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The Best And Worst PowerPoint Presentation Examples

Engaging presentations are the lifeblood of effective communication in today’s information-driven world. Whether you’re in a boardroom pitching a new idea, standing in front of a classroom of curious learners, or delivering a keyote speech to an interested investor, the ability to create and deliver engaging presentations is a skill that can truly make or break your message. 

Various elements contribute to making a presentation good or bad, from compelling visuals to persuasive delivery; these factors collectively influence how your ideas are received and remembered. So, in this article, we will look at some of the good and bad presentation examples to help you transform your presentations and make them more engaging.

Main Differences Between Good V/S Bad PowerPoint Slides

Knowing the difference between the best and worst PowerPoint presentations is vital for creating engaging presentations.

What Makes A Good PowerPoint Presentation?

Have you ever wondered how you differentiate between a good design v/s bad design PPT? In this section, we’ll look at some examples of making PowerPoint presentations that inspire and engage the audience. Look at what’s behind the slides that stick in mind long after the projector is turned off:

• Less text, more impact
• Choose a color scheme that works
• Proper balance of animation and texts
• Logical flow of information
• Context-relevant graphics or illustrations

READ MORE: The Golden Rules for Impactful Presentations 

1. Less Text, More Impact

Imagine your presentation as a visual storybook. Less text on each slide means your audience can focus on your story, not squint at paragraphs. Use striking images or a single powerful phrase to grab attention. It makes your presentation look impressive and helps people remember the article’s key points. Keeping about 30 words per slide or 6-8 lines in your presentation will help maintain a proper flow of words and pictures, resulting in a fluid presentation.

2. Choose A Color Scheme That Works

You don’t need to be an artist to pick the right colors. A good presentation uses colors that work together nicely. Choosing harmonizing colors can guide the audience to focus on important information. Choose colors that look good together and don’t hurt the eyes. Microsoft Office’s color schemes can save the day if you’re short on ideas. Avoid using light colors on a dark background and vice versa.

3. Proper Balance Of Animation And Texts

Animations and transitions can be like party crashers in your presentation if not used wisely. They might steal the show from your message. A top-notch presentation keeps both animations and texts in check, ensuring they don’t overpower each other. However, don’t ditch them altogether! Use transitions and animations only to highlight key points. For example, make bullet points appear individually instead of all at once. It keeps your audience focused.

READ MORE: How to add animation in PowerPoint?  

4. Logical Flow Of Information

Think of your presentation as a road trip. Imagine if your GPS gave you all mixed up directions. Chaos, right? Similarly, your slides need a logical order and a roadmap. Maintaining the logical flow of your slides helps the audience follow the information easily. A logical flow makes your message clear and easy to remember. It’s like telling a great story with a beginning, middle, and end.

EXPLORE: Flowchart PowerPoint Templates

5. Context-Relevant Graphics Or Illustrations

A picture speaks volumes. Our brains love visuals. Using context-related graphs, photos, and illustrations that complement your slides can amp up important pointers and keep your audience engaged during the presentation. However, while presenting, make sure to explain why a graphic or a picture is there. Explaining the graphics verbally makes your message crystal clear and memorable.

EXPLORE: Want to create stunning presentations? Check out our presentation services !

A PowerPoint presentation shall excel in these aspects of making it engaging, informative, and memorable. These good PowerPoint presentation examples could help you make a better PPT in one or more areas, not leaving the audience disengaged or confused. 

While it’s important to look at good presentation examples, it’s equally important to avoid mistakes that can turn your presentation dull.

What Makes A Bad PowerPoint Presentation?

Ever been in a room with a presentation that made you want to escape through the nearest exit? We’ve all been there! In this section, we’ll highlight some common mistakes that turn a good presentation into a dull one. With many examples of good and bad PowerPoint slides on the internet, we have listed some bad examples that show the ‘DON’Ts’ and ‘AVOID AT ALL COSTS’ of PowerPoint mistakes:

• Image behind the text
• Using only bullet points and no paragraphs
• Having no symmetry in texts and pointers
• Being too minimal
• Keeping text too small

1. Image Behind The Text

Anyone who considered utilizing an image as a background most likely missed the memo. Text and images simply do not work together. One of the worst PowerPoint presentation examples is text overlaid on an image. Keeping the image in the background complicates understanding the text, and the main image should be clarified. Finding a text color that shines out in the background is nearly tough because all of those colors merely draw your attention away from the words. To avoid this calamity, avoid utilizing photos as slide backgrounds when you have text to highlight.

EXPLORE: Best PowerPoint Backgrounds Collection

2. Using Only Bullet Points And No Paragraphs

To make a presentation audience-friendly, reducing paragraphs to bullet points is a wise choice. However, it is critical to emphasize that this is more than simply putting only bullet points and leaving out all paragraphs. Using 5-8 bullet points is ideal for a slide. If the text size shrinks to 12 or 10 points, you’ve written a lot. Lengthy bullet points tend to bore the audience; some might even think of them as paragraphs.

3. Having No Symmetry In Texts And Pointers

A lack of balance or alignment between textual material and supporting visual elements, such as arrows, bullets, etc., can make your presentations appear unpleasant. When text and pointers are strewn about, it’s difficult for the audience to follow a logical flow of information; a common bad PowerPoint slide example to avoid at any cost. Your audience will be obsessed with deciphering the relationship between the text and graphics if your presentation needs more harmony.

4. Being Too Minimal

Being too minimalistic is as bad as overdoing it. Not having the required text on slides or keeping them blank makes them dull and non-engaging. You don’t need a color explosion or too many texts, but bringing some life to your slides is always a good idea. Using pre-made PowerPoint templates is a good idea to keep your content balanced; however, it is best not to leave blank spaces. A blank slide with no colors or text might give the impression of minimal effort. Strive for a balanced approach to keep your audience engaged and awake.

EXPLORE: 40,000+ PowerPoint Templates and Google Slides Themes

5. Keeping Text Too Small

Another thing to avoid is making your font size too tiny, almost like the size of a peanut. The size of the font is extremely important in any presentation. Think of it like trying to enjoy a beautiful scenic view through a tiny keyhole – not very enjoyable, is it? It’s the same with your PowerPoint. Your slides can be perfect with great colors, and graphics, but it’s a bummer if your audience can’t read them. A simple trick is to stand at the back of the room where you’ll present. If you can read the font comfortably, then you should be fine!

READ MORE: Best Presentation Fonts

A bad PowerPoint presentation will dismiss all your efforts and disengage your audience. To look more, avoid these bad PowerPoint presentation examples at any cost while making your next presentation.

We have carefully curated a visual appearance of how your PowerPoint presentations change by following the aforementioned points.

A good PowerPoint presentation is a balance – not too much, not too little. It’s about enhancing your message, not taking the spotlight away from you. However, striking that balance requires a lot of practice and trial and error.

You can always opt for presentation design services , like SlideUpLift. It gives you the advantage and access to presentation specialists. We design visually appealing presentations, with modern design elements, graphics, and illustrations; maintaining a perfect balance of every element. 

Whether you want to customize your slides completely or just tailor the color or font, we ensure that your brand or personal style always reflects in your presentation. 

Explore from our collection of 40,000+ PowerPoint templates and Google Slides themes. Utilize our presentation design services to create stunning PPTs. Give us a try with our custom-slides service , or schedule a call with us to know more!

What is the biggest difference between the best and worst PowerPoint presentations?

A good PowerPoint presentation effectively communicates its message, engages the audience, and uses visuals, layout, and content in a clear and compelling manner. In contrast, a bad PPT has cluttered slides, too much text, poor design choices, or distracting elements that hinder understanding.

How can I avoid making a bad PowerPoint presentation?

To avoid creating a bad PowerPoint presentation, focus on simplicity, use visuals wisely, keep text concise, maintain a logical flow, use appropriate fonts and colors, and avoid excessive animations or irrelevant content. Seek feedback from peers or experts to improve your overall presentation.

What role do visuals play in differentiating a good design v/s bad design PPT?

In a good presentation, visuals support and clarify key points. While in a bad one, they may be excessive, distracting, or irrelevant, overshadowing the main message.

How important is the audience's experience in determining the quality of a PowerPoint presentation?

The audience’s experience is essential in evaluating a presentation. A good PPT keeps the audience engaged and attentive compared to a bad PPT, which leads to disengagement and confusion.

How can I fix my bad PowerPoint presentation?

You can fix your PowerPoint presentation by opting SlideUpLift as your presentation buddy. With over 40,000+ PowerPoint Templates and Google Slides Themes to explore, you can choose what’s best for you. In case you have very specific presentation needs, you can opt for their presentation design services or custom slide service to create stunning PPTs. Schedule a call to know more.

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7 PowerPoint mistakes that are killing your presentation

By Paul Moss

Join 100k+ subscribers on our YouTube channel and enjoy highly engaging lessons packed full of best practices.

A few careless powerpoint mistakes can dramatically impact both the effectiveness and professionalism of your presentation..

Over the course of my career in consulting and strategy (and as a PowerPoint instructor for those industries), I’ve seen a lot of slides – great slides, terrible slides, and everything in-between. And what I’ve come to learn is that there’s a handful of common PowerPoint mistakes that many people don’t realize are hurting their presentation.

In this post I’m going to talk about the mistakes I see most often. I’ll give some basic examples of each mistake, explain why it hurts the presentation, and show you what you should be doing instead.

For the list, I’ll mostly be focusing on corporate style presentations, like what you’re likely to see day to day in the business world, but many of the lessons can be applied to other types of presentations as well.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to build your own high-quality PowerPoint slides, make sure you check our our advanced courses.

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Table of Contents

1. Complicated Visualizations

Your job as a slide creator is to make it as easy as possible for the audience to understand your message, and unnecessarily complicated visuals don’t help you do that. Instead, they just confuse the audience. 

In this slide from Muckerlab there is a simple sales funnel on the left, with various sales channels on the right. With enough time I can figure out the message, but it’s a bit challenging for my brain to map sales channels to the various stages of the funnel.

“Ecommerce & Digital Marketing” Muckerlab, 2014

You might think that your visual is easy enough to understand, but remember that the audience hasn’t had the same amount of time to look at the slide as you have, so it’s much more difficult for them to grasp the key takeaway quickly. 

In the slide below from Edelman there are four different charts, but each one is communicating the same type of information. By mixing up the chart style like this it makes the slide overly complicated. Instead of showing four simple column charts, they’ve forced the audience to understand and interpret each type independently. This just makes it harder for the audience to grasp the key takeaways of the slide.

“Global Deck” Edelman Trust Barometer, 2012

Instead, ask yourself, what’s the key takeaway of the slide, and how does my chart or graphic help support that key takeaway. Avoid trying to make yourself look smart, and instead figure out the simplest way to communicate the idea you’re trying to communicate. 

This slide from Credit Suisse is a great example of keeping the chart simple and clear. It’s just a normal-looking stacked column chart with easy to read data labels, a clear background, and a simple takeaway. The result is an effective and professional looking slide that’s easy for the audience to understand. 

“Analyst and Investor Call” Credit Suisse, 2022

2. Simple Titles

The point of a title on a slide is to get a quick summary of the slide’s main takeaway, so the audience can better read and understand the details.

In this slide from BCG for example, the title says “Rising housing costs may be driving creatives out of the city”. So naturally, the audience is going to skim through the content looking for evidence of rising housing costs and creatives leaving the city, which makes for more effective delivery. (

“Melbourne as a Global Cultural Destination” BCG. For more BCG content be sure to check out our full BCG slide breakdown

But unfortunately, many titles aren’t this descriptive. Instead what I see are titles that tell me the topic of the slide and nothing else . I get an idea of what the slide is about, but I’m forced to come up with my own takeaway.

“Fixed Income Investor presentation” Credit Suisse, 2022

You see this especially on slides with summaries of data, like this slide from Salesforce about its finances. But even on these slides it’s usually a good idea to put a takeaway in the title.

“Finance Update Q4 FY21” Salesforce

In this example from Orsted , they’ve shown some annual financial data, but they’ve also summarized what they want the audience to take away from the slide – that they are in line with expectations. 

“Investor presentation Q4 and full-year 2020” Orsted, 2021

By including a full sentence for your title, ideally one that summarizes the main takeaway of the slide, you make it much easier for the audience to understand what it is you’re trying to tell them.  

3. Default PowerPoint Designs

The third mistake I see more often than I’d like is using default PowerPoint designs. The worst case of this is using old slide themes, like in this example. Anyone who has spent any amount of time in PowerPoint recognizes this design, and aesthetics aside, it just looks like the slide was thrown together last minute. 

“First 30 Days” Markstar, 2017

You certainly don’t want to overdesign your slide, but at the very least try to avoid the out-of-the-box designs PowerPoint provides for you. Many of these designs haven’t changed in years, and usually they’re meant for a different kind of presentation (like a school project). 

And the same goes for PowerPoint shapes, graphics, and even colors. They all come across as unprofessional and overused, so it’s in your best interest to avoid them altogether.  

But where I think this is most easy to mess up is with tables. A table like this for example looks fine enough, but with just a few tweaks it can be made to look significantly better.

In this example, all I did was bold the titles, turn the negative values red, left align the first column and right align the others, make the top line extra thick, then add other lines to separate the regions. The result is a much better looking, and much easier to read table. 

When it comes to design, even just a little bit of extra effort can help you avoid cliche, unprofessional looking slides.

4. Unrelated Content

In corporate style presentations, it’s completely okay to have lots of content, so long as each piece of content has a purpose. What I see way too often is stuff that’s just there to fill space, and doesn’t have an actual purpose. 

In this Starboard Value slide , there are a lot of unnecessary distractions. For example, the box at the bottom is really just a repeat of what’s in the subtitle. Likewise, there’s a lot of text in the bullet points that could be trimmed down or eliminated without changing the message of the slide. It would help the audience focus more on the key takeaways, without getting distracted by all the fluff. 

“Transforming Darden Restaurants” Starboard Value, 2014 See our full breakdown of this slide here .

But what bothers me the most is the picture at the bottom, which really isn’t adding to the slide in any meaningful way. Yes, it’s on topic – the slide is about breadsticks after all – but it’s not giving me any useful information. We all know what breadsticks look like, and this doesn’t help me understand the key takeaway any better. 

Pictures are typically the most common culprit when it comes to unrelated content. It can be really tempting to throw a picture on a slide to fill up the extra space – especially if that picture looks professional and seems to loosely match the topic of the slide. 

Even McKinsey is guilty of this sometimes, as in this example . The picture looks great, but it doesn’t help the audience understand the main message of the slide about digital manufacturing being a high priority for a majority of companies. Instead, it just distracts the audience. 

“Moving Laggards to Early Adopters” McKinsey & Co., 2018 Learn more about how McKinsey designs data heavy PowerPoint slides.

In this example from a different presentation, they kept the slide fairly simple, with only information that supports the main takeaway of the slide, and nothing else. The result is a clear and easy to understand slide with a well-supported takeaway. 

“Capturing the full electricity potential of the U.K.” McKinsey & Co., 2012

So when you’re adding content to your slide, whether that’s a picture, chart, or anything else, make sure it contributes to the message in some way. And if it doesn’t then just leave that part blank and adjust the other parts of the slide accordingly. 

5. Distracting Backgrounds

This is related to the last mistake about unrelated content but is important in and of itself. A bad background can completely ruin a presentation. At best it’s distracting, but at worst it looks horribly unprofessional and makes the content hard to look at. 

Once again this is where PowerPoint is to blame. Some of the default backgrounds make it almost impossible to read the text, especially if that text doesn’t provide any contrast.

But even simple backgrounds can be distracting, as in our previous example from Starboard Value . Shading the background makes it difficult for my eyes to know where to focus my attention. Not to mention it makes some of the text slightly harder to read. 

Even subtle text or images in the background can be distracting, as in this BCG example . 

“Projecting US Mail volumes to 2020” BCG, 2010

The general rule of thumb with backgrounds is if you notice it, you should change it. The idea is you want to reduce the number of distractions on your slide so that the audience can focus on the insights. In that regard, you can almost never go wrong with a plain white background. This keeps the audience focused on your content, and ultimately on your message. 

