Progress slides are occasional slides that indicate where in the process you are. It’s usually numbered or lettered A,B,C. It might also use milestones towards the goal.  It helps connect the dots for the audience and give them an overview of where you are headed.

PowerPoint gets a bad rap. It has its virtues. It’s a useful process to help the speaker assemble and organize comments, and to talk without notes. Check out Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter) by Garr Reynolds for great ways to prepare slides.

A good rule for making a presentation is to follow Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 guideline:

• Use no more than 10 PowerPoint slides,

• Speak no longer than 20 minutes,

• Set your type in 30-point font or larger.

The next zombie movie will be based on an auditorium of people who had to watch a PowerPoint presentation.

PowerPoint Presentations are always too long, with too many words on too many slides.

Keep reviewing the slides to eliminate words, bullets, pages, graphics and anything else that doesn’t clarify your point.  The goal is to have a few key words set in 30-point font or larger.  Try to keep it to 10 slides.

Edit ferociously.

I was a huge fan of Steve Jobs from a design, management and entrepreneurial standpoint. His presentations were spectacular studies in persuasion. In some presentations, Jobs had a total of seven words in 10 slides. He allowed visuals to do the work. 

This is easier said than done for most of us.  Steve Jobs had graphic designers help him create the perfect visuals. If you don’t have such a team, it might be better to just have simple type slides with powerful colors.

A researcher who studies PowerPoint reports that people were better able to recall the main message of slides when presented with a full-sentence headline written as an assertion rather than a word or phrase headline.

“Strong eye contact persuades the audience you are confident” is a more powerful message than “strong eye contact = confidence” for example.

When my friend was leaving the ad agency where we both worked, he threw a party and gave a slide show about his experiences at the firm.  With each slide he described vivid scenes in detail.  But the screen was blank. He never went to the trouble of actually making slides.

To this day, we all talk about how fabulous that slide show was. No one recalls that the slides were blank.  We each remember the colorful story he painted.

You can create memorable pictures using words, with or without slides.

The dilemma that many presenters bring upon themselves is that they want their presentation slides to double as their leave-behind material.

An effective PowerPoint uses sparse language and powerful pictures to dramatize what the speaker is discussing.

A good leave-behind has pages of detail.

Never the twain shall meet.

PowerPoint has its place in a Zoom business pitch, but not necessarily in the open and close. Start your pitch with all the faces on the screen, then, after you present your thesis, go to the PowerPoint. 

Whenever you use PowerPoint, the audiences’ eyes are staring at the slides.  But, often in the open and close, you want the audience to look at you because you want to connect with them.

In the opening, you want to explain why what you are about to say will benefit them.  In the close, you want them to feel confident with you and agree to whatever you proposed. 

Your audience is much more likely to hear what you have to say, understand what you just said and like you, if you make eye contact with them as you speak.  Even using Zoom, that means looking at the lens and not the people visuals or PowerPoint.

A lawyer told me that last year was his best year ever because he stopped using PowerPoint to make pitches and just started talking face to face with prospects. How retro.

When speaking face to face with people, they are more likely to hear and understand you.  They are more likely to trust you.  Not every occasion requires PowerPoint.

The title on a PowerPoint slide is the very top line. It’s often used as a description of that page, such as “Agenda”, “Our Team”  or  “Summary”.

Make that heading more active. Instead of “Agenda”, have it read “7 Steps to Reach the goal”, for example.

Put a lot more energy and time into your message and rehearsal than in creating PowerPoint slides. 

 You are the presentation. The slides are just a tool.

The more slides in your deck, the less your personality shines in the presentation.

Any hope for passion, impromptu comments, and insight goes out the window because your focus is clicking through slides, not talking to the audience.

Try to keep the slides to about one for each minute or two you speak.

The less time you spend reading your own slides, and the more time you connect with the audience, the stronger and more confident you appear. That means you need to rehearse more for a presentation that uses slides, than for one that doesn’t.

One small yet powerful tool you should have is a wireless slide changer for PowerPoint if you are presenting live.  If you are Zoom, ask the host to give you control of the slides. 

Now you can walk the stage, hold on to something to calm nerves, and, appear more confident because you’re not constantly breaking the flow of the presentation to ask for the “next slide, please”.