He probably didn’t have PowerPoint in mind when he defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. But if the shoe fits…

Small Business Computing’s Death by Powerpoint post is ten years old, but we’re still subjected to data dumpers and slide slaves, among other offenders, on a regular basis. Just last month, in fact, PowerPoint pro Dave Paradi posted his latest Annoying PowerPoint Survey results. Surprised to hear that folks loathe speakers reading slides filled with sentences written in 8 point font? CFO World even called out last year’s ten worst. We’ve all been there. The big question is: are we doing the same thing over and over again to our audiences?

Let’s stop the insanity. Over the next couple of weeks, let’s talk best practices for presentations and presenters, as well as the planning, promoting and participant experience of webcasts. To kick things off, though, let’s get PowerPoint simple.

• Simple, sans serif fonts
• Simple, dark on light text
• Simple, unanimated slides (My kids like animation. Me? Speaking of insanity…)
• Simple, relevant graphics or charts
• Simple, bulleted concepts

The first four are simple fixes, but that last bullet is where we sometimes fall down. We know the material. We want to give our audiences the benefit of our expertise. ALL of our expertise…. So here’s our challenge: economize. Even Hemingway wrote“….one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of…” well, let’s just say he didn’t think they were masterpieces. Let’s challenge every word on the slide to give our audiences only our masterpiece.