This slide from Accenture is a great example of a non-distracting background that keeps the emphasis on the content. Nothing is diverting my attention and I can focus on what they’re trying to tell me. 

“Fintech New York: Partnerships, Platforms and Open Innovation” Accenture, 2015

But of course, the background doesn’t always have to be white. Sometimes darker backgrounds work better for longer, live presentations, especially when those presentations are given on a large screen. 

In another example from later in the presentation, Accenture uses a darker blue background that’s simple, clear, and professional. And most importantly, it doesn’t take my attention away from the content on the slide. 

6. Not Guiding the Audience

Most modern business presentations are full of text and data, which can make it difficult for the audience to process the information on a slide and see the key insights . In a live presentation, it is even more difficult – the audience has to simultaneously listen to the speaker, read through the content on the slide, and think critically about the information. 

The easy way to manage this challenge is to guide the audience through your slide with visual cues – things like text, callouts, and boxes. Unfortunately, it is something that many people just don’t think to do.  What this leads to is dense, difficult to read slides , as in these two examples:

“Bridging the Gap Between CIO and CMO” Isobar, 2014

“Transforming Darden Restaurants” Starboard Value, 2014

And the same thing can happen with charts . By just putting up a chart with no real commentary or guidance, you make it hard for the audience to understand what it is you’re trying to tell them. 

“Fifth Assessment Report- Synthesis Report” IPCC, 2014

In many ways, this is the counterpoint to the last mistake. Whereas you don’t want unimportant pieces like your background to be distracting, you do want the important parts of your slide to be distracting, because it helps the audience quickly grasp the key takeaways. 

Returning to our Accenture example, notice how they’ve used bolded text to help call attention to what’s important. Likewise, they’ve also used a line to put emphasis on the title of the slide. 

Check out our full breakdown of this slide here .

This BCG slide has quite a bit of information on it, but they’ve made it easy to work through by drawing the most attention to the title with green font and large text, then the next amount of attention to the subtitles with bold black text and green lines underneath, and then the least amount of attention to the bullet points. It helps the process the information on the slide in the way they want them to – starting with the highest level idea, and working their way through the details. 

“Evaluating NYC media sector development and setting the stage for future growth” BCG, 2012

This chart from McKinsey is another good example of guiding the audience.  Instead of just keeping the chart plain, they’ve added callouts that help emphasize the message in the title. 

“Jobs lost, jobs gained: Workforce transitions in a time of automation” McKinsey, 2017

Guiding the audience can be as simple as adding an arrow or bolding important text. But even small changes like this can make a big difference in your presentation. 

7. Too Many Colors

It can be tempting to use a variety of colors on your slide, but doing so just distracts the audience and takes attention away from the important parts. And not only that, it can look really unprofessional. 

On this slide for example they’ve decided to separate each of these sections by color to make it easier to distinguish between them. But instead of making it easier to read, the slide is difficult to understand and hard to look at. The sections are already naturally separated, with lines, titles, and even icons. But by adding bright colors, in addition to the orange and green that’s already on the slide, they’ve reduced the slide’s readability considerably. 

“Harnessing the Power of Entrepreneurs to Open Innovation” Accenture, 2015

The best slides use color strategically, to help highlight key points and ideas.

In this Bain slide for example, they’ve decided to highlight the important columns in red, while keeping the less important columns in grey. It provides a nice contrasting effect that helps emphasize the message. 

“2011 China Luxury Market Study” Bain, 2011

Likewise, this Deloitte slide contains a minimal amount of color, making it easy to sift through the data and focus on only what’s important. Not to mention it keeps the visuals of the slide clean and professional. 

“Consumer privacy in retail” Deloitte, 2019

It’s a bit counterintuitive, but when it comes to color, sometimes less is more.

Final Thoughts

A few simple tweaks to your presentation can really make a difference in both its quality and overall professionalism. Above all, be sure to focus on your main message, and avoid any distractions that might take away from that message. If you can keep an eye out for cliché, unprofessional, and meaningless content, you’ll be well on your way to creating high-quality, insight-rich presentations.

P.S. – If you’re really looking to up your PowerPoint game, be sure to check out our full courses: Advanced PowerPoint for Consultants and Advanced Presentations for Consultants .

You can watch a video version of this article on YouTube .

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Blog > Common mistakes in PowerPoint and what makes a bad presentation

Common mistakes in PowerPoint and what makes a bad presentation

08.09.21   •  #powerpoint #tips.

Creating and giving a good presentation is actually not that difficult. If you know how to do it. Otherwise, no matter how much effort you put into it, it can quickly turn out to be a bad presentation.

Here we show you some examples of bad PowerPoint slides and common mistakes that are often made in presentations so that you won’t make them in your next presentation and avoid "Death by PowerPoint".

1. Reading aloud instead of speaking freely

One aspect in bad presentations is often that the text is simply read out. Prepare your presentation so well that you can speak freely. The goal is to build a connection with your audience and get them excited about your topic. However, this will hardly be possible if you only read from a piece of paper or your computer the whole time. Your audience should feel addressed, if you just read off, they will be bored and perceive your presentation as bad, even if your content and your PowerPoint are actually good.

2. Technical Problems

The sound of the video you inserted on a slide is not on, your laptop does not connect to the beamer, or your microphone does not work. These are just some of the problems that could occur during your presentation.

But nothing is more annoying than when technical problems suddenly occur during a presentation or even before, when everyone is waiting for it to start. It interrupts your flow of speech, only distracts the audience from the topic and breaks concentration. So before you get started with your presentation, it is important to first start your PowerPoint in the place where you will give it later, practice there and familiarize yourself with the technology.

• Don't forget the charging cable for your laptop
• Find out beforehand how you can connect your laptop to the beamer. Find out which connection the beamer has and which connection your laptop has. To be on the safe side, take an adapter with you.
• Always have backups of your presentation. Save them on a USB stick and preferably also online in a cloud.
• Take a second laptop and maybe even your own small projector for emergencies. Even if it's not the latest model and the quality is not that good: better bad quality than no presentation at all.

3. Losing the attention of your audience

One of the most common mistakes in presentations is to lose the attention of your audience. Especially in long presentations it is often difficult to keep your audience’s attention and to avoid “Death by PowerPoint”. Anyone who has had this experience knows how uncomfortable it is to give a presentation where you notice that no one is actually really listening to you. Especially if your presentation is an eternally long monologue, it is difficult to get the topic across in an exciting way and to captivate the audience.

Our tip: Include interactive polls or quizzes in your presentation to involve your audience and increase their attention. With the help of SlideLizard, you can ask questions in PowerPoint and your audience can easily vote on their own smartphone. Plus, you can even get anonymous feedback at the end, so you know right away what you can improve next time.

Here we have also summarized further tips for you on how to increase audience engagement.

4. Avoid eye contact

You want your audience to feel engaged in your presentation, but if you avoid eye contact the whole time, they certainly won't. Avoid staring at just one part of the wall, at your paper or your computer. If the participants have the feeling that you are just talking to the wall, it is a bad presentation. Speak to your audience, involve them in your presentation and make it more exciting for them.

But also make sure you don't always look at the same two or three people, but address everyone. If the audience is large, it is often difficult to include everyone, but still try to let your eyes wander a little between your listeners and look into every corner of the room.

5. Speaking incoherently

Avoid jumping from one topic to the next and back again shortly afterwards. Otherwise your audience will not be able to follow you after a while and their thoughts will wander. To prevent this, it is important that your presentation has a good structure and that you work through one topic after the other.

Nervousness can cause even the best to mumble or talk too fast in order to get the presentation over with as quickly as possible. Try to avoid this by taking short pauses to collect yourself, to breathe and to remind yourself to speak slowly.

6. Many colors mixed with each other

Make sure that your presentation is not too colorful. If you mix too many colours, bad presentation slides will result very quickly. A PowerPoint in which all kinds of colors are combined with each other does not look professional, but rather suitable for a children's birthday party.

Think about a rough color palette in advance, which you can then use in your presentation. Colors such as orange or neon green do not look so good in your PowerPoint. Use colors specifically to emphasize important information.

It is also essential to choose colors that help the text to read well. You should have as much contrast as possible between the font and the background. Black writing on a white background is always easy to read, while yellow writing on a white background is probably hard to read.

7. Too minimalistic design

Even though it is often said that "less is more", you should not be too minimalistic in the design of your presentation. A presentation where your slides are blank and only black text on a white background is likely to go down just as badly as if you use too many colors.

Empty presentations are boring and don't really help to capture the attention of your audience. It also looks like you are too lazy to care about the design of your presentation and that you have not put any effort into the preparation. Your PowerPoint doesn't have to be overflowing with colors, animations and images to make it look interesting. Make it simple, but also professional.

8. Too much text

The slides of your presentation should never be overcrowded. Write only the most important key points on your slides and never entire sentences. Your audience should not be able to read exactly the text you are speaking in your PowerPoint. This is rather annoying and leads to being bored quickly. Summarize the most important points that your audience should remember and write them down in short bullet points on your presentation.

9. Many different animations

To avoid bad presentations it is important to never use too many animations. It looks messy and confusing if every text and image is displayed with a different animation. Just leave out animations at all or if you really want to use them then use them only very rarely when you want to draw attention to something specific. Make sure that if you use animations, they are consistent. If you use transitions between the individual slides, these should also always be kept consistent and simple.

10. Too many images

Bad presentation slides often occur when their design ist unclear and unorganised. Images and graphics in presentations are always a good idea to illustrate something and to add some variety. But don't overdo it with them. Too many images can distract from your presentation and look messy. Make sure that the graphics also fit the content and, if you have used several pictures on one slide, ask yourself whether you really need all of them.

11. Too many or unreadable fonts

Never combine too many fonts so that your presentation does not look messy. Use at most two: one for headings and one for text. When choosing fonts, you should also make sure that they are still legible at long distances. Script, italic and decorative fonts are very slow to read, which is why they should be avoided in presentations.

It is not so easy to choose the right font. Therefore, we have summarized for you how to find the best font for your PowerPoint presentation.

12. Images as background

To avoid bad presentations, do not use images as slide backgrounds if there should be also text on them. The picture only distracts from the text and it is difficult to read it because there is not much contrast with the background. It is also harder to see the image because the text in the foreground is distracting. The whole thing looks messy and distracting rather than informative and clear.

13. Reading from the slides

Never just read the exact text from your slides. Your audience can read for themselves, so they will only get bored and in the worst case it will lead to "Death by PowerPoint". You may also give them the feeling that you think they are not able to read for themselves. In addition, you should avoid whole sentences on your slides anyway and only have listed key points that you go into more detail then.

14. Turn your back

Never turn around during your presentation to look at your projected PowerPoint. Not to read from your slides, but also not to make sure the next slide is already displayed. It looks unprofessional and only distracts your audience. In PowerPoint's Speaker View, you can always see which slide is currently being displayed and which one is coming next. Use this to make sure the order fits. You can even take notes in PowerPoint, which are then displayed during your presentation. You can read all about notes in PowerPoint here.

15. Forgetting the time

Always pay attention to the time given. It is annoying when your presentation takes much longer than actually planned and your audience is just waiting for you to stop talking or you are not able to finish your presentation at all. It is just as awkward if your presentation is too short. You have already told everything about your topic, but you should actually talk for at least another ten minutes.

Practice your presentation often enough at home. Talk through your text and time yourself as you go. Then adjust the length so that you can keep to the time given on the day of your presentation.

16. Complicated Structure

The structure of your presentation should not be complicated. Your audience should be able to follow you easily and remember the essential information by the end. When you have finished a part, briefly summarize and repeat the main points before moving on to the next topic. Mention important information more than once to make sure it really gets across to your audience.

However, if the whole thing gets too complicated, it can be easy for your audience to disengage after a while and not take away much new information from your presentation. So a complicated structure can lead to bad presentations and "Death by PowerPoint" pretty quickly.

17. Inappropriate clothes

On the day of your presentation, be sure to choose appropriate clothing. Your appearance should be formal, so avoid casual clothes and stick to professional dress codes. When choosing your clothes, also make sure that they are rather unobtrusive. Your audience should focus on your presentation, not on your appearance.

18. Inappropriate content

Think about who your audience is and adapt your presentation to them. Find out how much they already know about the topic, what they want to learn about it and why they are here in the first place. If you only talk about things your audience already knows, they will get bored pretty soon, but if you throw around a lot of technical terms when your audience has hardly dealt with the topic at all, they will also have a hard time following you. So to avoid "Death by PowerPoint" in this case, it is important to adapt your presentation to your audience.

You can also ask a few questions at the beginning of your presentation to learn more about your audience and then adapt your presentation. With SlideLizard , you can integrate polls directly into your PowerPoint and participants can then easily answer anonymously from their smartphone.

19. Too much or unimportant information

Keep it short and limit yourself to the essentials. The more facts and information you present to your audience, the less they will remember.

Also be sure to leave out information that does not fit the topic or is not relevant. You will only distract from the actual topic and lose the attention of your audience.

20. Monotone voice

If you speak in a monotone voice all the time, you are likely to lose the attention of your audience. Make your narration lively and exciting. Also, be careful not to speak too quietly, but not too loudly either. People should be able to understand you well throughout the whole room. Even if it is not easy for many people, try to deliver your speech with confidence. If you are not enthusiastic about the topic or do not seem enthusiastic, you will not be able to get your audience excited about it.

Examples of bad presentations to download

We have created a PowerPoint with examples of bad presentation slides and how to do it right. You can download it here for free.

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Helena Reitinger

Helena supports the SlideLizard team in marketing and design. She loves to express her creativity in texts and graphics.

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15 Pro Tips to Design a Good (Vs Bad) PowerPoint (That Doesn't Suck)

Over who years, PowerPoint has gained a badewanne reputation. There's even ampere trending hashtag #DeathbyPowerPoint on Twitter and Instagram. Mystery? There are hundred of bad PowerPoint presentation examples that walk a tiny like this presentation:

Don't let your next PowerPoint presentation fall dupe to one away several missteps. All collection of tips with experts will set you on the right path. Learn how to avoid death by PowerPoint by following aforementioned go Bauer design tips includes this article. 

Good PowerPoint presentations can live a greatness way to connect through your destination audience and improve your bottom line. Bad Presentation slides are easier to avoid than you should think.

Into this books, we’ll share what manufacture a bad PowerPoint presentation. You'll also lern reason you should avoid making people sit through one at all costs. Then, we'll give thee a handful of side from the showcase pros that'll help you design a good PowerPoint . Best of all, you'll learn select to avoid terminal at PowerPoint.

What Constructs a "Bad" PowerPoint Presentation?

As rudeness as he might sound, in most cases, PowerPoint isn't the main reason behind a bad presentation. After all, Output is just a tool. It's utilised to form greatly slides, and it's also used to create  bad  Point slides.

On Envato authors have designed hundred of PowerPoint templates. According to their specialization, to main reason for bad PowerPoint presentations is design-related.

Slide design with poor layout that uses characters and colors that detract from the message on the decline is one of the main reasons why PowerPoint receives such a bad reputation . 

A classic mistakes to PowerPoint slideshow design is in include tables much information over a single slide. Take a viewing at this presentation on Lung Ovarian  from SlideShare. Not all will you find informational overwhelm, but they also decided to add 100 charts on one slide!

A couple of other reason that lead to poor PowerPoint presentations contains:

• a topic that's got nothing into do are your audience’s interest
• failing to make a connection with their audience
• reading directly from the slides

Envato author, Celsius Shapes , recommends paypal bonus attention to the view and how out the presentation on the paper before going into PowerPoint and creating of finalized how. They also suggest studying effective presentations online.

Another team of our Envato authors, AQR Studio , says that every bad presentation they perceived had the same thing inbound common:

"...too much text on individual slides and bad layout." 

Their advice is go take one look at presentation templates built by professionals and study them to find common elements is make by an attractive video. Few also make adding in to own style instead of copying someone else’s.

