A couple of months ago, when I was making a class on public speaking as a guest professor on the Faculty for social sciences, one of the questions was, if I believe that the students should use PPT presentations.

My answer was, as usual, yes, BUT…

And theres a big BUT that I comes with all the PPT presentations that I have seen. They can be really use full, if you use them the right way. On the other hand they can really harm your presentation, because you will make all the people watch the slides and not listen to you.

Problem #1 is when you put just too much text on the slides. If you see yourself reading off the slides instead of speaking for the audience, then you know that you have done it wrong. What will happen is, that the audience will read the things from the slide, and they won’t listen to you. An believe me, they read faster than you can speak, so whatever great way you will use to read the text, it will just go pass them, because they will be reading, or they will be already finished with the reading, and will be bored, speak to each other etc.

Problem #2 is when you make the slides too fancy. I was just on a class made by a professor from a French University. He used a MAC and obviously MAC offers much more on the slides than the regular PPT that most of the people use. The problem with the fancy, moving, burning and god knows what slides, is that, you will have to wait while the fancy presentation finishes, and if this happens while you speak, the whole audience will watch the slides and won’t really listen to you.

Use the slides smart. You should not write whole sentences on the slide. Just use the bullets, and show the audience the main points. You need to speak about each point for some time before you go to the next point. Make them look good, but simple. With that the slides will be a great addition to your presentation, but won’t interrupt the audience.