck the spelling!
And then finally, I hate this. Avoid excessive bullet pointing only bullet key points. Too many bullet points and your key messages will not stand out. In fact, the term bullet point comes from the people firing guns at annoying presenters.
Hence, the bullet point and bad color schemes, not good. Clashing background and font colors can lead to distraction, confusion, headache, nausea, vomiting and loss of bladder control. I can not stay on that one too long.
Here is something I have noticed, the number of PowerPoint slides you have in your talk, the less useful your talk actually is. Unfortunately, my presentation is right there.
Folks, I also noticed this, people love to pack data into their presentation. They show more and more data thinking it is better, but it is not. The more data you have, the harder it is to read your slide and the effectiveness plummets. Now, you can improve the effectiveness by adding some shading and some 3D effects, then some second order and third order effects on it.
I know let us add some labels that would help a lot. And that is pretty much every marketing slide I have ever seen right there. Then some like VP marketing standing regarding a thrill-clear and Q4. What the hell are you talking about?
Now, I am into in animation. People become animators in PowerPoint. You can have things flying all over the place and that can be good. If you are a visual learner, that will improve the effectiveness of your performance, but if you are easily distracted more animations and people have no idea what you are talking about because “Wow that is cool! Wow!”
And there are regions here by the way. There is the simple but effective region. There is the actively confusing, the effectively boring, the active ineffective, the dull but static region, the useless, the ADD unknown region, the useful but amusing, the stupid but confusing, the dull triangle, the hyper triangle, the sleepy square, the dizzying pentagon and everything else and I just called pointless motion.
That slide right there took me an hour and a half to make, right there. PowerPoint can just suck the life out of it, it is amazing.
I have also come up with this. It is kind of a little Science I have invented called ‘font analysis.’ Basically, the font you choose says something about who you are as a person. There is a huge list of font and you choose one and that says something about you. So, be careful the font you choose.
For example, if you choose Courier New, it happens to be my favorite. You probably organize in structured. If you chose Metes, it means you are artistic and if you choose Times New Roman it means you are lazy, apathetic and unimaginative and you always use the default.
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