Lastly, don’t forgetting that nerves and knowing your viewers plays an important role in your feature delivery as well. According to Dave Beckett , an TEDx discourse coach,

“[...]two major grounds for poor presentations: nerves, and not paying enough attention to the audience.”

Now that you know get makes a bad Point presentation, let’s about how you should avoid making your audience sit through it.

Why a Bad Output Presentation Hurts Your Message

A bad presentation will not only quit a sour fondness in your mouth, but it'll also bore your audience. Once insert community gets boring, chances are they'll disengage from the presentation. They'll stop remunerative attention to what you've got to say (also common sarcastically as death via PowerPoint). Reports, Books & Periodicals · Unmuted: What works, what doesn't real whereby were can all do better when working together online. · Storytelling as Best Practice (PDF).

Also, just your audience becomes disengaged, chances are they won’t remembering aforementioned topic, much smaller the content of your how. If you’re presenting in front in potential business company or investors, him run the risks of nay closing of deal or getting the necessary funding. Good Lecture VS Bad Presentation * - YouTube

Ultimately, a bad presentation will result in a bad impression of your brand and business. Luckily, we’ve cumulated the best PowerPoint design tips by the experts that'll help you created good PowerPoint presentations also avoid death by PowerPoint.

15 Tips von Professionals to Compose Health PowerPoint Presentations

None matter how experienced you have, the truth is, bad PowerPoint presentations can happen to anyone. Evened proven speech busses aren’t immune to delivering bad presentations.

Consider this story from Michel Mazur, speech coach from  Communication Rebel :

“Once EGO was invited to give one presentation on cultural trends. I worked closely with the meeting planner. In fact, she approved every scroll I was going to offer. This was an executive-level audience additionally she wanted the contents to may perfect. I research, I prepped, I practiced, I had great view.  

Five daily into my performance, one leading raised his help and asked “Are these trends based on quantitative research?” My reply was, “No, they belong qualitative cultural trends.” He real half the room tune away. One presentation flopped. My mistake was basing my whole speech on information away the person. That go killed me and there made no way to save the presentation in aforementioned moment...

I recovered. You can too when your presentation sucks. The most important point is: Keep Speaking. Learn from your mistakes both don't let them hold you back.”

As Dr. Mazur says, and good news a is you can recover from a bad presentation and go on to successfully establish good PowerPoints that don’t suck. Below, you’ll locate 15 hint from which specialist that'll help you rock your PowerPoint engineering press your presentations skills. This view shows a student giving equally a vile additionally a good presentation, he uses constructive feedback for improve his presentation skills.

1. Graphics for Visual Aid

Bad PowerPoint slides are overflowed, wordy, and boring. They lose point of the focus of one Byer presentation. Remember, your goal is to present informational in clear, understandable ways. By adding graphics for visual aid, you can do exactly which. For example, consider infographics. These is illustrations built to share ideas.

Tend than packing a slide with words to explain an concept, map it out with an infographic. This might be ampere process flow chart, or a 3D hierarchy diagram. In fact, premium infographic templates from Envato Elements offer many of options. Start one such works well for your topic, then fall stylish your details.

2. Stick to Readable Fonts

Top examples of vicious PowerPoint pictures often share something in gemeinsamer: strange fonts . Sure, unique fonts can be fun and funny. When they don’t have a place in a expert decline deck. It’s bad PowerPoint vordruck to use this fonts.

Alternatively, you need to choose a clear, stylish font that’s easy at reader. Remember, audiences might will reading your slides from the back of a large place.

This doesn’t mean fonts have to be boring. Far from it - and again, Envato Elements is here to related. As a member, you've got zugriff to thousands of custom font styles with unlimited related.

Each neat will works inbound your Presentation. Avoid becoming an example of bad Point form plus choose a premium custom font today! They look great press help yourself succeed.

3. Consistency Is Key

The number one tip for your Show design can to be consistent. This simply refers go using the same fonts and colors throughout thine presentation instead of changing them up every additional foil. Mystery Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes

It’s a good idea to use the same characters and colors applied in which resting of your type assets. But if you aren’t sure which colors and changing are a part of your brand identity, you can’t go wrong with keeping it simply. Most likely, your featured will feel stiff and not very appealing. After all, timing is a great part of become an successful presenter. bad ...

Speakers and originator Dude Culver is verify that simplicity works:

“A consistent theme pulls together the variety in your images and message, as you move from problem at solution. You ability use the baked-in themes supplied in PowerPoint or Keynote – MYSELF don’t due I want a simpler, more unique look.

I create a custom theme simple with my titles, a consistent white background, and sometimes with my download or my client’s logo.”

4. When A Comes up Text, Less Is Always More

As mentioned earlier, too much text wishes defeat your audience. Another downside of using furthermore much text is that your audience becomes read the content of the slide before you’re done talking about it and then tune you out. A Bad Presentation Walked Good.

TEDx in-house presentation expert, Aaron Weyenberg , makes an excellent argument for using without texts in your PowerPoints:

“With text, less is almost always more. One thing to avoid—slides with a lot of copy, especially if it’s a repeat of where you’re adage out loud. It’s like if to give a hard manual in ampere meeting—everyone’s head leaves down press few read, rather than staying heads-up and listening. If there are a lot of words on your slide, you’re asking your audience to teilung their attention between what they’re learning and what they’re hearing. That’s really hard for an brain to do, furthermore it compromises the effectiveness of both your slide text and your language words. Supposing you can’t avoid having text-y slides, try to progressively exposed text (like unveiling bullet points one by one) as you need it.”

5. How the Presentation as an Aid, Not this Main Tool

Don’t forget is you, the show, are the star of the presentation. Your presentation is there to reinforce your ideas and help you sell your point. Take advice from  Seth Godin :

“[...]make slides the reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create video that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re statement is true non just accurate.”

6. Use Guides into Make Sure Everything Aligns Properly

PowerPoint experts from Nuts and Seals Speedtraining firmly believe you must add guidance to your slides.

“When creating a document in PowerPoint, add guides around the placeholders from the parent slide layout.

That way if you inadvertently made an faults or if you want to makes things easier to align in the normal view, then you can just flip those on again plus see where everything is supposed to be placed.”

7. Contrast Always Wins

Bad PowerPoint presentation examples don’t stand out. They’re rigid to follow, both in style and delivery. Them need your slides go stand out to succeed. Here are some examples of the best and worst PowerPoint presentations you must consider. Glance over these good v/s bad PowerPoint declines examples to enhance your next presentation.

Contrast can autochthonous best design best to do exactly that. By styling about contrast, thine key ideas wills be instantly recognizable.

They’ll never fade into the background. This keeps your audience focused and engaged. Plus, it looks great. To is crucial to remember.

You slides los beyond real-time watching while you’re presenting. They need in be styling and comprehensive on later too.

8. Memorize the Concepts & an Scripts

Inc.500 entrepreneur and speaker, Qifen Daum saith you should memorize both your presentation index and script. Memorizing your script and the concept also helps in rechtssache there have technical difficulties with your presentation.

“Audiences know one amateur which second the notes kommenden output or the presenter looks at who screen as a reminders. This is your material. If you don't build it, you can't expect that audience to appreciation you as on expert.”

9. Use Relevant Imagery

There is no doubt that images and visual elements can boost your presentation or produce it even other impactful. But those images and various visuals need to be relevant. Depending to visual communications expert, Curtis Newbold :

“You may, for instance, need to give a powerpoint on dairy production inbound your community.[...]What I need to see are images that teller a story about the dieting industries the his challenging, the infographics that explain processes in surmounting the hurdle. You need one lot of visionary information, yes. But it also your to be relevant.”

10. One Message Per Slide

Your presentation needs into pique curiosity in your audience and get them interested by the topic. Once you've got their attention, you need to keep it and the best way the do that is go stick to sole send per slide.

Professional training and coaching expert Dave JP Phillips even goes so far to set presenters should focus on one key message per slide and include no learn easier six object (or lines) on apiece.

11. Use Animation Carefully

Animation can certainly make a good PowerPoint model more dynamic, but only when used correctly. Otherwise, it’s a distraction that can ruin the impression regarding the presentation. Learn away St Schroth , PowerPoint expert:

“Like adenine lot of other PowerPoint characteristic, animation sack be distracting if used badly. However, if employed rationally, animation bottle snap your audience's attention at business score, allow you to "chunk" information for better comprehension, and help explain advanced systems and relationships. After entire, we are "wired" to pay heed at movement.”

Studying the basics of use video:

12. Pay Attention at the Structure

Your presentation needs to have a good flow. It’s important to include any who needed elements supposing you want your presentation to be convince. More specificly, a right presentation resembles a point production, according into leadership development and executive coaching expert Jeff Black .

“You have the have all and elements: You’ve got to have a major opening act, you’ve got to got something in the middle to pull it through and you’ve got to have a great curtain’s finale along the end.”

13. Practice Exists the Key to Success

Don’t forget to practice, practice, and then practice some more the delivery of your presentation. Nancy Duarte , the author of Resonate , shares get as herb finest advice for new presenters:

“Nothing payoff is lightweight, also the best communicators aren’t always born that way. Many of them saw to importance of improving their skills and put the work in. It will be work. But if you become an golden communicator, insert life is in your hands.”

Students some values tips for practicing your presentation:

14. Build to Online Sharing

Learn about online-focused slide decks, and look at some of the best templates now:

15. Build Presentations to Engage

Samples of poorer Show slides may carry many forms. Not her all tend to bore an community. Maybe they’re overloaded with content, hard into understand, or just aren’t interesting. That’s why you should always engage with autochthonous audience. This semester I'm teaching three classes on presentation for undergrads at i university in Japan. For the second day, I have students share from the teaching what they ponder are the elements of adenine good presentation both what it think...

This could take many forms. If nothing or, always contains a Q&A plate at the end of your deck. This gives my audience the chance to clarify anything handful might’ve lost. Aforementioned difference between an good and bad presentation is ENORMOUS

With even get option is to be engaging or interactive throughout. By using a game button quiz, you can make presentations fun! And a happy community is forever a find busy audience. Providing a bad video - spot the mistakes - YouTube

Learn show about interactive quiz games PowerPoints from the help of this tutorial:

How to Quickly Customize Good PowerPoint Designs (With Premium Templates)

Want to know aforementioned ultimate way in avoid badezimmer PowerPoint slides? Two terms: awards presets.

By using a premium Envato Elements Show template , you can amaze any audience. Elements got thousands a amazing options present now.

Premium templates offering stunning styles, unlike free templates. Plus, they rescue you time thanks to their ease by use. In fact, your can customize one in just five quick stair. Let’s look at how. Examples the Good and Bad Slides - Download than a PDF or review go for free

What to follow along and teach more? Downloading the great Virtually PowerPoint template  from Envato Elements now.

1. Please Your Key Slithers

Bad PowerPoint examples are oft congested with dozens of slides in a row. Steady that most fascinating topics will eventually lose into audience if they draft on too long. That’s why you should choose only an very key slides to get your points across. Show of Good and Bad Slides

This is easy to a premium template in PowerPoint. Find an View tab, then click on Slide Sorter. Here, you’ll see a thumbnail for every slide by the deck. You can remove unwanted slides by right-clicking on them and select Delete Slide . Once you’re finishes, clickable Normal with the View tab to start editing.

2. Edit Text Features

Words are the backbone of gain PowerPoint decks. And thanks to premium templates, they’re easy to add. Notice wie slide layouts have text already in place. To change it going, click into one von the text box. Select the contents, then type over they using your keyboard. Repeat throughout your carriage deck. Notice how good your presentation skills are by spotting of errors made to this video.

Keep in mind: bad Powered presentation product have often too wordy. Avoid this by deleting any unwanted text boxes to free upwards some space on autochthonous slides.

3. Explore Font Effects

Single you’ve added textbook, you can customize it. Go to the Home title on PowerPoint’s ribbon furthermore detect the Font section on the left. Here, you’ll see many my the dropdowns.

The dropdowns power which size or style concerning your font. The buttons drive custom effects like underlines, fonts, and more. Click through them plus watch your choices apply to an text that you have selected. Bad PowerPoint Examples You Should Prevent at All Costs

4. Customize Photos

Any exemplar of bad PowerPoint technique: ampere lacks of representations. Don’t forget to add figures toward regular intermittent. Those boost visual interest or hold viewers and textbooks focusing off thou.

Premium templates, once again, make this slight. On many image, you’ll see shaped image placeholders. Browse to a stored image file for will computer, then towing it over your slide.

Drop it into place, and watch PowerPoint import it. Reference it'll scale to fit perfectly. It’s an effortless way at build a good PowerPoint slide.

5. Style Molds with Color

A poorer PowerPoint deck often will deficiency in color and choose. A bland aesthetic shall ampere rapidly way up lose an audience. That’s why the use of color exists so important. Press one premium template enjoy Virtually makes create use of color.

You can also change shape colors inbound PPT to how your own style. Pawl on a frame, then find the Shape Format tab on the palm. On it, you’ll see the Mold Fill dropdown color chooser. Explore the numerous options also click one to apply it. This is one of one top ways to build a great slide layout with plenty of cool colors. 

Find Even More Good PowerPoint Examples

If you're test for make a PowerPoint that doesn't suck, you'll want plenty of good PowerPoint examples for stimulus. Here become couple good PowerPoint designing to rouse you: Activity for talking about good (and bad) presentations

The Top Source for Great PowerPoint Templates (To Build Ok Presentations)

Want the best source for wonderful PowerPoint stencil? Envato Tree is thy answer. For a flat months rate, you’ll have access to boundless downloads out an world’s best Powerful templates . These help them make great slides every day. Plus, you’ll find misc company love stock photos, customize fonts, and much more.

Elements is the top creative value today. The unlimited downloads included grant you boundless possibilities. You can try out as many breathtaking Show designing as you want to find and one that’s right on you.

Envato Elements assist you build great Powered slides. It avoids the pitfalls of bad PowerPoint shapes. That’s because every template shall drafted due original experts. You’ll benefit starting:

• pre-built script placeholders
• room for images and illustrations
• custom infographics to illustrate dates
• unique fonts used throughout
• animated options for smooth transitions

As you can see, Elements templates saving you from edifice bad PowerPoint video. In moments, you ability build amazing graphics that listeners will adore.

Check Out Our Free Online Presentation Guide

Do you want to learn straight more about making great PowerPoint presented? We've receive the resource for you! We'll make you through the comprehensive process to get you ready for your following business presentation—from start to finish. A short simple video of okay and bad examples a presence. Enjoyed? Share aforementioned movie with your friends! Kindly credit when using the ...

Don't overlook our release online featured guide, The Complete Guide to Making Great Business Presentations . It's chock full von mighty business presentation advice to help you make your next business presentation your best yet.

Avoid Making PowerPoints The Suck By Applying These Pro Pointers

Death by PowerPoint is a real thing is can happen to anyone. If you want to make sure is your lecture walk a positive impact, keep diese tips in mind. Huge content and stellar design pair jointly to help you avoid bad PowerPoint presentation samples. Follow the PowerPoint design hints or right PowerPoint examples in this feature.

If thee need a good Slide design template fork your presentation, make sure to inspect out our sites. Grab Powered browse and design away today. Both are sure in help you avoid one curse of bad PowerPoint slides!

Article Note: This post possess been modernized with entries from Robert Childdressing . Andrew  is a freelance instructor for Envato Tuts+.

10 Presentation Design Mistakes to Avoid (With Examples)

One of the most important aspects of a successful presentation is designing an effective slideshow. Unfortunately, it’s also a part most professionals often neglect or don’t pay attention to.

This is why most of the bad presentation designs share a pattern. They are usually made using the default PowerPoint templates. They use the same default fonts as every other presentation. They also include terrible stock photos. And try to stuff as much information as possible into a single slide.

We noticed all these mistakes and more while exploring some of the most popular presentations on SlideShare. They were slideshows with thousands and even millions of views. But, they were riddled with mistakes and flaws.

