Presentation Skills PPT (Powerpoint)

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 4:58 pm

In order to hone your presentation skills PPT is an effective tool to use. There are 3 essential tips that must be known before presenting, and with these in mind you can survive any public speaking situation. Using these 3 tips will make your presentation soar and that essential ingredient of increased confidence comes along with it making you enter into future presentations a little less daunted than before.

It is interesting because these 3 tips are common sense but it’s surprising how often they are overlooked. So here they are revealed:

Firstly use visual aids whenever you can throughout the presentation to demonstrate your points. This is essential and much more powerful and effective than bland bullet points. Research has shown that if visual prompts are used, then the presenter is more than twice as likely to achieve their aim. So why are visual aids so important and are they really so much more effective?

Well, it’s all about how we absorb information during a presentation. A professor called Albert Mehrabian heavily researched exactly how we take in information when watching a presentation. He found that only 7% of the of the information we take in is text and 55% is visual, leaving 38% of the information absorbed as the words we say. So in practice, this is very important and useful information when planning our presentation.

1) Use visuals wherever possible such as graphs and tables, props and pictures.
2) Remember that when conducting a speech only 38% of the communication method is being used.
3) Forget the boring bullet points!

It is important to make your presentation memorable. Universities have studied the effects of message retention and found that using visual aids/slides has a dramatic effect on this. After 3 days they found that students remembered 50% of content where visual aids were used compared to 10% where bullet points were used. Now, that’s a big difference and one to truly take on board when planning your presentation. If you use visual aids then you double your chance of achieving your presentation goal. So if you are trying to impress and stand out from the crowd at a job interview or sales presentation for example, then this point could make a serious positive effect on your finances. A picture really is worth a thousand words.

For adding key visuals and honing your presentation skills Powerpoint is a great tool to use. Business Powerpoint presentations are extremely powerful in getting your message across and there are special courses available to hone your Powerpoint presentation skills. Using a public speaking PPT presentation is also powerful to keep the attention of a large audience.

On to the second essential point which is to rehearse. Yes, this sounds obvious but it is surprising the amount of people who spend time perfecting their business Powerpoint presentation but forget about the actual delivery. Rehearsing can make the difference between a good and mediocre presentation. Rehearse at least 3 times, 4 is better and make sure it is in front of a challenging audience, ie. Your spouse, parents, in-laws and children! They will be your greatest critics.

And lastly, the rule of three. In power point presentations, less is more so make sure you plan which message you want your audience to take away with them. Incredibly, people only usually remember 3 things from a speech or presentation so use lists of 3 whenever possible. A presentation has a beginning, middle and end, so start off with a good attention grabbing opening and finish with a clear round off, re-establishing what you want people to remember – 3 key things.

Aside from being an abbreviation for Powerpoint, .ppt is also the name for the files and the application’s full name is Microsoft Office Powerpoint. It runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X.

So, in order make the best impact to your audience and to hone your presentation skills PPT is a effective way to do this.

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