Secrets of a successful power point presentation

I do not consider myself to be a very good presenter, but over eighteen months I have observed closely some of my illustrious colleagues making some presentations and would forward share some of my observations.

You may not have mastered the contents of the presentation, but that is no cause for worry. You just need look at the bullet points; you may not even remember them, just look at the screen and parrot it out. The secret lies in making gestures and reading the bullet points with some emotions. Imagine yourself to be Shahrukh Khan and the bullet points to be the dialogues, once in a while also turn back and face the audience.

There can be some miscreants who might imitate you and make efforts to distract you. But you need worry if you have specks. Just remove them and chances are their actions would be so blurred that you won’t be able to make out of much. In this way you can create an illusion of making eye contact, one of the pre-requisites of good presentations and mitigate chances of distraction.

Numbers are always attractive, make efforts to include them. It doesnot matter whether they are essential or not, you need to include them as chances are that evaluator/ your boss would definitely like them.

When it comes to queries, you need to be confident. It doesnot matter whether you know the answer, even if you are unaware of the answer say something. If the person who asked the question doesnot seem satisfied, say the same thing albeit different words, chances are he will either act as he understood (no one would say out rightly that you are wrong) or will ask the same question again. If he does ask the question again repeat the same answer again as if it was obvious. This time he is bound to keep quite.

Whenever you get a query that seems difficult to answer, act as if you did not get the question. Repeating the question gives you some extra seconds to think over your response. If you still don’t have a convincing answer you can always say that you too had the same doubt and have been thinking over it since long (act as if you mean it, one of my friends did it very convincingly in of his presentations).

Make gestures while you speak, people look at you and standing stationary increases chances of them eloping to their dream land. Every good speaker has his customary gestures, you too need to develop some trademark movements.