In this guide, we show you how these mistakes can be harmful as well as give you tips on how to avoid them. Of course, we made sure to include some examples as well.

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1. Adding Too Many Slides

One of the biggest mistakes you can do when designing a presentation is adding way too many slides. This not only makes your presentation unnecessarily long but it can also affect the audience’s engagement. After a few slides, your audience will surely lose interest in your presentation.

Rand Fishkin is a well-known entrepreneur in the marketing industry. This is one of his presentations that received over 100,000 views. And it features 95 slides. We believe it could’ve generated more views if he had made the presentation shorter.

A presentation with 95 slides is a bit of an overkill, even when it’s made for an online platform like SlideShare.

Solution: Follow the 10/20/30 Rule

The 10/20/30 rule is a concept introduced by expert marketer Guy Kawasaki . The rule recommends that you limit your presentation to 10 slides, lasting only 20 minutes, and using a font size of 30 points.

Even though the rule states to limit the presentation to 10 slides, it’s perfectly fine to design a 20-slide presentation or even one with 30 slides. Just don’t drag it too far.

2. Information Overload

Statistics and research data are important for backing your claims. Even in your presentations, you can include stats and data to add more validity and authority. However, you should also remember not to over-do it.

A good example is this popular SlideShare presentation with more than 1 million views. Since this is a tech report slideshow, it includes lots of stats and data. But the designer has made the mistake of trying to include too much data into every slide in the presentation.

If this slideshow were to present to a large audience at a big hall, most of the audience won’t even be able to read it without binoculars.

Solution: Visualize Stats and Data

A great way to present data is to visualize them. Instead of adding numbers and long paragraphs of text, use charts and graphs to visualize them. Or use infographics and illustrations.

3. Choosing the Wrong Colors

How long did it take for you to read the title of this slide? Believe it or not, it looks just the same throughout the entire slideshow.

The biggest mistake of this presentation design is using images as the background. Then using colors that doesn’t highlight the text made it even worse and rendered the text completely unreadable.

Solution: Create a Color Palette

Make sure that you start your presentation design by preparing a color palette . It should include primary and secondary colors that you use throughout each slide. This will make your presentation design look more consistent.

4. Using Terrible Fonts

Fonts play a key role in improving the readability in not just presentations but in all kinds of designs. Your choice of font is enough for the audience to decide whether you’re a professional or an amateur.

In this case, the slide speaks for itself. Not only the font choice is terrible but without any spacing between the paragraphs, the entire slide and the presentation is hardly readable. How did this presentation generate over 290,000 views? We’ll never know.

Solution: Avoid the Default Fonts

As a rule of thumb, try to avoid using the default fonts installed on your computer. These fonts aren’t designed for professional work. Instead, consider using a custom font. There are thousands of free and premium fonts with great designs. Use them!

5. Adding Images from Google

You could tell by just looking at this slide that this person is using images from Google search. It looks like the designer lazily downloaded images from Google search and copy-pasted a screenshot onto the image. Without even taking the time to align the screenshot to fit the device or removing the white background of the image.

Or he probably added a white background to the images after realizing the black iPhone blends into the black background. Most of the images used throughout this slideshow are pretty terrible as well.

Solution: Use High-Quality Mockups and Images

The solution is simple. Don’t use images from Google! Instead, use high-quality images from a free stock image site or use a premium source. Also, if you want to use devices in slides, make sure to use device mockup templates .

6. Poor Content Formatting

There are many things wrong with this slideshow. It uses terrible colors with ugly fonts, the font sizes are also too big, uneven shapes, and the list goes on.

One thing to remember here is that even though apps like PowerPoint and Keynote gives you lots of options for drawing shapes and a color palette with unlimited choices, you don’t have to use them all.

Solution: Use a Minimal and Consistent Layout

Plan a content layout to be used with each and every slide of your presentation. Use a minimalist content layout and don’t be afraid to use lots of white space in your slides. Or, you can use a pre-made PowerPoint or Keynote template with a better design.

7. Writing Long Paragraphs

Adding long paragraphs of text in slides is never a good way to present your ideas to an audience. After all, that’s what the speech is for. The slides, however, need to be just a summary of what you’re trying to convince your audience.

Don’t make the mistake of writing long paragraphs that turns your slideshow into a document. And, more importantly, don’t read from the slides.

Solution: Keep It Short

As the author Stephen Keague said, “no audience ever complained about a presentation or speech being too short”. It takes skill to summarize an idea with just a few words. You should always try to use shorter sentences and lots of titles, headings, and bullet points in your slideshows.

8. Not Using Images

This entire presentation doesn’t have a single image in any of its slides, except for the company logo. Images are a great way to keep your audience fully engaged with your presentations. Some expert speakers even use images to add humor as well.

The saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” is popular for a reason. Instead of writing 200-words long paragraphs, use images to summarize messages and also to add context.

Solution: Use Icons, Illustrations, and Graphics

You don’t always have to add photos or images to make your presentations look more attractive. Instead, you can use other types of graphics and colorful icons. Or even illustrations and infographics to make each slide more entertaining.

9. Designing Repetitive Slides

This presentation about Internet Trends is one of the most popular slideshows on SlideShare with more than 4 million views. If you go through the slides you’ll notice the entire presentation is filled with nothing but charts and graphs.

Your audience will easily get bored and lose attention when your presentation has too many slides containing the same type of content.

Solution: Use a Mix of Content

Make sure to use different types of content throughout the slides. Add text, images, shapes, icons, and other elements to create each slide more engaging than the other.

10. Using Complex Infographics

Even though images and graphics are great for visualizing data, it’s important to use the right designs to showcase the data without confusing the audience.

For example, this slideshow made by HootSuite is filled with stats and data. Most of which look fine. Except for a few slides that include complicated designs filled with information all over the place.

Solution: Design Simpler Graphics

There are many great online tools you can use to design your own infographics and visuals. Use them. But, also remember to use simpler designs that are easier to understand for all audiences.

In Conclusion

There’s no such thing as the perfect presentation design. Every slideshow has its flaws. But, if you learn to avoid the common mistakes, you’ll have a much higher chance of winning over your audience and delivering a more engaging presentation.

If you don’t have any slideshow design experience, consider picking one of the bee PowerPoint templates or best Keynote templates . They feature designs made by professionals and you won’t have to worry about making any mistakes again.

The 10 Most Common Presentation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

January 02, 2024

Many of us make common mistakes in our business presentations. Often these presentation mistakes are ways of working that seem efficient (but are not) such as: (1) planning your talk with PowerPoint, (2) writing your talk without planning, (3) skipping practise sessions and (4) narrating dull slides.

To help you avoid common presentation mistakes  that many of us regularly make, you have here some examples of the most common mistakes.

Each of these presenting mistakes are ‘false friends’ – where you feel as if you are making progress but in reality you are diverting from the true path and giving yourself more work than necessary.

Study these presentation mistakes and identify where you can improve.

• Do you avoid planning your presentation up front?
• Are you too quick to start producing presentation slides?
• Are you reluctant to try out your presentation ideas on others early in the process?
• Do you use boring safe language?
• Do you try and say too much in your presentations?
• Are you unsure how to bring your presentation to life with levity.

These are all simple, natural presenting mistakes that cause thousands of presentations every day to be less effective than they should be.

While avoiding these traps will not make you a brilliant presenter, each trap you identify will take you much nearer to being a confident and convincing presenter.

Top ten ways to avoid common presentation mistakes

• Don’t start with PowerPoint. Leave creating visual aids until the end of the process
• Don’t start writing before planning. Have a clear plan first
• Don’t be the centre of attention. Make your talk about your audience.
• Don’t use written language. Translate everything you write into compelling spoken language.
• Don’t try and say too much. Say less, but say it better.
• Don’t be boring. Say something interesting every 10 words.
• Don’t be subtle. Be big, bold, clear and compelling.
• Don’t speak too fast. Leave a pause every 5-10 words.
• Don’t lead with slides or narrate slides. Speak directly to your audience and only use visual aids when they help your audience
• Don’t avoid practising. Dedicate time perfecting your talk and perfecting your performance.

Presentation Mistakes #1 – Do you waste time with PowerPoint?

Summary: powerpoint is a poor planning tool. only open powerpoint after you have decided what you are saying..

Most people, when they start writing a presentation, they open PowerPoint. They create slides, perhaps use old slides, design new ones and feel as if they are making progress because they can see ‘progress’ – something they can print and share.

BUT: Starting with PowerPoint is the equivalent of creating a movie by filming before you have a story or a script. You end up with a lot of footage, but it is near impossible to turn this into anything usable. You waste time and you waste money.

Instead, Create a powerful talk that barely uses any visual aids. Use the planning and language tools outlined in this blog article to create a talk that can work on its own without slides. You may realise that your presentation does not need slides. If you do want visual aids, only start creating them at the end of the presentation process, not at the start.

And why not rename ‘slides’ as Visual Aids. This change of language will help you think differently. Each Visual Aid must help your audience interpret what you say. Only create Visual Aids where they are absolutely necessary. Make life easier for your audience.

“Failing to prepare is preparing to fail”.  – Benjamin Franklin

Avoid Presentation Mistakes – Top Tips

• Stop using PowerPoint to plan
• Only use PowerPoint to create your visual aids or handouts after you have decided what to say.

Contact us for a free consultation on your coaching needs

Presentation Mistakes #2 – Do you make yourself or your idea the focus of your presentation?

Summary: while your presentation might be about your product or your business, you will be more effective if you make your audience the centre of attention..

A typical bad presentation starts: “In today’s presentation I will talk about how we performed last month, what our plans are for this month and how we are changing the way numbers are reported. I’ll talk about project Pegasus and give an update on the latest company sales figures”

Why is this not good? This presentation opening is more like a table of contents than anything else – and it contains little that is useful for the audience.

The art of communication is translating what you want to say into what it means for your audience. You’ll grab your audience if you talk about them and their interests. If what you say is useful, your audience is more likely to pay attention.

Instead, start like this: “As we all know, this has been a tough month. You’ll hear more about last month’s disappointing performance and learn about our plans for this month and what that means for your departments. I’ll also share with you the changes you can expect to see in how we report our numbers. You’ll also be pleased to know that project Pegasus is on track. We can already see a positive impact on our sales numbers – which I am sure we are all very pleased to hear.”

What has changed?

• Each ‘I will talk about’ has been translated into a ‘you will….’
• By using many more personal pronouns (we/ our/your) the talk is easier to listen to.
• In the revised text you hear much more useful information (is it good news, bad news) and
• The audience is involved in the story (‘we are all very pleased to hear’).

In short, the audience is now the centre of attention of this talk.

“Nobody cares what you think until they think that you care” – Maya Angelou

• Give your audience useful information from the start.
• Talk about them and what your information means for them
• Avoid ‘tables of contents’. Say something interesting in every phrase.

Presentation Mistakes #3 – Is your presentation a data dump?

Summary – a data dump is not a presentation. the real job of a presentation is to analyse and interpret information so it means something for your audience. you must add value..

A typical bad presentation sounds like: “Sales last quarter were 3.6m, this is up 3.2% on last quarter and down 2.8% on the previous year. This is 4.6% behind budget and 4.5% better than forecast. Breaking it down by division we can see that North was 8.2% over budget while South was 1.2% behind budget…….”

What’s wrong with this?  If you compile data then it’s tempting to share your hard work. But talking through raw numbers is a waste of everyone’s time. Instead, you want to look impressive.

That means, you must add value. You should describe what those numbers are saying. For example, you might say:

“As we can see, sales at 3.2m last month were as expected. The important thing to note is that North won the new IBM contract, which was unexpected, while South had three customer delays which pushed their sales back by a month. We are still pretty confident of reaching our end of year numbers.”

By speaking in this way you are giving your audience valuable information throughout (sales: “as expected” …. North: Unexpected IBM contract….South: customer delays,… pushed sales back by a month…’confident of reaching end of year numbers”).

The real art here is doing the hard work for your audience. If you make it easy for the audience you’ll not only have a better presentation, you will also look more impressive in front of your audience.

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln

• When you report data, add value.
• It’s your job to do the hard work.
• Explain what the data means for your audience.
• Make it easy for your audience.

Presentation Mistakes #4 – Do you use written language in your talk?

Summary – the written word and the spoken word are two different languages. one belongs on the page, the other in the mouth..

A typical bad start: “It is a pleasure to welcome you to this symposium, which is part of our programme to mark the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of Ireland. I am especially delighted that Francois Villeroy de Galhau is joining us today to give a keynote address. I am looking forward also to learning from the excellent lineup of speakers later in the afternoon. “The topic of financial globalisation is a natural theme for the Central Bank of Ireland. At a macroeconomic level, the global financial cycle is a primary determinant of financial stability conditions in small open economies. This lesson was painfully learned across the advanced economies during the international credit boom that occurred over 2003-2008.” Remarks by Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland, to the Financial Globalisation Symposium as part of the programme to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Central Bank of Ireland, Dublin, 2 February 2018

What is wrong with this?  When you preparing words for a talk or presentation, you want to avoid planning through typing. The spoken word and the written word are like different languages.  If you type first, you’ll probably find:

• The sentences are too long,
• The words are too complicated
• The rhythm of spoken language is lost
• You miss powerful rhetorical tools that make spoken language interesting and easy to listen to.

Written language must be translated into spoken language.

So, instead, say it first then write it. Then say it out loud again. Check that you are using plenty of rhetorical tools.  Listen for the rhythm of your speech and whether it’s easy to say (and easy to listen to). For example, this might have been a speech writer’s first draft for the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland.

“Welcome everyone to this great occasion. It’s 75 years since the Central Bank of Ireland was born. In that time we have grown up. – We were born as a new institution in a new country – and we are now standing tall alongside our brothers and sisters in Europe and around the world, a full participant in the global economy. In our busy life we’ve lived through financial cycles, a few near misses and, most recently, an international credit boom. “Financial globalisation is a topic close to our heart. What happens globally determines what happens locally. The global credit boom that ended in 2008 showed us how our financial stability is at the mercy of global forces.”

“Everything becomes a little different as soon as it is spoken out loud.” – Herman Hesse

• Always speak words before writing them down
• Use plenty of rhetorical tools
• Use an audience to test that it’s easy to understand

Presentation Mistakes #5 – Are you trying to say too much?

Summary – great talks usually say less, but use more reinforcement, illustration and examples.. the art of presenting is knowing what to take out..

Imagine an over-enthusiastic primary school teacher explaining atoms to her students.

“Atoms are the basic building blocks of everything around us. And each atom is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. These atoms are very small – you can fit 10^19 atoms into a grain of sand. The really interesting thing about electrons is that they are both particles and waves – they have a duality. In fact all matter demonstrates duality – but it is most easily seen in electrons. Now let’s look at protons and neutrons. These are made up of more elementary particles call quarks. The Standard Model of particle physics contains 12 flavours of elementary fermions and their antiparticles……”

By now the children are very confused.

What went wrong? When you say too much you give your audience a problem. If your audience has to work hard to interpret what you say, you have failed in your job as a presenter.  Your job as a presenter is to make it easy for your audience. 

Great communication involves simplifying, reinforcing and giving examples.  Imagine this alternative start:

“Atoms are the basic building blocks of everything around us. The air we breathe is made of atoms. The ground we walk on is made of atoms and we are all made of atoms. Atoms are very small. See this grain of sand here? Guess how many atoms are in this grain of sand? It’s a big number: a one followed by nineteen zeros. That’s a lot of atoms. There are roughly as many atoms in this grain of sand as the total number of stars in the observable universe. To look at it another way. If this apple were magnified to the size of the Earth, then each atom in the apple would be approximately the size of the original apple……”

“Simplify, then exaggerate” – Geoffrey Crowther, Editor, Economist Magazi ne

• Say less, but say it better
• Cut out non-essential information from your talk
• Don’t be afraid of reinforcing, illustrating and repeating what’s important

Presentation Mistakes #6 – Are you guilty of Death by PowerPoint?

