How not to do it, in PowerPoint

This week, I find myself helping a number of groups of software engineers to prepare PowerPoint presentations about their company or its products.

You might think that people who work with computers every day would be pretty au fait with all the common programs that are part of the Microsoft Office Suite - but that would be a dangerous assumption.

Well, maybe it's not so much unfamiliarity with the program that's the problem (I think most of my charges today probably knew their way around it at least a little better than I did) as not having the slightest idea how to use it to present visual information.

Here are just a few of the (fairly obvious, in any language?!) DON'Ts which I encountered today:

Don't use unnecessary text on your slides

(I saw one today that began "This slide includes...")

Don't include things which are far too small to read: either enlarge them, or remove them altogether

(This applies particularly to labels on graph axes and keys to colour schemes on charts, etc. When you lift graphics like this from a Web page or a Word document, they are usually tiny; they need to be much, much bigger if there is to be any point including them on a slide; but most of the time, you really don't have to - you can explain the significance of the colour scheme in your spoken accompaniment to the slide.)

Don't have more than 4 or 5 bullet-points maximum on any slide

(The record today was taken by a guy who had a list with 14 items crammed on to one slide. Either simplify a list like that by cutting it down to the 4 or 5 most important points; or break it down into 2 or 3 separate slides.)

Don't leave a lot of white space on your slides

(Quite a number of today's students had their entire list of contents - for example - in the top left quadrant of their slide, and were going to leave the remaining two-thirds or more of the space entirely empty. You only need fairly small strips of white space around the edge of your slide; try to make the content on the slide as big as possible.)

Don't make it a struggle to read your slides

(Choose high-contrast colour schemes and large font sizes. Try to keep the text to a minimum [use headlines or bullet-points as much as possible: single words or short phrases rather than extended sentences]. Leave generous spaces between bullet-points, etc.)

Don't include too much detail - particularly complex tables of statistics, bibliographies and Web page references, etc.

(It's much better to give out information like this on a printed handout.)

Don't attempt to put on the slides everything that you intend to say during the presentation

(If you do that, you will struggle to hold your audience's attention; why should they listen to you, if they can just read your slides instead?)

Pretty elementary stuff, you'd think, but..... I could probably make a decent living just from teaching this!