This is a guest post by  Walkerstone.com How A Simple Error Can Ruin your Presentation If you are getting cold feet due to an upcoming presentation, you would be glad to learn that it is pretty common. Especially if it is your first presentation and you want to impress your audience, it can make you really anxious. Well, it is a common feeling, and it is better that you relax and let your anxiety pass. There are many ways you can make your presentation perfect. One of the common mistakes that people find in a presentation is a mistake in spellings. A simple change in an alphabet can change the entire meaning of the sentence. Sometimes it can make you look ignorant. Hence proper revision and editing are extremely important after you finish writing something. It is often observed that words that sound similar are misspelled interchangeably. For instance, the words steak and stake sound similar but the two words have completely different meanings. Another common example is the d...

I was an Area Sales Manager (ASM) in a leading consumer goods company where I sold cooking oil and hair oil. Every quarter all ASMs had to make a presentation to the head of sales. We were supposed to talk about what we had achieved in the last quarter and our objectives for the next. These presentations were long but very important. The night before the presentation every ASM used to stay back in the regional office. Our boss (Regional Sales Manager) was kind enough to provide free pizzas and we used to work till midnight tweaking our decks. Our review would start 9 in the morning. We somehow survived and scraped through those meetings. Those were difficult times. Today when I conduct presentation skill workshops across the country I always ask the participants, “How many of you rehearse before delivering an important presentation?” Guess how many hands go up? Under 10%. Less than 10 presenters out of 100 actually rehearse their presentations! No wonder they have stage frig...

David Ogilvy , the father of advertising, in his book ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’ writes, “When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.” Design should not draw too much attention towards itself. And design is not to impress. Our slides help us communicate the message quickly and powerfully.  Garr Reynolds , the author of Presentation Zen says, “Projected slides should be as visual as possible and support your points quickly, efficiently and powerfully.”  Let us look some slides sourced from the internet (public sources). Don’t you think there is too much going on in this slide. There is too much ‘design’ that is actually hurting the audience experience. I have improved this slide. Below is the new improved slide. Suddenly it feels clean and nice. What did we remove? We removed all design elements which add no value. The blue oval for each bullet point, the orange a...