Summary – death by powerpoint happens when bad presenters let their slides lead. they ‘talk through’ what’s on the screen. instead, you want to talk directly to your audience, using visual aids as support..

Imagine this bad, and typical presentation: “As you can see on this page, we have looked at fifteen initiatives to revitalise the businesses. We examined the pros and cons of each initiative, as outlined in the table below. Following our analysis, it looks like initiatives 3, 7, and 8 are the most interesting. We’ll now look at each of the fifteen initiatives and explain why we came to our conclusions.”

That’s what death by PowerPoint feels like.

Death by PowerPoint has three causes.

• The speaker is narrating slides rather than speaking directly to the audience. i.e. the speaker expects the audience to both read and listen at the same time.
• The speaker talks about HOW they have done the work they have done rather than WHY this work matters and WHAT their work means.
• The speaker adds little value in what they say.

To Avoid Death By PowerPoint, get straight to the point.

Try this alternative start (read it out loud) “As you know, we were asked to find ways to revitalise the business. After speaking to everyone in this room, we identified the three projects that will make a real difference. We’ve chosen these because they deliver the greatest return on effort, they have the lowest risk and they can be implemented fastest. By the end of this meeting, we want all of us to agree that these are the right projects and to get your full support for rolling these out over the next 6 weeks. Is that OK?”

“I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking. People confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides” – Steve Jobs

• Get to the point immediately.
• Don’t rely on your audience reading. Tell them directly what’s important.
• WHY is more important than WHAT is more important than HOW

Presentation Mistakes #7 – Do you use meta-speak?

Summary – meta-speak is talking about talking. avoid it. speak directly to your audience..

Imagine this bad presentation: “I was asked today to talk about our new factory. In putting together this talk I wanted to tell you how we designed it and went about planning it. I also wanted to cover the process we used to get it delivered on time and on budget.”

What wrong with this? It’s as if the speaker is narrating their thought processes about planning this talk. While that might be interesting to the speaker, it is of little value to the audience. Avoid.

Instead, get right to the point, Speak directly.

“We have just opened our new factory. And we did this in just 12 months from board approval to the cutting of the ribbon in the loading bay. How did we achieve this? And how did we deliver it on time and on budget? Today I’ll share some of the lessons we leaned over the last 12 months. And I’ll reveal some of the mistakes we nearly made. And I’m doing this because it just might help you when you are faced with what seems like an impossible problem…”

“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” – Albert Einstein

• If you see meta-speak creeping in, cut it out
• Make your language direct.
• Get right to the point.

Presenting Mistakes #8 – Do you gabble or speak too fast?

Summary – speaking too fast helps nobody. you should learn how to incorporate pauses – many pauses – long pauses – throughout your talk..

Try saying this out loud:  “A-typical-speaker-will-speak-in-long-sentences-and-keep-speaking-linking-phrases-together-so-that-there-is-no-gap-and-no-time-for-the-audience-to-absorb-what-the-speaker-has-said-and-no-time-to-plan-what-to-say-next-this-causes-the-speaker-to-feel-more-nervous-so-they-speed-up-and-it-frustrates-the-audience-because-they-have-no-time-to-process-what-they-have-heard-before-the-speaker-is-onto-their-next-point…”

This typically happens when a speaker is nervous. So they rush. And it is then hard for the audience to listen.

Instead, try speaking this out loud:  “Good speakers use short phrases — They share one thought at a time — — By leaving gaps — it’s easier for the audience. — The good news is — it’s also easier for the speaker. — When a speaker uses pauses — they have time to compose their next sentence. — This helps the speaker look more thoughtful — and more convincing. — It also helps the speaker feel more confident.

“The most precious things in speech are….. the pause.” – Ralph Richardson

• Pausing takes practice. Few people do it instinctively.
• Use shorter phrases – one idea at a time.
• Aim for a pause at least every ten words
• Record yourself, listen to your pauses and hear how they add gravitas
• Keep practising until your pauses feel natural and sound natural.

Presentation Mistakes #9 – Are you too serious?

Summary – levity can help you look more professional and will help your audience pay attention to what you say..

Too many presentations overly serious, dull and un-engaging.

Why? When we have something important to say we want to look ‘professional.’ But professional and serious are not the same. When you are too serious it’s harder for your audience to connect with you.

If you really want to look professional, bring the audience into your world. Levity and humour helps you achieve this. This does not mean you should tell jokes, but you should help the audience smile and feel clever for understanding what you say.

See how you can do it differently.  This is the third paragraph of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s EU Privacy speech . He uses humour followed by flattery to get his audience open and receptive to what he is about to say.

“Now Italy has produced more than its share of great leaders and public servants. Machiavelli taught us how leaders can get away with evil deeds…And Dante showed us what happens when they get caught.

“Giovanni has done something very different. Through his values, his dedication, his thoughtful work, Giovanni, his predecessor Peter Hustinx—and all of you—have set an example for the world. We are deeply grateful.”

“Inform, Educate & Entertain”. – Sir John Reith, BBC

• Have a smile on your face when preparing your talk
• Look for opportunities to introduce humour and lighten the tone
• Play with ideas.

Presenting Mistakes #10 – Do you avoid practising?

Summary – it’s tempting to avoid practise and to wing it on the day. this is the amateur approach..

The best presenters, like great athletes, do all their practising in advance , so that their performance on the day  looks effortless.

People make excuses to avoid essential practise:

• “I’m always better without practice”
• “I don’t want to over-prepare”
• “I sound wooden when I over-rehearse”
• “I’m more natural on the day”
•  “This is an artificial environment. I’m much better in front of a real audience.”

But many people are deluded. They believe themselves to be good speakers.

So, instead, think of yourself as a professional athlete, actor, pilot or dentist. These professionals make their work appear effortless only because of hours of preparation. A great presenter should think the same.

Use your rehearsal to try out every aspect of your talk and to iron out what works. Use a critical audience. Keep changing and improving it until it’s as good as it can be. If you are not a brilliant speaker, then spend time building your skills. This practice includes:

• Cut any waffle or anything boring
• Say something interesting at least every 10 words
• Use more rhetorical tools (see Chapter x)
• Keep reinforcing your key points
• Start strong, end strong

“The more I practise, the luckier I get”. – Gary Player, champion golfer

• Dedicate proper practise time – at least three sessions for an important talk.
• Use a critical audience
• Keep cutting, changing, fixing and tweaking
• Only stop when you are able to pay attention to your audience’s reaction rather than remembering what you want to say.

Summary – key presentation mistakes to avoid

When you understand the common mistakes presenters make, you will find it easier to create and give a compelling, successful presentation.

Reminder: Top ten ways to avoid common presentation mistakes

How to avoid presentation mistakes – for ever, if you really want to improve your presentation skills, then get in touch. our team of expert presentation coaches has been helping business executives polish their presentation skills for over 15 years. we are trusted by some of the world’s largest businesses. click on the link below to discuss your needs., transform your presentation skills with tailored coaching.

We can help you present brilliantly. Thousands of people have benefitted from our tailored in-house coaching and advice – and we can help you too .

“I honestly thought it was the most valuable 3 hours I’ve spent with anyone in a long time.” Mick May, CEO, Blue Sky

For 15+ years we’ve been the trusted choice of leading businesses and executives throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East to improve presentation skills and presentations through coaching, training and expert advice.

Unlock your full potential and take your presentations to the next level with Benjamin Ball Associates.

Speak to Louise on +44 20 7018 0922 or email [email protected] to find out more and discuss transforming your speeches, pitches and presentations.

Or read another article..., how to sell your business: 9 success secrets.

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Bad Presentations: How To Avoid Common Presentation Pitfalls In 2023

Table of contents.

It’s easy to make a presentation, but it’s difficult to make a good presentation.

There are simple mistakes that are made when it comes to the fine art of designing and performing a presentation if you haven’t been doing it for the past 15 years, over and over, like we have!

In this article we explore the common pitfalls most presentation designers/presenters make , and how you can avoid them.

What Impact Can A Bad Presentation Have?

Bad presentations and good presentations have something in common, they’re memorable. Whether it’s a speech at a wedding, or pitching to investors, if it’s bad, it stands out.

The impact a bad presentation can have on your, your business or your brand is profound. It’s more than just the performance on the day. In today’s world, everyone is connected and people talk. It’s difficult to shift your image if you make the wrong impression.

Below are just a few hurdles you can expect to face if your presentation bombs.

Loss Of Confidence In You Or Your Company

When you have or give a bad presentation, it’s easy for your audience to lose confidence in you. After all, at that moment in time, you’re the face of the company and a direct representation of who you represent.

If you drop the ball, that’s what your audience is going to expect you to do if they decide to partner with you. How can they do business or trust in you if they don’t have confidence in you.

Fortunately, we understand how much hard work, time, and dedication it takes just to get the opportunity to deliver a presentation to your audience, your clients, your investors, or your own company. Which is why our presentation design services will help take care of the visual and organizational side of your slides.

We Can Make You Look Goood!

You Can Develop A Negative Reputation

Ineffective presentations are a waste of time, and as we all know, time is valuable. Simple things like unpreparedness, lack of audience engagement, talking too much, a poorly structured or visual presentation design.

These things DO NOT go unnoticed and you will develop a reputation that will most certainly work against you professionally. It takes a lot more work to repair damage that it does to put your best foot forward in the first place.

Slower Business Growth

If your presentation misses out on the key points and the words you’ve chosen for your slides are poor, you will experience slower business growth as there is less information for your audience about your brand. If they are missing out on the key idea because your slides are too simple, they won’t want to buy into your brand.

Here Are The Most Common Mistakes You Can Make With Your Presentation

There’s common mistakes that are both easy to make and easy to avoid if you know what you are looking for. There are common mistakes presenters make because most presentations have too much information, pictures and the information that you as the presenter are trying to communicate gets lost in the jumble of the presentation.

Talking Too Much About Yourself

Presenters who spend too much time speaking about themselves while they present is one example of a common mistake. The audience members want the informative information about your brand, not the informative information about you as the speaker.

Focusing Too Much On Facts And Not Storytelling

You want to engage your audience by using both facts and storytelling to sell them on your brand. If you focus too much on facts, it’s the worst thing you can do for your presentation because you’ll quickly lose your audience’s attention.

Poorly Designed Visual Aids

Visual aids are important to making a great presentation, but not if they are poorly designed. It’s important to have engaging visual aids, dark text on white background is a great way to focus the audience’s attention. Make your presentation your own by choosing well designed visual aids that add to your presentation as a whole.

Disorganized Information (No Logic Or Order)

Are your slides all over the place? Your examples don’t make sense to your brand? The worst presentations are hard to follow, confusing and distracting from the main points. An audience wants to sit through an engaging presentation, and by having order and logic to your slides with words that point back to your idea, you will capture their attention and keep them captivated.

Too Much Information

If you have too many points on your slides, or paragraphs that you’ll be reading off during your presentation, you have too much information. Have less on the slides, keep to the point and spend more time talking directly to your audience rather than reading to them.

No Engagement Or Interaction

A common pitfall that is easy to fall into, is not interacting with the audience members, by making eye contact, allowing time for questions or asking questions to the audience. They are sitting right in front of you (Physically or Virtually) so interact with them right from the beginning so they expect it throughout the presentation. If you need some tips on how to make a presentation interactive , we’ve got you covered.

If you’re looking for a few tips on, this article on being a better presenter can help.

Reading Directly From Your PowerPoint Presentation

When you read directly from the PowerPoint Presentation, your body language is not open to the audience, and it means that you aren’t engaging with either the material or your listeners. If you spend time in preparation and writing out what you will be saying, you can speak directly to the audience and portray confidence in your brand. By purposefully making eye contact, you are connecting with those who are listening to you.

Ending The Presentation Abruptly

When you finish your talk and forget to allow time for questions, you are sending a message that you don’t care about the audience’s understanding of the material you have presented. All it takes is one slide to finish a presentation well and leave space for the audience to ask questions.

Animation Overload

When you overload on animation, you make your presentation look cheap and distracting from your important points. It’s an easy way to make ineffective presentations, as it’s distracting to the main goal of your presentation. Keep animations to a minimum and bullet points on your slides instead to create engaging presentations.

So Is A Bad Presentation Worth The Risk?

Don’t talk too much about yourself, but tell stories about your brand so the audience can connect with you as the presenter and your company. You want to engage with the audience through well chosen visual aids, and keep order to your information both in your slides and your speech. Don’t overload in cheap looking animations and always leave room for your audience to ask questions at the end.

It’s best to be prepared, put our best foot forward and invest the time/money in making sure you’re well rehearsed and have some kick ass slides to back you up. Effort and intent are noticed, as long as they’ve been put it.

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9 PowerPoint Mistakes to Avoid for Perfect Presentations

It's easy to screw up your PowerPoint presentation. Let's take a look at mistakes you probably make when presenting your slideshow, and how to correct them.

Giving an effective PowerPoint presentation is an art. We've all sat through a dreadful slideshow that we couldn't wait to escape from. Whether due to a drab speaker or lousy slides, there's usually room for improvement.

The good news is you can prevent your audience from hating your next presentation! Let's review the most common mistakes people make when preparing and giving a PowerPoint presentation. Knowing these recurrent blunders gives you a leg up, and helps you nail your next important talk.

1. You Load Up Slides With Text

Perhaps the biggest mistake people make in presentations is overloading every slide with text. This detracts from your talk for several reasons. For one, people are naturally inclined to read everything on the screen. If it takes them half a minute to digest everything, they aren't listening to you during that time.

If you have too much text on a slide and advance the slideshow before someone has a chance to read through everything, they might get upset and stop paying attention to the slideshow at all. Less is more with text. Don't be afraid to use space to add emphasis to what's present, or break a particularly meaty section into two slides.

When in doubt, remember that people are either going to pay attention to your slides, or pay attention to you. If you tend towards wordiness, stick to bullet points and short phrases instead of sentences. For a rule of thumb, limit yourself to five bullet points per slide, with no more than five words per bullet point.

2. You Use Stupid Transitions

Every new version of PowerPoint includes more wacky transitions , but you shouldn't use them. Aside from being resource-intensive on weaker machines , many slide transition effects are distracting and don't add anything to your talk.

You should certainly use a transition to keep the slideshow interesting, but stick with something simple like a wipe or slide. And never, ever select the Random option since it will undoubtedly choose the wildest transition at the worst time. You don't want your audience to worry more about what transition is coming next than what you'll say next.

3. You Mix Fonts and Colors

While you don't want your slideshow to feature black Times New Roman text with a white background, it's easy to overdo it in the other direction, too. If you choose to get colorful , stick to a few colors that blend well and use them for emphasis.

The same goes for fonts. You should choose a font that's easy to read. As fancy as handwritten script looks , it's probably impossible to read if you're not standing right in front of the screen . Try to stick to one font throughout the entire presentation, and definitely don't mix fonts on the same slide!

Few colors and fonts make for solid presentations because they mean consistency. It's childish to cram as many pretty fonts and colors onto one slide as you can. It looks messy, and while Georgia font isn't too exciting, people would prefer to read your text instead of admiring how fancy it looks.

4. You Read Slides Verbatim

This one might take the prize for worst possible trait during a PowerPoint presentation. Reading your slides word for word will bore the audience, and makes you seem rigid instead of dynamic .

Remember two important notes to help with this problem. First, PowerPoint slides don't need to contain every little bit of information you're discussing. Use them as little attention-grabbers so your audience understands the current topic, but wants to listen to you explain more.

Second, your PowerPoint slides are not for your use! Your slideshow is not the presentation -- the presentation is your talk. PowerPoint slides are simply a tool you use to better communicate. You shouldn't need your slides to stay on topic. Practicing will help with this.

If you have trouble remembering what you want to say, use the notes section of each PowerPoint slide. Then when you display the slideshow, your monitor will display a snapshot of the current and next slide, along with any notes you've jotted for that slide. Stopping to turn around and look at your slides, or reading them aloud, will not effectively bring your message to the audience. Anyone in the audience could stand up and read the slide, but you know the material.

