It takes excellent art to use PowerPoint presentations in your daily life. In the past, presenters would dump all of their content onto a few slides, stand in front of the crowd, and read it aloud, making it boring for their audience. However, to attract your audience’s attention, it is essential to master the fundamentals of making a presentation.
However, you’ll need to study a lot of stuff on and off the screen, which is not something that comes naturally. We’ve realized that most individuals consistently make the same errors when working on PowerPoint.
These typical errors are simple to avoid and can determine whether a presentation is successful or unsuccessful. One way to avoid such mistakes is to use pre-designed free PowerPoint Templates specially designed for your purpose.
We’ve identified 11 of the most frequent errors committed so you won’t repeat them and can steer clear of them when doing excellent presentations consistently.
1. Usage Of Excessive Amount Of Text
Using too much text on each slide is one of the most prevalent issues with PowerPoint presentations. It is a significant issue for a variety of reasons. First, overloading your slide with too much content diverts attention away from what you’re saying.
People will naturally want to read everything on the screen and stop paying attention to what you say. But, of course, everyone reads at a different pace, so although some might read it fast, others might not finish it before you move on, which could make them feel excluded from the presentation or completely turned off.
The general rule for text in your presentations is that less is more. Using bullet points can help the content look organized and less messy. Check with tools like Easy Word Count to see if you can keep your slides to 50 words per to avoid this from occurring.
2. Use Of Intricate Charts
Charts are an excellent method to present vast quantities of data in an understandable style and are occasionally required in PowerPoint presentations. However, when creating these charts, it’s simple to overdo it and include too much data in each graph.
In keeping with the above-mentioned consideration, ensure your graphs are straightforward to understand. Otherwise, you risk losing your audience’s interest and concentration. To present much data, utilize two charts spread across two slides.
3. Leaving the Presentation in the Middle
You may need to play a movie, display some photographs, or communicate multimedia with your audience throughout your presentation. The problem with this is that it disrupts your presentation’s flow and puts a lot of errors at risk.
Ensure that everything you intend to convey is embedded correctly in your presentation. Be careful to embed any media you can, including images, videos, and YouTube videos.
4. Use of Subpar Transitions
PowerPoint has many built-in transitions to help you move from one slide to another. These built-in transitions contain cut-across slides, fade-ins, fade-outs, and many other effects. Avoid them at all costs.
5. Incorrect image formatting
If you’ve ever viewed a PowerPoint presentation with images added, whether, from Google Image Search or another source, you know how frustrating it is when the presenter leaves the white backdrop on the photographs.
This practice might be acceptable if you use a plain white background for your presentation. Still, suppose you’re using a theme or a colored background. In that case, this makes your presentation look cheap and unprofessional and will harm your reputation and credibility in the eyes of the audience.
Making your PowerPoint presentation visuals is the most effective approach to ensure that they are not only not abstract but also perfectly ideal for the subject of your presentation.
6. Poor contrast on the slides
One of the most crucial skills you should have for making expert PowerPoint presentations is the ability to contrast. Using white text on a white background, which is not what you will do, is the worst-case scenario for this.
However, having light text on a light background is still terrible, particularly for people watching your presentation from the rear. So instead, use a bright font on a dark backdrop and vice versa.
7. Withholding the Crucial Information
You must emphasize critical facts while presenting your material on the presentation slides. This means that instead of placing the most crucial information on the corners of your slide, put it in the center where it will be visible to all.
8. Utilizing an Inferior quality Presentation
To maintain your credibility as a presenter and have people take you seriously, you must ensure that your presentation is of the highest caliber and error-free.
Your presentations should contain little text, so issues like misspellings, grammatical faults, and improper punctuation will be obvious. However, to ensure that your presentation is flawless, you must double-check and proofread it.
To prevent the spread of false information, you should also fact-check any statistics or assertions you present.
9. The use of Clipart
ClipArt denotes a very unprofessional-looking presentation and indicates that you either rushed your presentation and couldn’t be bothered to source graphics or didn’t put enough work into it.
Including them in your presentation could occasionally appear funny, but doing so only gives off a “bad-quality vibe.” Never go near them. Try to favor high-quality content, icons, or diagrams that perfectly match your brand’s colors and identity.
10. Lack of Slide Consistency
While you want your slide to be interesting, eye-catching, and keep your audience’s attention, it is not a good presentation practice to use various colors, fonts, and text styles. This will only become confusing and distracting if you switch from slide #1, which has black text in a particular font and size, to slide #2, which has much larger text in a different color.
Avoid using handwritten-style fonts at all costs, and try to pick a plain, readable font like Calibri. If you use certain colors, pick a few that go well together while avoiding anything too strikingly different.
Make your slides fit your brand’s image if you represent a company or organization. Additionally, use PowerPoint’s color themes wisely to manage colors effectively.
11. Dry running your presentation
Set aside time before each presentation you give to practice it in a space. This will ensure that you are well-prepared. In addition, you will save time messing with cables to ensure that everything works if you test your equipment to ensure it is compatible with the configuration.
Additionally, you should find a place in the room where you can stand so that everyone can see and hear your presentation well and hear you. Finally, to ensure that you won’t encounter any issues, ensure your material is written in a typeface that even those in the back can read.
Conclusion
As you can see, these are all quite typical errors that we frequently encounter in presentations, and they can be easily avoided if you are aware of them. So, when designing your presentations, use this page as a checklist to ensure they’re flawless every time.
