Have you ever attended a really bad presentation workshop? Loaded question? When I teach a PowerPoint presentation workshop and ask that, everyone has several stories. But then they all ask me to teach them to do the whizzy bits.
A good presentation workshop, to me, is one where the presenter uses whatever aids best enhance their speech. Presentation workshops can be considered bad for various reasons, but I am going to concentrate on PowerPoint. This can apply equally to any presentation software package. I think no matter how interesting the topic or speaker is, if the slide show takes over, the message gets lost.
I once was standing outside an office meeting where a very long presentation workshop was taking place. They turned the lights off, closed the blinds and started the slides. What color was the background? Dark blue. What about the text - surely it would be something bright… no, it’s dark red. No contrast, almost impossible to read, sitting in the dark staring at dark print on a dark screen. Everyone who walked out of the room was ready to go to sleep, and I’m sure they could not remember most of the presentation workshop.
Another presentation workshop I observed had so much animation the audience were mesmerized. Every object came in from different directions, diagrams moved all over the screen. Wow. I can't even remember the topic of that one, but it sure was whizzy.
Getting the message across is what is supposed to be accomplished in a presentation workshop. But sometimes people go overboard. A young woman had just started a business and was speaking to a group of small business owners about what her business did. The thing was, her slides were all single sentences, and she simply read every slide aloud. Occasionally she would repeat a point, but that was just by re-reading the whole sentence. The slides should hint about what you are going to talk about, or support it, but it should not give the presentation workshop for you. Reading the slides does not make the speaker seem knowledgeable about their field. I am sure she did know what she was talking about, but not being confident about public speaking make her use PowerPoint as a crutch, and the presentation workshop was flat and uninteresting.
I personally do not care if a speaker has to read a script if they are nervous or new to presenting, and I am sure most of the audience feels the same - they are just glad it’s not them up there!
Just remember that your presentation workshop is about the quality of the information, not how pretty or whizzy the PowerPoint presentation workshop is.
