I recently attended a free webinar by PowerPoint makeover guru Rick Altman. Here are some of the notes I took:

• Put the needs of your audience first.

• Don’t include these slides:
  •  About us
  • Mission Statement

• Slides should compliment/enhance the message.

• Share your ideas; don’t explain your slides.

• Remember phone booths? Remember seeing pictures of people trying to cram as many people as possible into a phone booth? Is your slide like that phone booth…crammed with information? You’re not going to get any contents for that.

• Nobody goes to a presentation to see your slides. They come for your expertise. Don’t make your slides more important than yourself.

• They come for you, but make it about them.

• Ask yourself: if the projector blew up, could you give your presentation without your slides?

• Three things that make a good presentation (these should all be different from each other):

1. What you say.
2. What you show.
3. What you give to the audience.

• Asked: What is your biggest complaint about PowerPoint slides. Answered: Too much text on slides.

• Try to make each bullet point 3 words or less (unlike this bullet point).

• Problem:You want your slides to do double duty; to be the visual component for a presentation and a handout. The purposes are disparate. Create 2 different documents.

• Say it first, and then show it.

• You can follow Rick Altman on Twitter (@rickaltman)

• http://www.betterpresenting.com/handout/handout.pdf