PowerPoint Presentation Mistakes

PowerPoint presentations are meant to make any kind of data presentation easy and precise. However, many organizations and other personnel charged with a responsibility to present data have fallen victims of poor presentations by preparing the worst pieces of presentation slides. Some of the most common presentation mistakes include:

Wordiness – A PowerPoint presentation is meant for summarizing, long sentences field with words is not ideal.

Abnormally many slides – Presentations are made on a one on one event with the audience, many slides mean long hours of sitting hence boredom.

Lack of clarity – A presentation is created through a combination of various ideas and concept. A good presentation should not include multiple concepts on a single slide.

The National Security Agency is the most recent casualty of the bad presentation habits.  According to me, the NSA committed the following mistakes on their leaked PowerPoint presentation:

Their slides were much cluttered. A close look at each slide, there were more than logos covering one-quarter of it before the intended data (Gallo). The problem could have been solved by including all the desired logos on the first slide.

The NSA included so many slides on their Power Points, there was a total of 41 slides making it super long (Gallo). To remedy this, I would have summarized the data to make it shorter.

Lastly, the NSA presentation was wordy, the slides carried over 70 words each. The slides would have been better off less wordy through summary and use of diagrams.

A badly crafted set of presentation slides grows boring and less interesting before the intended audience hence undermining communication. Bad presentation quickly changes the perception the audience holds to the presenter to the extreme worst (“NSA Slides Explain The PRISM Data-Collection Program - The Washington Post”).

Work cited.

Gallo, Carmine. “Forbes Welcome.” Forbes.com. N.p., 2018. Web. 3 May 2018.

“NSA Slides Explain The PRISM Data-Collection Program - The Washington Post.” The Washington Post. N.p., 2018. Web. 3 May 2018.