I sat through the presentation with a sense of dismay and irritation. I counted 24 slides in all that were rich with ideas, bullet points, arrows, boxes and text of which at least half were too small to read. The presenter proceeded to read each item on each slide that was guaranteed to send me into a hypnotic trance. I wondered, “How many of these slides will anyone remember?” I quizzed myself. Thirty minutes and a half a gallon of Jolt Cola later, I concluded that I couldn’t remember a single one.
The truth is that so many of us have been doing PowerPoint slides so wrong for so long that we don’t know what is right anymore. So here are several tips in one large Training Tip about PowerPoint.
Let me see contrast. Use a dark screen with bright white lettering. Yellow might also work. This is sure to grab my attention much faster than a white screen or the distracting and gaudy backgrounds PowerPoint provides.
Use a font that is not busy. Times Roman may work in the novel you’re reading or as a memo, but it is often too busy on a screen with all its seraphs and other accents. Helvetica, Universe, Arial or Calibri work nicely.
Size is the first thing the human eye is drawn to on a slide. We have all misused size by making the heading larger than any other words on the slide. Why make the least amount of information on the slide the largest or more important?
Give me only one idea per slide. For some reason, Corporate and Correctional America believe they have to economize on the number of slides by putting everything they can on a minimal number of slides. This will destroy the will of my working memory to live two seconds after the slide comes into view.
Don’t put more than six items on a slide. It’s difficult remembering one of them, but six is about all I can handle e.g. I have asked my supervisor at least six times what his middle initial stands for and six times I have forgotten it. Now, think of someone showing me 24 slides with more than six items on each slide. How much of that do you think I will be able to recall?
Please don’t use bullet points. This tells me you have compiled a text that you could have emailed to me or given me as a hand-out. (More on this another time.)
Don’t use your PowerPoint as a hand-out. You know I will go ahead and read them right till the end, while you’re muddling along on a much earlier slide that I am not even paying attention to.
Don’t read to me what I can read myself at a far faster rate than you can. Educational psychologists call it “switching.” It happens when the presenter reads the list on the slide. I don’t hear and read at the same time. If I revert to one, I will abandon the other, and then I will remember even less.
Please don’t use the slide as your notes. PowerPoint has a whole section underneath the slide, strangely called “Notes.” Write your narrative there. In fact, why not start the slide in the Notes section before putting anything on the slide? (There’ll be more about that later.)
Whenever I teach officers to become new instructors. I discourage the use of PowerPoint. My standing advice is: change a sentence to a key phrase, change a key phrase to a single word, and change a single word to a picture.
After all, that is what PowerPoint was supposed to be--a visual--a picture.