Getting ahead of yourself

By
Two days back I attended a presentation in my office. A sales person was pitching for a sponsorship.

 She wanted to talk about 4 things on a slide. When the slide appeared, it contained 4 lines of text. She started talking about the first point. After 30 seconds, she reached point 2. But by then I was at point 4 :-)

 If you have to share things one after the other, do not display all the text at once. Your audience will always jump ahead of you. Instead of listening, they will be busy reading. It is unavoidable.

 Use animation. Click and line 1 appears. Discuss it. Then click and line 2 appears and so on.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Sponsorship Proposals: 10 ideas that will get you cash in this recession

By
You are organizing a big event. It can be an AIDS awareness event or a rock festival. You can be a student, a NGO or a society. To organize any event you require sponsorship money. And where will the money come from? It comes mostly from companies. So you start approaching them and keep making sponsorship proposal presentations. As you know, it’s never easy to get cash out from a company, that too in this recession.  What can you do to increase your hit rate? How can you make your pitch more attractive and lucrative to the person evaluating your presentation? How can you get him to shell out cash happily? You can manage to get cash easily if you spend some time thinking and preparing over the following points. I have drawn this list from my personal experience of evaluating more than a hundred such proposals as head of marketing in my job. I once got a proposal to sponsor a sports event where the presenter kept explaining me how many types of games are goin...
Read more

How many slides for a 30 minute presentation?

By
I have already answered this question in one of my previous post here ( How many slides should your presentation have? ). Then why am I writing on it again? In the last one month I have seen umpteen number of Google searches for this. There are scores of people out there who are facing this question and so I thought I will nail this issue once and for all. The Question: How many slides for a 30/20/10 or 5 minute presentation? The Answer: It does not matter. Have the right content, say one thing per slide and finish before the allotted time. Do not worry how many slides your presentation runs into. Even if you realize that there is no ideal number there are various reasons which will make you worry about the original question. This is something I want to discuss in today's post. The reasons why you are forced to think on the number of slides? Concern #1: Printing handouts. Lesser number of slides means lesser number of prints. Concern #2: Time management. If I have more slides I...
Read more

How to Make Business Review Presentations?

By
Image
Meet Mr.V K Chandrasekaran. A remarkable personality who rose from being a medical representative to the post of Vice President of one of India’s biggest pharmaceutical company Dr. Reddy’s. In this interview, we ask Mr. Chandrasekaran ‘How managers can make effective business review presentations?’ Review meetings are never easy. Managers put night outs and prepare extensively before presenting to superiors. Doing a good job in the field and being able to present it are two different skills. How should a manager prepare for these review meetings? What is his superior looking for? Come let’s hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Q1. What did you, as a superior, expect from these review presentations? Being a business review, my first expectation is with regards to data . I expect data integrity, data accuracy & data familiarity. By data familiarity I mean, you should be thorough with your data. You have crunched it before coming to me. Secondly, I expect the manager to draw s...
Read more

How to present one bullet point at a time?

By
Image
A few years back my superior at office was making a slide. He had 5 sentences (as bullet points) and he wanted to present them one at a time. He wanted to achieve what's explained in the following slide: This is not a normal animation which people use, but this can be of immense use in cases where you want to present points in a sequence. Presenting one bullet at a time ensuring full audience attention on the presented point. It is especially helpful when you have many bullet points and you don't want to show all of them on the slide. This is how you do it. Step-1 Click on the placeholder (denoted by arrow) -> Go to Animations tab -> Choose Custom Animation Step-2 Add Effect -> Entrance -> Fade This effect will ensure every bullet point will enter with a 'fade' effect. You can choose any other Entrance Effect you desire. Step-3 Under Custom Animation on the right, select Effect Options. Step-4 Under Effects Tab -> After Animation -> Choose Hide ...
Read more

How to animate line charts so they come one after the other?

By
Image
You are presenting the sales trend of Product A, B and C. You have a line chart. Instead of showing all the 3 lines at once, you want to click and show the line graph of A, then talk about it. Then you want to go to B and then C. How do we do this animation? Here it is in a few simple steps (in PowerPoint 2010). The process is almost similar in 2007. In case you have any problems, leave a comment or send me an email. Step-1 Create the line chart in PowerPoint or copy paste from Excel Step-2 Left click on the chart to select it. Under Animations Tab on top -> Go to Add Animation . Step-3 Go to More Entrance Effects -> Wipe. Wipe is a good effect. During final presentation, the lines will come from left to right smoothly. Step-4 Under Animation Pane on your right -> Click on Chart -> Choose Effect Options from drop down. In PowerPoint 2007 choose this from 'Custom Animation' panel on your left. Step-5 Under Effect Options window there are three tabs (Effect, T...
Read more

Change the font size of all slides within 10 seconds

By
Image
On October 10th I made a presentation to an audience of 300. Instead of large screens I had to present on 5 LCD TVs (placed all over the hall). Because the screen size was smaller I increased the font size to 60 so people can see the slides. I wrote about it in my Oct 15th post . In response to it a reader & friend Manvendra commented on Facebook: "Very true. Been in such an awkward situation last month. Now I carry more than one copy of the same presentation, ready for small as well as larger screen sizes." Since I had visited the venue in advance I could manage to prepare accordingly (keep bigger font). What would we do if we went to an unknown place and found out that the screen size is much smaller? Our slides made with font size 30 are just not legible. H ow do we increase the font size of all the slides then and there? Or should we, as Manvendra says, carry two sets of the same presentation? Carrying two presentations might not be the best answer in my view. The so...
Read more