5. Your Charts Are Complex and Useless

Adding media other than text (in moderation) to a slide makes it more interesting and grabs the audience's attention. When you're representing data in the presentation, charts are an easy way to show the relevant information in one image.

Charts are great , but it's important that you don't go overboard with them. The audience won't have the patience to decipher all sorts of colors, trend lines, keys, and text. If the chart isn't self-explanatory for the average audience member, or if you can't explain it in a sentence, you need to make it less complicated .

6. Your Template Is Boring

Take the extra few minutes to find a template that fits your presentation, or even make your own if you're so inclined. While some of the built-in PowerPoint templates might seem a little generic, you'll likely find one that's sharp without being overbearing. Don't choose anything that's too wacky with all sorts of colors, but feel free to find something unique.

Black text on a white background is ugly, but white text on a black background is passable if you don't have any other options. If you need some help, check out awesome free PowerPoint templates for everyone.

7. You Minimize PowerPoint for Other Media

As great as PowerPoint is, often you have to leave the slideshow to put some other content on the screen. Maybe you want to show a relevant YouTube video or visit the company's website. While this is sometimes unavoidable, it's jarring to jump back and forth between windows, even with slick keyboard shortcuts .

That's why you should embed everything you can inside your presentation. We've shown how to embed YouTube videos inside PowerPoint and it's easy to take a screenshot of any website to paste into your slides. If you can avoid leaving the slideshow, do so for a smoother experience.

8. You Don't Remove White Space From Images

Here's a common error that only takes a few seconds to correct. Often seen in college lecture slides and the like, many folks tend to copy and paste images from a Google search into their slides. The trouble is that most of these images include an ugly white border around them, which looks amateurish.

You can remove this white border easily using a free image editor like Paint.NET . Just open the image, and use the magic wand tool to select the white space around the image. Press Delete to remove the white space, then hit File > Save As and make sure you save the image as a PNG . A PNG file makes that deleted space transparent, while JPEGs don't support transparency .

Paste the fixed image into your slideshow and it will look so much better!

9. You Don't Ensure Everyone Can See the Material

Preparation is an essential part of every presentation, but you should do more than just practice your talk. Failing to ensure that people will be able to see everything you've put together could torpedo all your work.

If you have the chance, test your slideshow in the room where you'll be speaking, on the equipment you'll use. Make sure that no graphics or text appear cut off on the projector, and test out various seats in the room to confirm that the text isn't too small from far away. This might sound excessive, but it goes a long way in producing a professional presentation.

What Presentation Mistakes Do You Hate?

PowerPoint is a relatively simple tool , but it's clearly difficult to master. From mistakes in slide creation to blunders during your talk, there's a lot that could go wrong when you're responsible for a presentation. You can improve many of these with practice, which will improve your confidence, too.

In the end, a prepared presentation can salvage poor slides. However, a lousy slideshow damages the audience's impression of you, so it's best to nail everything if you can. Using these tips, your slideshows will be cleaner, flow better, and further engage the audience! You can't ask for much more than that.

What do speakers do with PowerPoint that makes you cringe? Let us know your most hated slideshow mistakes down in the comments!

Image Credit: cunaplus via Shutterstock

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10 Common Presentation Mistakes

Avoiding common pitfalls in your presentations.

By the Mind Tools Content Team

Most of us have experienced dull, irrelevant or confusing presentations. But think back to the last really great presentation you saw – one that was informative, motivating and inspiring. Wouldn't you love to be able to present like that?

This article looks at 10 of the most common mistakes that speakers make when giving presentations. By avoiding these, you'll make your presentations stand out – for all of the right reasons, and none of the wrong ones.

Mistake 1: Not Preparing Enough

Steve Jobs was a famously inspiring speaker. His speeches may have looked effortless, but, in reality, each one took days or weeks of preparation.

Careful preparation is essential. The amount of time you spend on planning depends on your situation, but it's a good idea to start early – you can never be too well-prepared.

Proper preparation also helps you to manage presentation nerves . When you know your material inside and out, you're far less likely to feel nervous. Our presentation planning checklist and Skillbook " Even Better Presentations " can help you to plan your next event properly.

Mistake 2: Not Familiarizing Yourself With the Venue and Equipment

Imagine that your presentation starts in an hour. You arrive at the venue and, to your horror, the projector won't work with your laptop. The slides you spent hours preparing are useless. This is a disaster!

You can avoid a situation like this by taking time to familiarize yourself with the venue and available equipment at least once before your presentation.

Often, the sorts of problems that can jeopardize your presentation will be situations beyond your control, but this doesn't mean that you're helpless. Conduct a risk analysis to identify potential issues, and come up with a good "Plan B" for each one.

Mistake 3: Ignoring Your Audience

Sometimes, speakers can get so wrapped up in delivering their presentations that they forget about the needs of their audience.

Start your presentation by telling your audience what to expect. Let them know what you'll cover first, whether and when you'll stop for a break, if you'll be taking questions during the presentation, and so on.

Providing these "signposts" up front will give your audience a clear idea of what to expect, so that they can relax and concentrate on your presentation.

Mistake 4: Using Inappropriate Content

The primary purpose of any presentation is to share information with others, so it's important to consider the level you'll pitch it at.

Do some research on your audience. Why are they here? How much do they already know about your topic, and what do they most want to learn from you? It's no use giving a presentation that's so full of jargon that no one understands you. But you wouldn't want to patronize people, either.

Try to put yourself in people's shoes, to get a clearer idea about their needs and motivations. You can also greet individuals as they arrive on the day, and ask questions to get a feel for their level of knowledge. This will also help you to personalize your presentation and make a connection with each person in your audience, so that they'll be more attentive to what you say.

Mistake 5: Being Too Verbose

Short, concise presentations are often more powerful than verbose ones. Try to limit yourself to a few main points. If you take too long getting to your point, you risk losing your audience's attention.

The average adult has a 15- to 20-minute attention span. So, if you want to keep your audience engaged, stick to the point! During the planning phase, make a note of the themes you want to cover and how you want to get them across. Then, when you start filling out the details, ask yourself: "Does my audience really need to know this?"

Our articles on the 7 Cs of Communication and Communications Planning have more tips for communicating in a clear, concise way.

Mistake 6: Using Ineffective Visuals

Poor slides can spoil a good presentation, so it's worth spending time getting yours right.

We've all seen slides with garish colors, unnecessary animation, or fonts that are too small to read. The most effective presentation visuals aren't flashy – they're concise and consistent.

When choosing colors, think about where the presentation will take place. A dark background with light or white text works best in dark rooms, while a white background with dark text is easier to see in a brightly lit room.

Choose your pictures carefully, too. High-quality graphics can clarify complex information and lift an otherwise plain screen, but low-quality images can make your presentation appear unprofessional. Unless an image is contributing something, embrace the negative space – less clutter means greater understanding. Use animation sparingly, too – a dancing logo or emoji will only distract your audience.

Mistake 7: Overcrowding Text

The best rule of thumb for text is to keep it simple . Don't try to cram too much information into your slides. Aim for a maximum of three to four words within each bullet point, and no more than three bullets per slide.

This doesn't mean that you should spread your content over dozens of slides. Limit yourself to 10 slides or fewer for a 30-minute presentation. Look at each slide, story or graph carefully. Ask yourself what it adds to the presentation, and remove it if it isn't important.

Mistake 8: Speaking Incoherently

Even though we spend a significant part of the day talking to one another, speaking to an audience is a surprisingly difficult skill, and it's one that we need to practice.

If nerves make you rush through a presentation, your audience could miss your most important points. Use centering or deep breathing techniques to suppress the urge to rush. If you do begin to babble, take a moment to collect yourself. Breathe deeply, and enunciate each word clearly, while you focus on speaking more slowly.

Our article on better public speaking has strategies and tips that you can use to become a more engaging speaker. One useful technique is storytelling – stories can be powerful tools for inspiring and engaging others. Our Expert Interviews with Annette Simmons and Paul Smith have tips that you can use to tell great stories.

Mistake 9: Showing a Lack of Dynamism

Another common mistake is to freeze in one spot for the duration of your presentation.

Some presenters feel most comfortable behind the podium. Try to emulate great speakers like Steve Jobs , who moved purposefully around the stage during his presentations.

As well as working the stage, he used gestures and body language to communicate his excitement and passion for his subject. Pay attention to what your hands are doing – they're important for communicating emotion. But only use gestures if they feel natural, and avoid being too flamboyant with your arms, unless you want to make your audience laugh!

See our Expert Interview, " Winning Body Language ," to learn more about body language and what it says to your audience.

Mistake 10: Avoiding Eye Contact

Have you ever been to a presentation where the speaker spent all of their time looking at their notes, the screen, the floor, or even at the ceiling? How did this make you feel?

Meeting a person's gaze establishes a personal connection, and even a quick glance can keep people engaged. If your audience is small enough, try to make eye contact with each individual at least once.

If the audience is too large for this, try looking at people's foreheads. The individual may not interpret it as eye contact, but those sitting around them will.

It takes practice and effort to deliver a good presentation. But, if you know how to avoid the pitfalls, your presentations will be great.

Common presentation mistakes include not preparing properly, delivering inappropriate content, and speaking poorly.

Time spent on careful planning always pays dividends. Check out the venue, and familiarize yourself with equipment in advance to avoid possible problems.

Keep your content clear and concise, with visual aids to match. And make sure that you pitch it at the right level for your audience's understanding, so that your presentation doesn't patronize or bewilder.

Remember, public speaking is a performance. Practice speaking clearly with a slower pace than your normal speech to avoid "rapid-fire" delivery. Use eye contact, body language and gestures that complement your message to keep your audience engaged.

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7 Signs You’re Delivering Bad Powerpoint Presentations

Featured , Strategy / February 26, 2018 by Greg Trimble / Leave a Comment

Everyone has sat through bad PowerPoint presentations. You know the feeling — you emerge from the conference room feeling a little more confused than when you went in.

But have you ever given a bad PowerPoint presentation? If you have, then you can more than likely remember the blank stares on the faces of everyone in the room. It’s no fun.

PowerPoint is easy to use, but hard to use well, and people make the same mistakes when putting together their presentation. If any of these things are true, it’s possible you’ve been using this easy tool all wrong and delivering bad powerpoint presentations:

1. You Think Your Slides Are Your Presentation

Do you put all of your effort into creating a slide deck? Does your presentation consist of you simply reading text from the screen? If so, you have made one of the most common PowerPoint errors, which is forgetting that PowerPoint is just a tool to help you communicate with an audience.

Your slides should be used primarily as a prompt to cause your audience to think and to cause you to remember your next point.

Solution: Plan your presentation by thinking about your audience. What do they want to hear? What do they need to learn? Work on a strategy to communicate effectively with them, and then build a PowerPoint presentation that supports your plan with the least amount of text on the slide. Which brings us to the next point…

2. You Have Too Much Text

A PowerPoint presentation is not a Word document. Your audience doesn’t want to spend the whole time squinting at large blocks of text, trying to speed-read while you talk, which is exactly what will happen if you fill each slide with lots of text. No one is going to listen to a word you’re saying if they’re trying to get through the 8pt font you’ve filled that slide with.

Solution: The text on each slide should simply be a jumping-off point for you to talk about something. This is why bullet points work so well — it helps structure the presentation for both you and the audience while keeping their focus entirely on what you’re saying.

3. Your Slides Are Packed With Detailed Graphs

Are your presentations packed with all sorts of detailed graphs, charts and visualizations? Do all of them need to be there? As Echo Swinford , a PowerPoint consultant, says, “When I see a presentation that’s full of unreadable graphs and tables, what goes through my head is, ‘Wow, this guy wants me to see how hard he worked to crunch all these numbers.'”

Solution: Go through every visualization in your presentation and ask, “Is this helping me to communicate my message, or is it just there to make me look knowledgeable?” Also, ask if there’s a way to visualize your data more effectively than a standard graph. Creative visuals can really help your audience to understand and retain information.

4. You Don’t Have Any Notes

At the end of the presentation, your fascinated audience asks if they can get a copy of the slides. They get your email, take a look and find that there are no notes. Instead, each slide is just a collection of bullet points that don’t make a lot of sense without you there to explain them.

Solution: Notes are one of the most powerful and underused features in PowerPoint. You can use these as speaker notes to guide you through the presentation, but you can also use them to store detailed information that would be of use to other people. If you have lots of text on a slide, move it to a note so that it’s available when people want to read it.

5. Your Fonts Are Unreadable

You want to make your visuals pop, so you put every piece of text in a different font. To add a little extra oomph, you vary both text color and background color. Halfway through the presentation, someone complains that they have a migraine and asks to leave.

Solution: The most important thing to consider when choosing fonts and colors is whether or not your text is easy to read. Ornate fonts are not easy to read, and a variety of fonts breaks up the flow. For colors, nothing beats a dark font on a light background. Take care to avoid certain combos — red text on a green background is impossible to read for a colorblind audience, for example.

6. There Are Too Many Animations

You’ve pulled out all the stops on this presentation and made it as dynamic as possible, with text animations, fancy transitions and even cute GIFs. For your audience, it’s a little like watching a surreal cartoon, and they find it hard to concentrate on your words when things are moving in such a distracting way on the screen behind you.

Solution: PowerPoint offers a number of features that help to bring your presentation to life. The hard part is knowing how and when to deploy them. As a rule, you want to keep the slides as simple as possible so that audience attention is focused on you. Animations can be great when used at the right time, such as introducing a new section or when you need a moment to pause before moving on.

7. You Have Too Many Slides

Every time you hit the forward button, your audience let out a sigh. You seem to have an infinite deck of slides, with no end in sight. Eventually, you can see their eyes glaze over as they check out and start drafting emails in their head.

Solution: Holding an audience’s attention is no mean feat. You can easily lose them by stuffing your presentation with hundreds of slides, all of which will blur into one another after a while. It also helps to give your audience a progress update — every five slides or so, add a slide that shows how far into the presentation you are, and give the audience a moment to digest.

PowerPoint is a terrific tool, but it is just a tool. It falls on you to ensure that you are using it correctly for the purpose of communicating and engaging with an audience. If your audience come away from your presentation with a real understanding of your subject matter, then congratulations: You are a PowerPoint master.

Top 12 Most Annoying PowerPoint Presentation Mistakes

Updated: Mar 11

Using PowerPoint presentations in your life is a fine art. Back in the day, people used to simply chuck all their content onto a handful of slides, stand up in front of the audience and read it off. If you want to create an engaging meeting or presentation, you need to master the basics.

However, this doesn’t come easily, and there’s a lot of things you’ll need to learn about both on and off the screen. But, during our time using PowerPoint presentations, we’ve come to realise that most people make the same mistakes over and over again.

These common mistakes are so easily avoided and can even make the difference between a successful presentation and a failed one. So you don’t make the same mistakes, we’ve sourced out 12 of the most common mistakes made so you can head it the right direction when it comes to creating outstanding presentations every time.

1. Using Too Much Written Content

One of the biggest and most common problems that occur in PowerPoint presentations is using too much text on each slide. This is a huge problem for many reasons. The main problem is that this distracts many people from what you’re actually saying.

Naturally, people will want to read everything that’s on the screen and will zone out from the information that you’re saying. Of course, most people have different reading speeds while some may read it quickly, others won’t get to the end before you move on, causing them to feel disconnected from the presentation or to switch off completely as they don’t feel included.

As a rule of thumb, less is more when it comes to text on your slides. Try to stick to using bullets points, and any essential text should be divided between multiple slides. To stop this from happening, check with tools like Easy Word Count , trying to limit yourself to 50 words per slide.

2. Using Complex Charts

Charts are sometimes a necessity when it comes to PowerPoint presentations, and they are a great way to convey large amounts of data in an easy to read format. However, it’s easy to get carried away when designing these charts and add too much information per graph.

Hand in hand with the consideration above, try to keep your graphs simple and easy to read. Otherwise, you’ll lose the focus and attention of your audience. If you have a lot of data to convey, simply use two graphs set over two individual slides.

