What are the basic criteria that determine if your slide is working? How can you evaluate a slide or even a presentation to see if it will work and deliver your message cleanly and effectively?

I look for five basic things.

1. Is there a BIG IDEA? Is there one concept that ties the slide together and fits in with the BIG IDEA that the overall presentation is trying to communicate. There cannot be more than one concept per slide and the audience should be able to get it quickly and without too much distraction. Often this can be expressed in the headline for that slide.
2. Are there minimal words? There is an inverse relationship between audience engagement and the quantity of words on the screen. In general, the more text they have to read the less they will “get it” and the less attention they will focus on the presenter. Be a ruthless text editor — make each word earn its keep.
3. If there are images are they displayed big enough to have maximum impact? Do they clearly tell the story the slide is trying to communicate? Is there more than one image on a slide — if so are they all necessary? Try eliminating them one-by-one and see if your idea becomes clearer and stronger.
4. Are your numbers expressed simply? Have you made the effort to make the numbers mean something significant or are they just a data dump? Think of yourself as a tour guide explaining a foreign country to your audience. It is your job (and your slide’s job) to show them the important and interesting spots in the strange land they are in.
5. Have you rehearsed the slide in its context? Rehearsal is the ultimate test. Do it out loud, in front of a mirror, with a trusted friend or video camera. Practice reveals all the clumsiness and inconsistencies in your presentation and its visuals. It shows where there is too much or too little, it builds your confidence and uncovers possibilities for improvisation and humor.

Measure your slides and your entire presentation against these concepts and your next PowerPoint deck will soar.

Just the other night I was at my favorite Toastmasters meeting. I have a great TM club here in Atlanta and I get to see a lot of motivated folks move from anxious newbies who are usually a bundle of nerves to presenters who have gained a measure of practice and experience and, as a result, confidence.

It fuels my deeply held belief that anyone who has the motivation and determination can become an effective speaker. I have seen it happen over and over again. They put in the work, get the right feedback and become someone they never thought possible.

The speaker last night was Sarah, a professor at a prestigious Atlanta university. She had a wonderfully humorous story about how she was managing all the tasks that come with having a new baby in the house. It was accompanied with a modest PowerPoint deck.

Sarah was struggling with the same problem I have seen over and over with PowerPoint presentations: She was a very good presenter and had a great story. And she had a good slide deck. But when she tried to bring them together in a smooth flowing delivery to her audience, the slides and her delivery were choppy and uncoordinated. She had to keep looking back at the screen to see what was going on there. She felt she had to explain her slides instead of having the slides illuminate her words. I could tell she was uncomfortable.

Delivering an effective PowerPoint presentation means having your words and slides work together like the dialog and the setting in a movie. They should merge seamlessly. Each will compliment and expand the other without the audience feeling like it is watching and hearing two separate presentations.

I must admit it is not always easy to do. But here are two critical strategies that will help you accomplish this:

1. Write and practice your presentation before turning on PowerPoint. Your words and your thoughts should be the driver of your delivery. Then, once you are fairly comfortable with how the delivery is shaping up, add in the visuals that will help expand your spoken thoughts. All too often we will use PowerPoint to create our presentation. This just doesn’t work!
2. Rehearse times two. Once you start to merge your verbal delivery with your slides, practice like you mean it. Double that. Get comfortable with what visuals appear when and how your transitions work. Sometimes you want the slide to appear and then you will comment. Sometimes you want the opposite – you will begin your words and have the slide appear at a significant point. This all takes rehearsal and editing. Put away your script, work from an outline. Then put that aside. Move things around and make your delivery natural and sensible. The only way to do this is with practice.

There is great truth in the maxim: The amateur practices until they get it right. The professional practices until they cannot get it wrong. It’s work, but it is well worth it.

A useful but underutilized technique in PowerPoint is to set a transparent color in a photo. The original stock photo here was of two men set on a pure white background — perfect for this treatment.

First, I imported the photo into the slide then I selected Format > Color > Set transparent color. Using the cursor I selected the solid white background and PowerPoint 2013 set the entire background as transparent. Then I simply used Format > Bring Forward to move the photo above the other elements in the slide.

Easy-peasy!

Previous posts

• PowerPoint can be funny too
• Five ways to evaluate a slide

A common problem with updating and improving an existing (and probably tedious) slide deck is how to effectively revise a slide filled with data. We have all seen and possibly used a big Excel data file to generate a table filled with many numbers. The difficulty for the audience is how to make sense of a screen filled with numbers in which all are similar in size and therefore importance. Presenters often resort to the use of a laser pointer — a bad and irritating solution.

There is a simple and quick fix — draw a bright red box around the data you wish to focus attention on. If you are walking your viewers through a number of different parts of the table, create duplicate slides and move the box from one section to the next. The obvious advantage of this is that you are narrowing their attention to what you wish to discuss while showing the entire range of information.

The disadvantages are that you are still clogging up the screen with a lot of information — more than the audience can easily assimilate. If your data set is particularly large your text may be very small. Highlighting a few of the numbers will only draw attention to the fact that they can’t read them because of their size.

In the example above, I have also created semi-transparent white boxes to partially obscure the data I was not discussing. Download a factsheet to show you how.

Drawing a box like this may be a quick way to improve your data-heavy slides — give it a try.

Last week we discussed what steps you could take if you had to deliver a presentation from a really bad PowerPoint deck. A deck that you were not permitted (under penalty of death) to change. You can review those suggestions at the end of this post if you wish.

But what if you are allowed to make some changes but must keep the overall look? This usually means you have to stick fairly close to the corporate template. In this case there are a lot of options.

What to do if you can change a few things in a bad PowerPoint presentation:

• First, consider the ideas for dealing with an unchangeable slide deck at the bottom of this post.
• Add color. Often corporate decks are bland with little color.
  • Create a rich, colorful opening slide, maybe a strong full-slide photo.
  • Use colorful, appropriate slides for transitions between different sections of your talk.
  • Insert colorful slides as a setup or a background for your stories.
• Reduce sentences and paragraphs to keywords
• Add additional slides after complex charts, graphs and data sets that translate and distill the information.
• Add “quote” slides that help break up the progression of template slides — maybe with images of the person you are quoting.
• Use big bold images wherever possible. Fill as much of the slide real estate as you can for that big impact.
• Use people images where appropriate. Your audience will connect with photos of their same species.

From my last post:
If you can’t change anything and are required to deliver a pre-built but weak slide deck.

• Determine what content is critical to your audience and what isn’t.
• Introduce with a discussion of what to watch for and what to ignore.
• Likewise, debrief and discuss the important areas and minimize what wasn’t important.
• Whatever you do, don’t read slides word for word. Paraphrase. Try reading the first few words and let them read the rest. Just don’t read everything to them.
• Use a little humor. Make fun of your terrible PowerPoint deck. (careful here — don’t get fired!)
• Use your remote (or press the “B” key) to black out the screen to pause and interject your comments, have a discussion, switch to other media, etc.
• Use the blackout key to tell a story about your organization and its employees or clients.
• Use collateral pieces, white papers, handouts, etc.
• Be willing to try anything to break up the boredom, lift the energy and help the audience focus on the important material.

Don’t let bad PowerPoint hijack your message. Keep your audience’s best interests in mind and deliver a presentation that goes beyond those lousy slides.

*MacGyver is an American television series about a secret agent, Agnus MacGyver, who could get out of any difficult situation with a paperclip, some hair gel and a few discarded toenail clippings. As bad as some PowerPoint presentations can be, he would certainly be resourceful enough to figure a workaround.