3: To slide, or not to slide…
This is honestly a good question… Far too often, people seem to think that a presentation is always accompanied by a slide deck, while this is far from the truth. As you might understand from reading this book so far, it is all about bringing your story to inform your audience or getting them to perform a certain action. A slide deck, or any other visual aids for that matter, should be seen as an optional tool to help your audience in better understanding your message. Don’t get me wrong, I encourage the use of visual aids if they help you bring your story more powerful, but don’t get set on making a slide deck, while there are so many, far more powerful tools that can be used!
Don't feel like reading? Check out the video at the bottom of this article!
Visual aids
Visual aids can have an insanely positive effect on you and your audience and therefor I strongly recommend the use of them, but it is important to know which tool to use and how to use them. Below I made a short list of items that are available, but please use your imagination and always keep in mind what goal your visual aid has.
- Slides
PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Keynote can help you show lots of information in many different ways. Text, images, charts, and graphs can be visualized to make information far more understandable and therefor it is widely used, but there is a pitfall which to many presenters fall into and therefor I made a separate section for this below. - Whiteboard / Flipchart
Nothing beats drawing on stage! It gives you freedom to touch any topic you want and create your visual aid on the spot! Nice side effect, if you can draw clearly, people will see you as the expert. - Models & Demonstrations
Talking about a new product? Make sure you have one in your hand while presenting, or better yet, give your audience the opportunity to touch it! Showing a brand-new product from images is one thing, but actually being able to touch the product as one of the first people in the world is a completely different level of engaging your audience! - Props
Physical objects that will help your audience to visualize what you are talking about. An example would be to have a mock-up of an authentic pizza oven on stage, just to set the mood!
These are just the top 4 that I can think of quickly, but if you use your imagination, I am sure you can think of other things as well. My advice here would be to always prioritize any other visual aid above that of a slide deck, if possible.
Death by PowerPoint (Or any other slide tools)
Nope, I will not teach you everything there is to know about making slides in PowerPoint or Keynote, that is not within the scope of this tutorial. If you need help with creating slides, simply google for “beginners tutorial PowerPoint” or put the same search in YouTube and you will find a million tutorials. Instead, I will focus here on what you should or should not do when creating slides. As said, the use of slide decks can be very powerful, but it does come with a lot of warnings which most often get ignored. I can strongly recommend watching the Ted talk from David JP Phillips called “Death By PowerPoint” as he made an amazing presentation, illustrating what you should and should not do. What you will find in this part of the book is basically a shorter version of his Ted talk and with a bit of a twist of my own.
Let’s start with some guidelines to use when you create slides, so we can finish with the cool stuff, the tips and tricks on how I create my slides to power up my presentations.
- Limit the use of objects on your slides
Never fill your slide up with a lot of text, images or whatever. Especially not mixed!
There is this theory about keeping a maximum of 6 objects per slide to keep your slides clean and tidy. The reason for this is pretty simple. Each time you change slide, your audience will first scan your slide before listening to you again. Having to many objects on your slides, will make you lose their focus. In case you are using sophisticated objects, like graphs, keep the number of objects even lower, as your audience will take time to understand what they are seeing. - Limit the amount of text to the bare minimum
Seriously, try not to use any text. Remember what I said about your audience scanning your slide before listening to you again? Guess what, they will also start reading before going back to listening. I always try to limit the amount of text to single words and in worst cases, have a maximum of 6 bullet points with a maximum of 6 words per bullet point. Anything more than that and I will either delete it or break it up over multiple slides. - Limit the use of effects
In general I would say, stick to a fade transition or what they call the “Morph” transition. Just make sure they are fast and clean. Otherwise, try to limit any effects on your slide to the bare minimum, preferably none at all. However cool these things look, they are distracting for both you and your audience. So, rule of thumb, only use effects when they are effective and make them fast (0,5s).
This to me is the top 3 of most important things to keep in mind, and this will probably limit you enough already if this is the first time you will create slides. There are a few more items to consider, like slide numbers, clashing colors and more of those things, but for this book, the top 3 is enough. Maybe one day I will write an article about this and post it on my website, or you can just go to YouTube and check out that Ted talk of David JP Phillips I mentioned earlier, “Death by PowerPoint”.
Creating your slides
Time to get some visuals added to your story! As said in the introduction of this chapter, I will not be teaching you how to use PowerPoint, Keynote, or any of the other tools you could use. That is out of scope of this book. What I will show you is how I build my slides.
Let me start again with mentioning something very important. Slides are there to power up your story, they are not there to tell the story! I really cannot say this often enough. Next to this, it is important to check with the host of the event if there is a template or if there are guidelines set out on how slide decks should be made. Often, companies have a template they would like you to use.