3. Leaving the Presentation Midway Through

During your presentation, you may find that you need to play a video, show some images or in some other way share some form of multimedia with your audience. However, this is one of the worse things that you can do since it breaks away from the flow of your presentation and opens up a huge risk for errors to take place.

You need to make sure that you embed everything you want to share within your presentation. Photos, video and even YouTube videos can all be embedded in your presentation so make sure you do.

4. Using Poor Transitions

We all know that PowerPoint comes with a tonne of built-in transitions which take you from one slide to the next. This includes fades in, fade-outs, cut-across slides and much more. However, these are simply distracting to your presentation and should be avoided at all costs. Simply use hard transitions.

5. Not Formatting Images Correctly

If you’ve ever seen a PowerPoint presentation where someone has added images, either from Google Image Search or otherwise, you’ll be aware of the fact that it’s so annoying when the presenter hasn’t removed the white background from these images.

This may be fine if you’re using a plain white background for your presentation but if you’re using a theme or a coloured background, this makes your presentation look tacky and poor and will damage your reputation and your credibility in the eyes of the audience. The best way is to create your own images for PowerPoint presentation so you can be sure that they are not abstract but absolutely perfect for the topic of your presentation.

Mike Walker, a presentation expert from Big Assignments , shares, “Making a background transparent is an easy problem to solve by either using Paint, Photoshop or simply downloading and using PNG files with transparent backgrounds.”

6. Poorly Contrasted Slides

Contrasting is one of the most important habits you need to learn for creating professional PowerPoint presentations. The worst-case scenario of this is using white text on a white background, which you’re obviously not going to do.

However, using a light text on a light background is still just as bad, especially for those sitting at the back of your presentation. If you’re using a dark background, use a light font and visa versa.

7. Hiding the Important Information

When it comes to conveying your information within the slides of the presentation, it’s essential that you highlight the important information. This means you should avoid putting the most important information at the edges of your slide, rather into the middle where it’s highlighted for all to see.

8. Using a Poor-Quality Presentation

This is a huge problem if you have checked over your presentation before presenting it. You need to make sure that your presentation is high-quality and free from errors, otherwise, you’ll be harming your own credibility as a presenter and people won’t take you seriously.

Since your slides shouldn’t have much text on them anyway, any errors, such as spelling mistakes, grammar errors and poorly used punctuation will stand out like a sore thumb. It’s essential that you check your presentation and proofread it to make sure that it’s perfect. You can use tools like ProWritingAid for checking grammar and proofreading tools like Ox Essays to guarantee this level of quality.

You’ll also want to fact check any figures or statements you include to make sure they are correct, to stop the spread of misinformation.

9. Using ClipArt

Personally, this is one of the most annoying mistakes that people implement into their presentations. ClipArt just represents a tacky presentation and shows that you’ve either rushed your presentation and couldn’t be bothered to find images or just didn’t put enough effort into your presentation.

In some cases, it may seem comical to put them into your presentation but, again, this just emits a ‘bad-quality vibe’. Avoid them at all costs. Instead, try to prefer high quality content such as icons or diagrams that will fit perfectly with your brand colors and identity.

10. No Slide Consistency

While you want your slide to be engaging, eye-catching and to hold your viewer’s attention, it’s bad practice to mix up colours, fonts and text styles in your presentations. If you’re going from slide n°1 that has black text of a certain font of a certain size to the slide n°2 that ha much larger text, a different colour and a different font, this will just get distracting and confusing.

Try to use a clear and easy to read font, such as Calibri and avoid handwritten-styled fonts at all costs. If you choose to use certain colours , choose a handful that complements each other well but don’t choose anything too contrasting. If you’re representing a business or organisation, try to fit your slides to match your brand’s image. Also, make sure you to make a smart use of PowerPoint's color themes to manage colors efficiently.

11. Reading from the Presentation

This is easily one of the most common mistakes that people make and guarantees an unsuccessful presentation. Always remember that your slideshow is there to accompany what you’re saying and shouldn’t be used as a script.

If you’re simply reading from your presentation, this is incredibly boring for your audience since they could just sit and read it themselves and there’s no real reason for you to be there. You’ll also find that you naturally spend most of your time reading the slides, rather than engaging and directing your focus at your audience.

As a guideline, you shouldn’t be using your slideshow at all, and there’s no real reason to look at it, only to make sure that you’re on the right slide. 99% of your focus should be on your audience.

12. Testing Your Presentation

Before every single presentation that you present, be sure to set aside time to test out your presentation in the room that you’re hosting it to make sure that you’re well prepared. Test out your equipment to make sure everything is compatible with the setup, and you won’t have to spend time fiddling around with wires to make sure that everything works.

You’ll also want to make sure you have a position in the room where you can stand so everybody can clearly hear what you’re saying as well as being able to see the presentation clearly. Be sure to text that even the people at the back can read your font selection so you’ll have no problems with anyone.

This is all extremely common mistakes that we see in presentations all the time and, as you can see, there are so easily avoided if you’re aware of them. Use this article as a checklist when creating your presentation to make sure they’re perfect every time.

About this author : Brenda Berg is a professional with over 15 years of experience in business management, marketing and entrepreneurship. Consultant and tutor for college students and entrepreneurs. She believes that constant learning is the only way to success. You can visit her personal blog at Letsgoandlearn.com

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Really Bad Powerpoint

I wrote this about four years ago, originally as an ebook. I figured the idea might spread and then the problem would go away–we’d no longer see thousands of hours wasted, every single day, by boring PowerPoint presentations filled with bullets.

Not only has it not gone away, it’s gotten a lot worse. Last week I got a template from a conference organizer. It seems they want every single presenter to not only use bullets for their presentations, but for all of us to use the same format! Shudder.

So, for posterity, and in the vain hope it might work, here we go again:

It doesn’t matter whether you’re trying to champion at a church or a school or a Fortune 100 company, you’re probably going to use PowerPoint.

Powerpoint was developed by engineers as a tool to help them communicate with the marketing department—and vice versa. It’s a remarkable tool because it allows very dense verbal communication. Yes, you could send a memo, but no one reads anymore. As our companies are getting faster and faster, we need a way to communicate ideas from one group to another. Enter Powerpoint.

Powerpoint could be the most powerful tool on your computer. But it’s not. Countless innovations fail because their champions use PowerPoint the way Microsoft wants them to, instead of the right way.

Communication is the transfer of emotion.

Communication is about getting others to adopt your point of view, to help them understand why you’re excited (or sad, or optimistic or whatever else you are.)If all you want to do is create a file of facts and figures, then cancel the meeting and send in a report.

Our brains have two sides. The right side is emotional, musical and moody. The left side is focused on dexterity, facts and hard data. When you show up to give a presentation, people want to use both parts of their brain. So they use the right side to judge the way you talk, the way you dress and your body language. Often, people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s often too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

You can wreck a communication process with lousy logic or unsupported facts, but you can’t complete it without emotion. Logic is not enough.

Champions must sell—to internal audiences and to the outside world.

If everyone in the room agreed with you, you wouldn’t need to do a presentation, would you? You could save a lot of time by printing out a one-page project report and delivering it to each person. No, the reason we do presentations is to make a point, to sell one or more ideas.

If you believe in your idea, sell it. Make your point as hard as you can and get what you came for. Your audience will thank you for it, because deep down, we all want to be sold.

Four Components To A Great Presentation First, make yourself cue cards. Don’t put them on the screen. Put them in your hand. Now, you can use the cue cards you made to make sure you’re saying what you came to say.

Second, make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.

Third, create a written document. A leave-behind. Put in as many footnotes or details as you like. Then, when you start your presentation, tell the audience that you’re going to give them all the details of your presentation after it’s over, and they don’t have to write down everything you say. Remember, the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.

IMPORTANT: Don’t hand out the written stuff at the beginning! If you do, people will read the memo while you’re talking and ignore you. Instead, your goal is to get them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation.

Fourth, create a feedback cycle. If your presentation is for a project approval, hand people a project approval form and get them to approve it, so there’s no ambiguity at all about what you’ve all agreed to.

The reason you give a presentation is to make a sale. So make it. Don’t leave without a “yes,” or at the very least, a commitment to a date or to future deliverables.

Bullets Are For the NRA Here are the five rules you need to remember to create amazing Powerpoint presentations:

• No more than six words on a slide. EVER. There is no presentation so complex that this rule needs to be broken.
• No cheesy images. Use professional stock photo images.
• No dissolves, spins or other transitions.
• Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.
• Don’t hand out print-outs of your slides. They don’t work without you there.

The home run is easy to describe: You put up a slide. It triggers an emotional reaction in the audience. They sit up and want to know what you’re going to say that fits in with that image. Then, if you do it right, every time they think of what you said, they’ll see the image (and vice versa).1

Sure, this is different from the way everyone else does it. But everyone else is busy defending the status quo (which is easy) and you’re busy championing brave new innovations, which is difficult.

January 29, 2007

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12 mistakes that can doom your presentation to failure.

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Sales. Believe it or not, most of us are in the sales business.

Courtroom attorneys, both prosecutors and defense lawyers, are in the sales business. Their product consists of arguments for or against the defendant.

University professors are in the sales business. Their products are knowledge and thinking skills.

Consultants and corporate trainers are in the sales business. Their products are competence and proficiency with everything from how to lead a team to how to operate a complicated machine.

Whatever your job is, you can be sure that it involves sales—persuading people to adopt fresh perspectives, embrace new methods, rally around a common cause.

In all of this, Terri L. Sjodin is worthy of attention. An expert in advancing the persuasive presentation skills of professionals, Sjodin is a New York Times bestselling author ( Small Message, Big Impact ), and a respected researcher. For her latest book ( Presentation Ready: Improve Your Sales Presentation Outcomes & Avoid the Twelve Most Common Mistakes ), she conducted a multi-year study drawing on the experiences and observations of more than 5,000 business and sales professionals. Her expertise has been featured by many media outlets including the Today Show, Bloomberg News, CNN, CNBC, and Fox Business, as well as many industry podcasts.

Quoting the philosopher Seneca as saying, “Luck is when preparedness meets opportunity,” Sjodin explains how that view applied to the research she conducted during the Covid pandemic.

“ We used the lockdown to our advantage and captured data that has revealed insights unique to presenting during that challenging time,” she says. “We learned more about how to navigate specific obstacles in virtual presentations.”

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How to watch real martha baby reindeer interview with piers morgan, drake kendrick lamar feud timeline attempted intruder arrested at drake s toronto home police say.

A lot of professionals were great at in-person customer interactions but had to adapt to virtual presentations via video platforms when the pandemic hit. What were the biggest challenges of that transition?

“Ultimately, virtual meetings can’t provide all the benefits of face-to-face meetings, but they are scalable and can save you and your prospects time and money,” Sjodin says. “Some people simply feel awkward and uncomfortable using this technology. A common confession is, ‘I’ve been presenting for years. Why is this so difficult?’ The reason it’s daunting is because we are merging the art of presenting, the science of selling, and the modern tools of technology. It’s a lot to juggle all at once.”

Sjodin says that for some people, learning to master this technology is a lot like learning to drive a stick-shift automobile after years of driving with an automatic transmission.

When people are preparing for important presentations, what questions should they be asking themselves to ensure that their message and delivery are effective?

Terri L. Sjodin

“The best game plan is to do your homework early in the process, while keeping the end goal in mind,” Sjodin says. “Preparation is the best way to avoid ‘winging it.’ That might seem obvious. The truth is that many people, for various reasons, simply fail to prepare or don’t have a strategy to prepare effectively.”

Consider a meeting you have on your calendar right now and ask yourself a few key questions. What is my intention for this meeting? What am I trying to accomplish? Who are the listeners? What’s the audience size?

In the information-persuasion balance, what seems to be the key to driving a presentation to a prospect’s decision or conversion?

Sjodin says being overly informative was one of the highest ranked mistakes self-identified in her research study. “Information in and of itself doesn’t drive conversion,” she says. “The key is to get clear on the goal of being persuasive. What do you want to have happen as a result of this meeting or presentation?”

By design, a persuasive presentation has a specific intention. The speaker wants the listeners to act based on what they’re hearing. Sjodin suggests asking yourself this question: “Did I build a compelling case for my message?” She says professionals in need of results are best served when they craft presentations that are both persuasive and informative. “This seems simple, but, trust me, nobody complains that a talk was overly persuasive. They complain about the data dump.”

A challenge many speakers face is how to establish their own credibility without distracting from the product service, or cause they are championing. Sjodin has some suggestions on how to address that challenge.

“When a presentation is filled with vague assertions and imprecise data, speakers lose credibility,” she says. “Credibility is essential. Without it, a prospect has little reason to buy into your proposal.”

Her research results showed that sales professionals who committed the mistake of providing inadequate support consistently failed to establish credibility with the listener through their personal experience or data quality.

“A potential customer will evaluate you and your information before deciding whether to believe you,” she says. “Personal credibility speaks to your experience, education, background, industry knowledge, and field work. If you are new to an industry, it’s tough to sell your experience. Your chances are better if you sell your work ethic and scrappy mindset instead of your ability to advise listeners on how to do something they have been doing for the past 20 years.”

In her research, Sjodin found that many sales professionals confessed that they “conclude but do not close.” Where’s the disconnect? What’s her advice to them?

“ The close is the specific call to action you want your listener to take after hearing your message,” she says. “A conclusion is a wrap-up of what you just said. Some people avoid closing altogether because they don’t want to risk hearing ‘no thanks, not interested.’ The fear of rejection makes closing feel uncomfortable, so they just skip it altogether.

Closing doesn’t need to be scary, she says. “All you are doing is inviting your listener to choose to move forward in some regard.

Delivering a persuasive presentation requires the ability to close. “Persuasive presenters are always prepared to ask for a next step, or commitment—it’s what they’re there to do,” she says. “If you have met with numerous prospects but haven’t completed many transactions, ask yourself, ‘Do I close, or do I conclude?’ One generates action; the other gives your prospect the option of doing nothing.”

What’s the role of storytelling in making a compelling sales presentation, and what’s the key to doing it well?

It’s Sjodin says it’s the presenter’s responsibility to build and deliver an interesting message. You might think your data is interesting, but that doesn’t mean the audience will. This is where storytelling plays a role.

“Boring presentations are unfortunately a common occurrence,” she says. “Multiple factors can contribute to a dull, tedious, and tiresome talk, including low presenter energy, an overall lack of creativity, and an absence of storytelling and other entertaining elements.”

Sjodin says the key to effective storytelling is to put yourself in the seat of a skeptical listener and ask whether your message is intriguing and thought-provoking. “If a small, persistent voice tells you that it’s boring, it probably is. Can you find a story that could bring this issue to life in a more dazzling way?”

Death-by-PowerPoint still seems to be a common mistake made by speakers and presenters. Sjodin offers advice on using visual aids effectively.

“Visual aids can significantly enhance a presentation when used effectively,” she says. “They are not designed to be a crutch to help get a person through their content. Remember, you are the star, and the visual aids are the bit players. They are there to enrich the message and say something visually that you can’t communicate in the same way verbally. Tragically, most presentations are dominated by text and bullet points and do not visually create a wow factor.”

Does making a sales presentation mistake matter?

“In today’s competitive market, everybody sells something, whether it’s a product, a service, a cause or even when selling themselves on a job interview or for a promotion,” Sjodin says. “One of the most surprising initial insights in the research study was that 92% of participants reported feeling that making a sales presentation mistake has or probably has impacted moving a transaction forward or achieving their goal. That is a big number! So does it matter? The research results say yes!”

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Blog > Common mistakes in Bauer and whats makes a bad presentation

Common mistakes in PowerPoint and what making a bad presentation

08.09.21   •  #powerpoint #tips.

Creating and giving a good presentation is actually nay so difficult. If you know how till do it. Different, no matter how much required you put on it, it can quickly turn out to be a bad demonstration.

