Everyone Makes Mistakes...

Everyone at some point in their school years, whether it was college, high school, or even middle school, has had to do some form of presentation. Most people usuallly do the typical written report and read word per word out loud to the audience without even making their pulses increase. For the more creative folk, when it comes to presentations, they usually turn to visual reports. That's where Microsoft Power Point comes into play. The only problem with these forms of presentations is that they are beginning to turn into the old fashioned written report. Several presentors, including myself, do not realize the mistakes that they are making in their presentations. After reading some articles on the do's and dont's of Power Point Presentations, I suddenly realized that I have had mistakes in every single presentation that I have ever given! For starters, I think that the most common error that I found in myself was using the Power Point Presentation as a teleprompter. I don't mean to do it, but as a result of adding too much information to the slides, I end up writing out everything that I wanted to say instead of just saying it myself. Some tips that I found to be extremely helpful from the articles are listed below:

• Slides in a presentation are supposed to support the speaker and are not supposed to be filled with too much unnecessary information.
• Avoid using cheesy clip-art and instead aim for using photographs that are more professional.
• Make sure that you are using the proper charts for the type of information that you are trying to convey.
• Avoid too many bullet points per slide, and instead try to narrow words down to a minimum of 6 per slide.
• Stay away from distracting backgrounds and tacky, hard to read colors and fonts.

These tips are given to help make presentations the best that they could possibly be and to avoid an audience of sleeping people. Power Point is supposed to be an aid in making the best presentations ever, but it is simply up to the presenter to make sure that that is the ending result.