When you reach this point, you have your story ready, and you have practiced already a couple of times. Chances are that you already envisioned what your slides should look like. If not, no worries, we will get there as we walk through the steps.
In many cases, your slides will start with a title slide. A simple slide with the title of your presentation and your name on it. If it is for work, you might want to add your job title here as well, but this is optional. Some people also like to include the name and date of the event where they are presenting or some catchy sub-title or catch phrase on this same slide. Personally, I believe people know what date it is and I can only hope they know which event they are at... So, I like to keep it simple.. Title and name is all that is needed.
In general, the moment you go on stage this title slide is the one that will be shown on the screen. If you have a catchy opening, this is probably the moment you want to bring your opening, with your title slide on the background. Another option is when your opening involves a catchy one-liner or-so, to add one more slide after this one with just this one-liner in the middle of this bright white slide. Nothing else on the slides, just 1 or 2 lines of text.
The next slide that you often see is some sort of an agenda on what you are going to present, but be aware that this again is an optional slide. If you are talking about a single subject, it is ok to skip this one. In fact, if you can do without, skip this one! It will only give your audience a reason to start reading instead of listening to you or worse, fall asleep.
Now it is time for the fun stuff... Your actual presentation!
Take your story and read the first topic a few times and while reading, think about how to visualise what you are saying. If it is about numbers, you could include some nice graphs to show what you are talking about. (Excel is your friend here). Sometimes you might be able to show an image or an icon to make it more understandable and in some cases you will need some text or bullet points. (Remember, minimise your text!). Whatever you think of adding to your slides, the rule stays the same. Keep it simple and clean.
Since I am mostly doing technical drawings in the field of networking, I often talk about connections and changes within the network topology. This means that I often have the need to use multiple slides to show a change in the network. There are two ways of doing this, which depend on the size of what I am trying to show. In some cases the drawings I show are small and I can get away with putting them side by side and use two slides. The first one will only show the old drawing on the left and the second slide will show both the old and the new drawing to compare. This does mean that my story should be done in a way that I first speak about the old version and I click to the next slide as my talk progresses to the new situation. In case my drawings are larger, taking the whole screen, I first show the old drawing and than use a second slide with the new drawing. A simple "fade" effect will then show the difference between the two and again, as my talk progresses, I will click to the next slide to follow my story.
Looking at our pizzeria example, I really think the “less is more” principle is the most powerful in this case and I would probably skip a title slide all together or be save and create a title slide with only a black background, nothing else, followed by a single slide with a full frame picture of the little pizzeria in the mountains, smoking chimney and multiple generations of chefs in front of it. Just picture that image in your mind while reading through that first topic. Wouldn’t that just be the perfect combination?
The above sounds quite simpel and in all honesty, it should be. Creating clean and simple slides should not be to much work. The only reason for slides to take a lot of your time is because you either have to much stuff to put on a single slide and you don't know where to put it, which is not clean and simple, or because you are trying to do all these cool effects, which you shouldn't unless you really know what you are doing. Given you are reading this book, you probably don't know what you are doing, so stay away from using to many effects!
I think this is the moment in the book where I need to warn you for a very dangerous person. It is the person with the good advice. An advice I hear very often is about how many slides per minute of story you should have. The last one I heard is that each slide should be combined with a minimum of 1,5 minute of talking, otherwise it would be to chaotic! Please, do yourself and the rest of the world a favour and ignore this advice. Sure, they are right when they say it becomes to chaotic, but this is exactly why we are keeping our slides clean and simple with minimum effects. To take out the chaotic. When it comes to deciding how many slides you need, there is only one person who can judge this and that is you!
If you look at the above examples, there is a large difference between the network drawings and the pizzeria. One used multiple slides to show a single detail, while the other uses a single slide to show a full topic. In fact, one of my last presentations was a total of 8 minutes and had 12 slides in the deck.
What I am trying to say here is that you are in control on how many slides you need, but remember that the majority of people prefer multiple slides with fewer objects compared to fewer slides with many objects each.
I got a bit lengthy there with the examples and additional information, but it is important to understand that there is no set rule to the amount of slides you need. It all depends on how best to power-up your story to give your audience and yourself a better experience.
As I said in the beginning, the way I do this is simply by reading my story and visualise in my head on what could help to bring my story over. Sometimes it can be a single slide that represents a full topic, other times it is a single slide for a single detail. You are in charge here and only you can decide on this.
Additionally, once you created a slide for a part of your story, what I advise you to do is copy the part of the story in the presenter notes. This helps you again when you are practicing later on.
Where to go next
Now that you have your story and your visual aids sorted out, it is time to really start preparing for the show... Learn how to "Practice, Practice, Practice"
Check out the video about this article