Here we see she all examples of bad PowerPoint pictures also common mistakes that are often made at video hence the you won’t make them in get next presentation and avoid "Death by PowerPoint". Observe the slide show. • Gaze at the hideous example of bad slide design and presentation. • Read the hints or tips slides that follow.

1. Reading aloud instead of speaking unlimited

Ne facet in bad presentations can often which this text a simply reader out. Preparing your view so well that you capacity speaking freely. The goal is to build a connection with your audience and get them inspired about your topic. However, this will barely to possible if you only readers from a piece of paper alternatively our home that who time. Thy audience shoud feel discussed, provided you just reading off, they will be bored and perceive thy presentation as bad, even if your content additionally your PowerPoint are actually good.

2. Technical Trouble

The sound of the video you inserted in a slide is not on, your laptop has non connect to the beamer, or your microphone are not work. Are belong valid some of the problems that could occurring during your presentation.

But nothing is more tiresome than at technical problems suddenly occur during a presentation or even before, when each is waiting with it to start. Computer interrupts owner ablauf of speech, only distracts this public from the topic and breaks focusing. So before you get started at your presentation, it is important to start start your PowerPoint in the place where you will give it later, real there and familiarise yourself with the technology. A lousy slideshow amends the audience's print of you, and worse, ... the conclude up set too much text up the slide. ... Bad item schematics.

• Don't forget the recharging cable for your laptop
• Find out beforehand how him can connect your laptop up the beamer. Find out which connection the beamer has and which connectivity your laptop has. To be on which security side, take an accessories with you. Real bad powerpoint presentations are the norm. If you have to use PowerPoint watch this first!
• Ever have backups of your presentation. Preserve her on one USB stick and preferably also online the a cloud.
• Take a second laptop and maybe flat your own small projector for exigencies. Even if it's not the latest model real one quality is not so good: better worst quality then no presentation at all. My Presentation _There is a joke that goes: A kangaroo kept erhaltung out of his shelter at the zoo. Knowing that he could hop high, the zoo officially put above a...

3. Losing the attention of own hearing

One of the highest common mistakes included presentations your to lose to attention is your audience. Especially in long presentations it has often difficult to retain your audience’s attention and to avoid “Death by PowerPoint”. Anyone who has possessed this experiential knows how unconvenient is is to give a introduction where you notice that no one is actually really listening to you. Especially if your performance is can ever long talk, it is difficult to get the topic all in on exciting ways press to captivate the audience.

Our tip: Include interactive poll or quizzes within your presentation to get will audience and enhance their take. The this help the SlideLizard, you ca asked questions in Show and your audience can easily vote up ihr owning smartphone. Asset, you can even receive anonymous feedback at the end, so you know right from whichever you can increase next time.

Here we will also summarized further tips for you on how to increase audience engagement.

4. Avoid eye contact

You want your audience the feel engaged include your presentation, but if thou avoid eye contact the whole time, they certainly won't. Avoid startling at just one part of the wall, at your paper or your computer. Is this participants have the feeling that you are just talking to the wall, it is a bad presentation. Speak to your audience, involve them in to presentation and make it see exciting for them. How to make genuine really bad PowerPoint presentations

But also do sure you don't always look at that same two or three people, but address everyone. If the audience is large, he is often severe to include everyone, but still sample to let your eyes wander a little between your listeners and look into every corner of which room.

5. Speaking incoherently

Avoid jumping from one topic go an then and back again shortly afterward. Otherwise your audience will nay be able to follow your since a whilst and their thoughts will wander. To prevent this, it are important that your presentation possesses a good structure real that you work thrown one topic after the other.

Nervousness can cause constant the best toward mumble or talk too fast stylish decree toward geting and presentation over with as quickly the likely. Try to avoid this by ingest short pauses to collect yourself, to take and to reminds yourself to speak go.

6. Many colors mixed with each other

Make sure that your present be nay too colorful. If you mix too many colours, bad presentation slides be result strong quickly. A Powerful in welche all kinds of farbigkeit are combiner with each other does not watch proficient, and much suitability for a children's birthday party.

Think regarding a slightly hue palette in advance, which yourself can then application in your presentation. Colored such as orange or neon green execute not looking so good included get PowerPoint. Make dye specifically to underline important information.

It is also essential to choose paints that help the text to read well. They should have as much color when possible between one font and which background. Black writing on one white background is immersive single to read, while yellow writing on a color background is probably hard to read. Do you make these blunders in get presentation slides? How many of like worst presentation slides ever did your effectively have to sit through?!

7. Too minimalistic design

Even though it is often said that "less is more", you should not be to maximalist in one design of thy presentation. A presentation where your slides are blind and only black text on an white wallpaper is likely to go down just as badly such if you use too many colors.

Empty presentations are boring and don't truly help to enter the care of your audience. It also looks like you are too lazy in concern about the design by your presentation also that you have not lay any amount up the preparation. Your PowerPoint doesn't have to be overflowing with colors, animations and images to make it look interesting. Doing it simpler, but additionally professional.

8. Too much write

And slides of your presentation supposed never be overcrowded. Write only the most important key points on choose slides and none entire sentences. Autochthonous viewing should not be competent to read exactly the text you are speaking in your PowerPoint. This is rather annoying and leads at being bored speed. Summarize the most crucial total that your audience should remember and write you down in shorter bullet points on your feature.

9. Many differents animations

To avoid bad presentations it will important until almost how too many animations. I looks unkempt and confusing if per text and image is displayed with a different animation. Just leave out animations on all or if you really want to use them subsequently using them only very rarely when you want toward draw attention to something customizable. Make sure that if you use animations, she are solid. If it use transitions between the individual slides, these shoud also always being kept consistent and basic. For example, if we place small black shapes to a solid pallid slither background, ... Mixing bright blues and reds is adenine terrible practice on inflict upon ...

10. Too many images

Bad presentation slides often occur when their design ist unclear and unordered. Photographs and charts in presentations are always an good idea to schildern something and to add some variety. But don't overdo it with them. Too many photo can distract from is presentation plus look unclean. Induce sure that the graphics also fit one list both, are you have used several gallery on neat slide, ask themselves whether you really demand all of them. Here us show thee some examples of bad presentations and some commons mistakes such you shall avoid at all costs.

11. Too many or readable fonts

Never combine too many fonts so this your presentation does cannot look messy. Use at most second: one for headings or one for text. When choosing fonts, i should also making sure is they what still legend at long lengths. Script, italic and decorative fonts are very slow go read, which is why they should be avoided include presentations. Death by PowerPoint - methods into make bad Presentations

It is not so easy to choose the select font. Therefore, we have reviewed for thee how go find which best font since owner PowerPoint presentation.

12. Images as background

To avoid bad presentations, doing not apply images as slide backgrounds if there should be also textbook on them. The drawing only distracts free the text and it a difficult to read it because there is did lot contrast using the background. He is also harder to see the image because an text in the foreground is distracting. The whole done looks messy and distracting rather over informative and clear.

13. Reading from the slides

Never plain read the exact text upon your slides. Your audiences can read on themselves, so they will only get bored and in who worst case it leave lead to "Death by PowerPoint". It may also give them an feeling that you think they are not able to read required themselves. In addition, you should avoid whole sentences on own slides regardless and single will listed key points that you go into more detail then. I wrote the info foursome years forward, originally as an ebook. MYSELF figured the idea might spread the then the problem would zugehen away–we’d nope longer understand thousands of hourly spent, every single …

14. Turn your back

Not turn around during your presentation to look at your projected PowerPoint. Not to read upon your slides, but also not to make sure the next glide is already displayed. It watch unprofessional and only distracts your audience. The PowerPoint's Speaker View, you can always see which slide is momentarily presence displayed and which one is coming next. Use save to make sure one order fits. You can regular take notes in PowerPoint, which are then displayed during your presentation. You can read all about notes in PowerPoint here.

15. Forgetting who time

Always pay attention toward one time given. It is annoying when yours presentation takes much longer than actually planned and your spectators is just waiting for you for cease talking or you are cannot able to finish their presentation at all. It your just as awkward if your presentation is too short. You have already told everything about your topic, but you should actually talk for at least another ten minutes. Common mistakes to avoid when making a PowerPoint demonstration

Practice your presentation often enough at dear. Talk through your video and time yourself as you go. Then adjust the length so the you can keep to the time given on the day of your presentation.

16. Complicated Structure

The structure of your presentation should not is complication. The audience should will able to follow you easily and remember the essential information by the end. When you got finished a part, briefly summarize and repeat the main points before moving on at this next topic. Mention important information learn than once to make sure he really gets beyond to your audience.

Not, if the complete thing gets too complicated, it can be easy for your audience to disengage for a while and don take off much new information from is presentation. So a complicated structure can lead to bad presentations and "Death by PowerPoint" nicer quickly.

17. Inappropriate clothes

On the day of your presentation, be sure to choose reasonably cloths. Your appearance should to formal, thus avoid casual clothes and adhesive till professional clothing keys. When choosing your clothes, also make sure that they are rather unobtrusive. Your audience have focus on your presentation, nope on your outward. Bad PowerPoint Example

18. Inappropriately content

Ideas about who your audience is and matching your presentation to them. Find out how much them already know info the topic, what they want to get learn itp and why them are weiter in the first place. If you only talking about objects your audience already knows, they will get got beautiful soon, but if you throw around a lot of technical terms when your audience has hardly dealt with the topic at all, they will also have a hard time follows it. So to avoid "Death by PowerPoint" with like case, it is important to adapt your presentation to our audience. The subsequent story contains actual slides presented in actual presentations in master environments.

You can also ask a few your at that beginning of your presentation to learn more about your audience and than personalize your submission. With SlideLizard , you can integrate elections directly into my PowerPoint and participants can then light answer anonymously away own smartphone.

19. Furthermore large otherwise unimportant related

Keep it short and limit your to an essentials. The more factual and information you present into respective community, the less they will remember.

Also be sure to leave out information that does not fit the topic or be not relevant. To becomes only distract coming the actual matter both loose the attention of you audience.

20. Monotone talk

If you speak into ampere monotone voice all the time, her what likely to lose the attention of your audience. Take yours narration lively and exciting. Other, be careful not to speak too silently, but not too sounds either. People should be skillful to understand you well throughout the whole room. Even if it be nope easy for many people, try to deliver your speech with confidence. Supposing you are not fascinated via the topic or do not seemingly enthusiastic, you will none remain able to get your audience excited about it.

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We have created a PowerPoint with product of wc presentation slides and how go do it right. You can download it weiter for free.

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Helena supports the SlideLizard team with marketing and engineering. She dears to express they creativity in texts and graphics.

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How To Get Free Access To Microsoft PowerPoint

E very time you need to present an overview of a plan or a report to a whole room of people, chances are you turn to Microsoft PowerPoint. And who doesn't? It's popular for its wide array of features that make creating effective presentations a walk in the park. PowerPoint comes with a host of keyboard shortcuts for easy navigation, subtitles and video recordings for your audience's benefit, and a variety of transitions, animations, and designs for better engagement.

But with these nifty features comes a hefty price tag. At the moment, the personal plan — which includes other Office apps — is at $69.99 a year. This might be the most budget-friendly option, especially if you plan to use the other Microsoft Office apps, too. Unfortunately, you can't buy PowerPoint alone, but there are a few workarounds you can use to get access to PowerPoint at no cost to you at all.

Read more: The 20 Best Mac Apps That Will Improve Your Apple Experience

Method #1: Sign Up For A Free Microsoft Account On The Office Website

Microsoft offers a web-based version of PowerPoint completely free of charge to all users. Here's how you can access it:

• Visit the Microsoft 365 page .
• If you already have a free account with Microsoft, click Sign in. Otherwise, press "Sign up for the free version of Microsoft 365" to create a new account at no cost.
• On the Office home page, select PowerPoint from the side panel on the left.
• Click on "Blank presentation" to create your presentation from scratch, or pick your preferred free PowerPoint template from the options at the top (there's also a host of editable templates you can find on the Microsoft 365 Create site ).
• Create your presentation as normal. Your edits will be saved automatically to your Microsoft OneDrive as long as you're connected to the internet.

It's important to keep in mind, though, that while you're free to use this web version of PowerPoint to create your slides and edit templates, there are certain features it doesn't have that you can find on the paid version. For instance, you can access only a handful of font styles and stock elements like images, videos, icons, and stickers. Designer is also available for use on up to three presentations per month only (it's unlimited for premium subscribers). When presenting, you won't find the Present Live and Always Use Subtitles options present in the paid plans. The biggest caveat of the free version is that it won't get any newly released features, unlike its premium counterparts.

Method #2: Install Microsoft 365 (Office) To Your Windows

Don't fancy working on your presentation in a browser? If you have a Windows computer with the Office 365 apps pre-installed or downloaded from a previous Office 365 trial, you can use the Microsoft 365 (Office) app instead. Unlike the individual Microsoft apps that you need to buy from the Microsoft Store, this one is free to download and use. Here's how to get free PowerPoint on the Microsoft 365 (Office) app:

• Search for Microsoft 365 (Office) on the Microsoft Store app.
• Install and open it.
• Sign in with your Microsoft account. Alternatively, press "Create free account" if you don't have one yet.
• Click on Create on the left side panel.
• Select Presentation.
• In the PowerPoint window that opens, log in using your account.
• Press Accept on the "Free 5-day pass" section. This lets you use PowerPoint (and Word and Excel) for five days — free of charge and without having to input any payment information.
• Create your presentation as usual. As you're using the desktop version, you can access the full features of PowerPoint, including the ability to present in Teams, export the presentation as a video file, translate the slides' content to a different language, and even work offline.

The only downside of this method is the time limit. Once the five days are up, you can no longer open the PowerPoint desktop app. However, all your files will still be accessible to you. If you saved them to OneDrive, you can continue editing them on the web app. If you saved them to your computer, you can upload them to OneDrive and edit them from there.

Method #3: Download The Microsoft PowerPoint App On Your Android Or iOS Device

If you're always on the move and need the flexibility of creating and editing presentations on your Android or iOS device, you'll be glad to know that PowerPoint is free and available for offline use on your mobile phones. But — of course, there's a but — you can only access the free version if your device is under 10.1 inches. Anything bigger than that requires a premium subscription. If your phone fits the bill, then follow these steps to get free PowerPoint on your device:

• Install Microsoft PowerPoint from the App Store or Google Play Store .
• Log in using your existing Microsoft email or enter a new email address to create one if you don't already have an account.
• On the "Get Microsoft 365 Personal Plan" screen, press Skip For Now.
• If you're offered a free trial, select Try later (or enjoy the free 30-day trial if you're interested).
• To make a new presentation, tap the plus sign in the upper right corner.
• Change the "Create in" option from OneDrive - Personal to a folder on your device. This allows you to save the presentation to your local storage and make offline edits.
• Press "Set as default" to set your local folder as the default file storage location.
• Choose your template from the selection or use a blank presentation.
• Edit your presentation as needed.

Do note that PowerPoint mobile comes with some restrictions. There's no option to insert stock elements, change the slide size to a custom size, use the Designer feature, or display the presentation in Immersive Reader mode. However, you can use font styles considered premium on the web app.

Method #4: Use Your School Email Address

Office 365 Education is free for students and teachers, provided they have an email address from an eligible school. To check for your eligibility, here's what you need to do:

• Go to the Office 365 Education page .
• Type in your school email address in the empty text field.
• Press "Get Started."
• On the next screen, verify your eligibility. If you're eligible, you'll be asked to select whether you're a student or a teacher. If your school isn't recognized, however, you'll get a message telling you so.
• For those who are eligible, proceed with creating your Office 365 Education account. Make sure your school email can receive external mail, as Microsoft will send you a verification code for your account.
• Once you're done filling out the form, press "Start." This will open your Office 365 account page.

You can then start making your PowerPoint presentation using the web app. If your school's plan supports it, you can also install the Office 365 apps to your computer by clicking the "Install Office" button on your Office 365 account page and running the downloaded installation file. What sets the Office 365 Education account apart from the regular free account is that you have unlimited personal cloud storage and access to other Office apps like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

Read the original article on SlashGear .