Advice from a master speaker

I just stumbled across an article based on a yearly talk by MIT computer science professor Patrick Henry Winston; How To Speak (the article is here - Addition: You can download the actual lecture in section here). If you ever have to do a talk to colleagues (or strangers) the information is invaluable. A number of his points relate to the dos & don'ts of slides. I've never been of the school that say 'PowerPoint presentations are bad'. However, there are bad PowerPoint presentations. PowerPoint is one of those applications that is so easy to use, especially if you don't know how to use it, and easy to use incorrectly. Just because you have pretty slides, doesn't mean you have a good presentation.
Some of my rules (and the professor agrees, so I must not be far off) is:

• Don't just read the slides. If that's all you are going to do, just give it to them and go home. There is noting more boring than just reading.  Slides are suppose to support your talk.
• If the slide can't be read from the back, the font is too small. Professor Winston suggests that you should never use less than 24 point.  If the info won't fit, there's too much info for one slide (or too much detail).

One that I'll add is that where possible, make you slides interesting. I've never liked plain text slides when it can be avoided. Be careful however or you'll drift into 'bad presentation' territory. Examples are:

• Animation. Use it sparingly, not on all slides, and only when it can add impact to the slides message.
• Use graphics. Professor Winston says that use meaningful graphics. "If it’s found in Microsoft’s clip art gallery, it’s not meaningful." I'll point out that Microsoft common clip art can be edited to make it more meaningful.

I'll leave you with a PowerPoint horror story. Although I had a hand in it I was only following orders.
A few years back my manager needed to do a presentation of our departments plans for the coming year to the managers of the other departments. He felt that since he was the 'technology guy' (he was the operations manager which included the IT section - 2 of us) he would do his presentation using technology.
He had me put his presentation into PowerPoint then we spent 3 hours in his office while he used it's recording feature to record his talk to each slide. He did his presentation clicking each slide and letting the laptop do the rest.
I'm glad I didn't have to do the clicking (he suggested it, but decided it was his presentation). The talk wasn't well received by the audience.

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