One of the most common mistakes people make when preparing presentations is diving right into their slideware. They don’t plan what they are going to say before they start creating slides. Too often, the result is a poorly organized talk with too many slides that bores the audience. Most people start preparing presentations by creating slides because they think they don’t have time to plan. After all, they have slides to prepare! There is a little trick in PowerPoint, however, that enables you to create an entire slide deck directly from an outline created in Word. Which means you don’t have to choose between creating slides and planning your talk. There are several pitfalls to preparing a presentation by starting with your slides. First, slideware is better suited to preparing visual aids than it is to crafting a message. On paper or in a word processor, you can see and work with your whole message as you compose it, as opposed to slideware where you can only compose one slide at a time. And as anyone with experience knows, you spend so much time futzing with your slides that you have no time to prepare, or rehearse, what you are going to say. Planning your presentation before you create your slides, on the other hand, makes for more effective presentations in several ways. When you start your preparation by composing your message, you separate what you are going to say from what you put on your slides. That way, you save time by creating only as many slides as you need to support your message. And each slide will contain just enough information to hold people’s attention, and remind you of each point you will discuss. That way, you are the presentation, as the saying goes, not your slides. CONTINUE READING AT MAIN BLOG Categories: Education | Continuing Education | Professional Services | Business Organizations | Publishing | Business to Business | Communications&Media; Tags: portland, business, writing, presentations, technical, messaging, communications, editing, consulting, strategy,,
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