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You do not know how to make a slide deck damn Interesting

In the current digital world, where every tom, dick & harry has a powerpoint presentation to do, it is quiet unreasonable to think that client will happily sit around to assimilate the entire list of bulleted text on the slide decks. No one remembers plain texts and incomprehensive statistical charts. Is it not? Primarily, Presentation is a tool to communicate, it is an effort put by the presenter to enrich the time spent by the audience, to communicate something useful to the audience with the intent of achieving mutual benefit, instead what normally seems to happen in most of the presentation is to just put the audience through the torture of that dull dry and boring presentation. Death by PowerPoint! Is it not? You would have heard – Death by sickle. This is a new trend now – Death by PowerPoint! Personally, I have died several times.
So, How to make it interesting? First and foremost, anything will be interesting, only if it adds value to the people listening it, instead of adding value only to you. Having said that, we are going to look at the scenario that presentation is full of useful & value adding content but is not just interesting enough for presenting across.

See the article: Presentation is not made; it is delivered

To the Point

Always remember, audience has not come for a reading competition. They should not spend too much time reading the slides. Build the slides with less content and explain the rest. This is the best way to go about it. This also ensures audience do not keep looking at just the slides, they need to look at you also.

Build the suspense

The slides are to be arranged in the deck in such a way that the communication unfolds slide by slide. While the purpose or intent of the presentation should be clearly communicated to the audience, complete background of the deck should not be disclosed in the first slide. Audience should not get the complete picture from the slide, they will look forward to you to give them that.

Use Images and Animations

It is a known fact which does not require special mention that presenter who effectively uses images and animations in the presentation successfully retains the audience much higher than his counterpart with a complete text based presentation.
Images have become an integral part of today’s presentation. The way things were understood as far as presentations were concerned has changed dramatically in the last ten years. What was thought as just the content and facts that would constitute a presentation has come to a point of

realization now that presentation needs to be more engaging with highest quality of visual appeal, just like a movie. There is a saying that “One Image Can Speak Thousand Words”. Well, there is a new saying now “ One animation can speak million words”.  Effective use of images and animation in the presentation is a strict look out, for the presenters.

Storytelling

When people get bored in the midst of a presentation, a story can come to the rescue of the presenter. I have seen people who were seemingly uninterested in seminars getting naturally intrigued when they hear the sentence “ Let me tell you a story”.  A story that is relevant to the matter of the seminar and that is delivered in the right way can make a presentation a great success.

See the article : Effective Storytelling during Presentation

Conclusion

It is wise to remember that a presenter is a communicator first and foremost but that does not mean that he communicates with tons and tons of words on a white background slide deck. Rather than being engrossed in the idea of maximum communication, we need to clearly understand the requirements and needs of our audience and make the presentation interesting for making it successful.