15 ways to improve your presentations in 2009

This is a big meaty post with 15 ways to improve your presentations.  These ideas are designed to challenge you to stretch yourself. With each idea I’ve pointed you to further resources from fellow presentation bloggers or from my own archives.

Choose one or two to work on at a time. Bookmark this post, so that once you’ve implemented those, you can come back and work on some more during the year.

1. Customise your presentations for each audience

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How to do an agenda slide like Garr Reynolds

Garr Reynolds’ slides from his recent webcast are now online. Garr has an innovative agenda slide. He’s transformed what is normally a boring bullet-point slide into something beautiful and effective. Check out slides 7 to 12 for the agenda slide sequence:

Review of the 3 books of the Presentation Revolution

There are three books which have ushered in and defined the PowerPoint Revolution. If you can only buy one, which one should you buy? Here’s my analysis of the three books and my recommendation.

Cliff Atkinson was the pioneer with Beyond Bullet Points. The Beyond Bullets approach is an entire system for creating a presentation with the support of non-bullet PowerPoint slides. It’s published by Microsoft and is a hybrid between a software how-to book and a presentation book. I find the system too limiting and constraining. Note: I have the 2005 edition of BBP – there is a 2007 edition which may be improved.

Garr Reynolds came next with Presentation Zen, based on his blog of the same name. His book is imbued with the philosophy of simplicity. If Cliff’s book is methodical, Garr’s is philosopical. The book attempts to cover most aspects of giving a presentation from planning the content, to designing the slides to the delivery itself. However, the strength of the book is the section on slide design. Garr made us non-designers aware of the importance of design in PowerPoint presentations. The discussion on the planning and delivery of a presentation is at a high conceptual level. There are useful insights for presenters with some experience but the lack of practical guidance could be frustrating for a beginner.

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The top four things I learnt from Garr Reynolds’ workshop

Garr Reynolds ran a day-long workshop yesterday in Wellington, New Zealand. I’ve devoured his blog, poured over his book and I was very excited about attending this workshop. Here are the top four things I came away with.

1. Beauty matters

Garr’s workshop was an aesthetic experience. His slides nourished my visual sense. It was like going to a contemporary art or photo exhibition. Beauty adds another dimension to your presentation. As a non-designer I feel empowered to create the same beauty in my PowerPoint slides. [Read more]

Content is King

TED is an annual conference held in Monterey, California featuring presentations from the world’s leading thinkers and doers. Each speaker has 18 minutes to make their point. TED puts videos of the speakers on their website – this is an amazing treasure trove of material for observing and learning from great presenters. Garr Reynolds from the Presentation Zen blog has done a great job in highlighting some of the great speeches from TED and offering his comments. His comments generally focus on these areas:

1. The visual content of the presentation eg: slides, props
2. The delivery style of the presenter
3. The substance of the content.

My approach will be to analyse the process of the content. What I mean by the process of the content is such things as: [Read more]